A drive for better staff and member experiences
The Royal Automobile Club for Queensland (RACQ) is a member-based organisation owned by over 1.7 million members. RACQ goes beyond meeting its members’ needs—it provides peace of mind through its roadside assistance, motoring services, insurance, banking, travel and solar products.
Matt Gosen, Service Center Manager at RACQ, had a vision to improve self-service capability and enable staff to focus on helping members.
RACQ had already adopted ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) for its service portal in 2014. However, the platform was highly customised and involved significant technical debt to maintain, limiting its ability to support the business. As RACQ evolved by offering more products and services to members, a key strategy emerged to free up employees’ time and empower them to serve their customers better.
In September 2022, RACQ decided to expand the self-service portal to a range of business areas, including IT, staff discount, procurement and facilities. By using these capabilities, RACQ improved faster self-service.
“When I took on the Service Center role, we had 30% self-service tickets compared to 70% via phone calls or emails,” says Matt. “Now, with ServiceNow ITSM as a single interface between technology and business, we’ve managed to pivot to an 80% self-service rate.”
Through continuous discussion and interactions with stakeholders, Matt and his team have also improved the way users log tickets, encouraging more employees to use the self-service portal as the first point of contact. In the last year alone, the Service Center received over 100,000 tickets, of which around 50% were related to areas such as account access, and 50% reported incidents such as device issues or unexpected outages.
“Now, we can introduce improvements to our knowledge base. This means our Service Center can not only resolve requests and incidents more quickly but also provide the ability for better self-service. This sets the groundwork for future virtual agent bots,” says Ben Johnston, General Manager, Technology and Enterprise Delivery.
Productivity gains through automating user account provisioning
To help employees effectively serve its members, RACQ wanted to overhaul the identity and access management process and deliver an improved user experience.
With over 50,000 requests received in 2023, any delays in providing access to users mean one less person helping a member. Matt understands the importance of a timely process and how this also makes a good impression on new hires on day one.
For example, some managers could recruit five to 10 people at a time. If they didn’t submit tickets for approval on time, those new hires could show up without access to the IT system or hardware on their first day.
Having a hybrid cloud environment, RACQ uses ServiceNow ITSM with ServiceNow Automation Engine spokes for Microsoft Entra ID to sync back to on-prem AD and UiPath for automation with its identity and access management system. This allows RACQ to quickly and easily add or remove account access when a user joins or leaves the company. It also provides a consistent process for access granted to users and gives them the right access at the right time.
Having centralised data sources in the identity and access management system eliminates the need for managers to constantly log new tickets, which both removes human error and saves time. Zero-touch resolution for some requests also became possible, with users automatically added or removed from the Active Directory.
“Through the automation with ServiceNow and Microsoft, we can provision account access in less than a day, instead of five. The fastest it has ever happened is minutes,” Ben says. “With manager input, a new hire would have a laptop and basic system access 90% of the time on their first day.”
Another prior challenge for Matt and his team was having to review PowerShell scripts every six months to improve automation. Using the flow designer feature in ServiceNow Automation Engine, this is no longer a concern as the system carries out necessary processes automatically. ServiceNow also sends out automatic reminders to managers about the last dates for contractors, enabling them to quickly extend or remove access based on their needs.
However, that’s not the only gain that RACQ has made by deploying ServiceNow ITSM and ServiceNow Automation Engine. Matt says that tickets are easier to log and manage, and service improvements mean fewer tickets are generated.
“By deploying a single portal running on the ServiceNow platform, we anticipate that as time passes there will be even fewer incidents for users to report, and the tickets will keep coming down,” he says.
A central knowledge base to support continuous improvement
ServiceNow ITSM also provides dashboard and reporting capabilities for Matt and his team to track and monitor service performance trends. For example, a new hire at the Service Center or on a resolver team has visibility into the histories of previous incidents that have been resolved, including how they were resolved and what was carried out via the dashboard.
The service team can also view the number of changes that have failed, and link them back to incidents caused by changes. This allows RACQ to build more knowledge base articles and resolve issues faster. According to Matt, RACQ has now built 110 customer-facing articles and just under 700 articles for IT.
“With a single point of reference for previous information, we can make better decisions on improvement and the next automation,” Matt says.
RACQ’s Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings are typically intended to authorise change requests and review recently implemented changes. By utilising ServiceNow CAB workbench within Change Management to automatically build agendas for CAB meetings, the team now has a real-time view of changes instead of manually updating information in documents or PDFs.
ServiceNow and Microsoft are better together
Capgemini was the implementation partner for RACQ’s identity and access management project. It brought in a Microsoft ‘genius’ to ensure the integration with the ServiceNow Automation Engine spoke was working for the platform. Matt and his team completed the project in just five months.
“With the experience and in-depth knowledge that Capgemini has about ServiceNow, we know what we could do to maximise our investment and what will be possible in the future.”
Going forward, Matt will focus on improvements to new integrations and ensure that RACQ is using ServiceNow to its full capacity.
“Automating our processes with ServiceNow and Microsoft helps us drive consistency, efficiency and an amazing user experience,” Matt concludes.