When a vision of operational excellence becomes reality

By Ariel Gritti Tartac, Service and Operations Manager, Globalia

In the travel industry, especially air travel, customer experience is often lagging behind other industries. Surveys prove this too – in the 2018 American Customer Satisfaction Index Amazon ranked above well-established hotel and travel brands, such as Hilton, Marriott and Expedia.

For operations executives working in this industry, often using complex IT legacy systems, day-to-day work can be frustrating due to disconnected systems that simply don’t talk to each other.

This was the case for us at Globalia, Spain’s largest tourist group, which comprises a number of independent companies.

Our vision is to drive operational excellence across the whole group to deliver exceptional customer service experiences. But our IT service delivery was slow, siloed and ill-equipped. It was time to turn this around and fully align with our business objectives.

Towards unified service delivery
We knew that by unifying service delivery we would be able to enhance virtually every business process across the whole group. We also recognised that adopting a single, best-of-breed ITSM platform was the only way to truly integrate Globalia’s operations and prepare for future growth.

We started by replacing the mish mash of different systems and management processes in the different business units with the ServiceNow platform. We basically created a sort of ‘internal Amazon’ platform for users to enable self-service for routine requests.

Importantly, ServiceNow’s cloud-based approach meant that the platform could instantly benefit every end user in every part of the business, across our independent companies.

The manual days are over
An almost immediate benefit was delivered to my team. We are only 20 engineers, and in the past, just dealing with incoming requests and assigning tasks was a challenge. The new unified service desk has significantly reduced the burden.

On top of the new service desk, ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution gave us a single management interface, which has been crucial in optimizing how my department works with Globalia’s various business units (BUs). Incorporating event management, service mapping and asset management, the ITOM solution has enabled the creation of a variety of digital workflows to automatically create incidents, direct responses and assign tasks across the team.

Our experience at work has been much improved and we are saving enormous amounts of effort. In fact, we estimate digital workflows have saved us about 95% of time! In addition, event management has reduced the number of operator-controlled events by 98%.

Crucially these savings have been achieved with maximum efficiency. I have been able to manage the whole process directly, with no need for additional headcount – another significant saving for the business.

Boosting operational excellence
By standardizing on ServiceNow’s ITSM and ITOM solutions we automated key business processes, achieved a far greater integration across the business, and accelerated our operations beyond recognition.

The speed of delivery of my team has been transformed and today we can more than meet the demands of a rapidly growing business. Compared to the custom developments we had to do in the past, we’re able to take on more projects and deliver new services incredibly quickly.

The experience of ServiceNow has been exceptional, but the numbers that have made the biggest impact to our colleagues’ experiences at work are related to incident resolution.

The overall incident resolution time has been reduced by 89%, the time to fulfill a request has shrunk by 44%, and first-time resolution of incidents has increased to 88%. That’s a dramatic improvement in efficiency and service delivery.

ServiceNow as a core fabric of our business
When peers and colleagues ask me about our future direction, I know we are in a fortunate position because we have put in place a platform that gives us the foundation to continue to thrive.

With ServiceNow in place, I’m confident that whatever functionality, features or services are needed by the business, we can develop them in a scalable way.

At Globalia, the principle of managing the business via digital workflows on the ServiceNow platform is now well-established. We will continue to create new use cases, new efficiencies and ever greater experiences for our customers.

As we strive towards even greater operational excellence, my dream is for the whole company to be built on ServiceNow.