COMLINE transforms automated IT service delivery

Automating IT service delivery
Many businesses rely on in-house IT teams to deliver secure, frictionless digital experiences so people can safely and easily communicate, work, shop, and learn. However, understaffed IT departments often struggle to efficiently resolve help desk requests, onboard new employees, and proactively mitigate cybersecurity threats.

COMLINE SE (COMLINE) empowers businesses across Europe to bolster limited onsite resources with over 400 automated, easy-to-use IT services available 24/7. “Our extensive self-service catalog puts us miles ahead of other service providers who still operate on an outdated 9-to-5 model,” says Bodo Booten, CTO Head of Service Innovations and Operations at COMLINE. “Our customers don’t have to wait to speak with an agent because all IT services can be quickly selected, integrated, and managed on intuitive self-service portals.”

COMLINE relies on ServiceNow to power IT catalogs and self-service portals, streamline customer ticketing and integrations, and rapidly launch new services. “Before implementing Customer Service Management, we offered less than a dozen IT services with limited cloud-based integrations,” explains Booten. “Instead of developing new solutions and services, our employees spent many hours on manual, repetitive tasks such as calculating quotes, managing orders, assigning tickets to agents, and migrating infrastructure and applications.”

Since deploying Customer Service Management (CSM) with a focus on IT Ticket Management, Asset Management, and Service Catalog, COMLINE has automated ticketing and integrations, introduced support for all major cloud and ERP platforms, and increased revenue by over 40% with more than 400 new IT services. “With ServiceNow, we’ve reduced reopened tickets by 90%, accelerated mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50%, and cut reassignments 40%,” says Alexander Haeusler, Head of Enterprise Solutions at COMLINE SE.

Streamlining asset management
Although many customers routinely use portals to independently select and manage IT services, others depend on COMLINE to staff and outsource help desks and manage crucial in-field operations 24/7. “COMLINE is providing first and second level support for over 30 customers with the help of ServiceNow,” states Booten.

To streamline help desk ticketing, COMLINE harnesses CSM while leveraging Asset Management to automatically integrate, update, and monitor customer systems, devices, and applications. “ServiceNow enables us to efficiently manage customer systems and resolve complex IT issues in minutes by providing cross-department COMLINE SE visibility across organizations,” says Haeusler. “This allows us to generate actionable analytics and contextualize key insights to accelerate integrations and updates, proactively identify potential IT issues, and reduce MTTR.”

CSM also makes it easy for customers to automate security reporting and comply with strict international data privacy laws, standards, and frameworks such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), System and Organization Controls (SOC), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). “We previously struggled with security and compliance integration and spent a lot of time preparing for audits,” says Haeusler. “With ServiceNow, we and our outsourcing customers can support more successful audits by using compliance frameworks and building secure and compliant processes.”

By automatically updating security protocols to address new threats and comply with evolving cyber security legislation, COMLINE empowers customers to deliver the highly secure services people need to safely work from home, consume services, and manage their costs with management reports

Launching new IT services
Having freed up 80% of agent productivity previously consumed by manual tasks, COMLINE IT staff now focus on launching new services and solutions such as the Microsoft Azure Operations Dashboard and custom widgets that automate cross-department workflows from HR to IT to Procurement. “Microsoft Azure Operations Dashboard is a ServiceNow-powered tool that unifies 12 disparate Azure portals and many more connections in one place,” explains Booten. “The popular, single pane-of-glass dashboard makes it easy for customers to track tickets, access catalogs, and manage services running in Microsoft’s cloud environment."

COMLINE is also designing an internal dashboard to deliver real-time, service-level views of customer systems and applications. “The dashboard will provide a 360-degree view of all managed deployments and enable staff to proactively resolve potential IT issues even faster,” adds Haeusler.

In parallel, COMLINE has integrated some of its ServiceNow Catalog Portfolio into Microsoft Teams so users can, for example, seamlessly create new teams in MS Teams. “Broadening integration will enable COMLINE to chat in real-time with customers in Teams instead of over the phone or email and lays a solid foundation for the future deployment of ServiceNow Virtual Agent, which will further optimize and automate responses to basic help desk requests,” explains Booten.

Empowering customer growth
With ServiceNow, COMLINE enables customers to cost-effectively deploy over 400 automated, easy-to-use IT services that flawlessly integrate with all major cloud platforms, ERP systems, and help desk applications. “Reducing operating costs and increasing employee efficiency empowers customers to shift more resources to R&D and develop innovative new products that boost revenue,” concludes Booten. “These products positively impact people further downstream by helping them safely and easily communicate, work, consume, and learn.”

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