Thales DIS empowers users

Delivering trusted and critical digital services
Thales is a global company that delivers services and solutions for the defense, aeronautics, space, and digital identity and security sectors. The most recognized brands and governments around the world rely on Thales to provide trusted digital services and protect critical infrastructure used by billions of consumers every day.

Next-generation customer support
Thales offers a broad range of services to customers, delivered via a variety of business units with specialist skills in that area. Its cloud protection and licensing business line provides software-, hardware-, and cloud-based encryption, key management, hardware security modules (HSM), and authentication solutions to businesses, governments, and other organizations.

These mission-critical solutions help customers protect and secure access to their most sensitive data, but when it came to post-sales support, the team wanted to transform services to be more customer-centric and personalized. However, the incumbent solution lacked the functionality to tailor the support service to customers in any way.

“A customer might order 1,000 security tokens from us, for example. Tracking, configuring, and managing that many devices was complex, and we want to give them an amazing experience as well as great products,” explains Andrew Blum, Director Service Operations, Client Services at Thales DIS.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management was deployed in 2017 by the cybersecurity arm of Thales’ digital identity and security business unit to create a personalized support portal for customers, but when it merged with Gemalto in 2019, it needed to consolidate and update its apps and systems to create a central support hub for customers and partners.

“We wanted to centralize post-sales support for several business units under one umbrella. Customers don’t want to have a different portal and different support team for every product they use,” says Andrew. “Having a single view of the customer also gives us better insight into which services they might be interested in next.”

Personalized, relevant, and timely
The team created an initial minimum viable product (MVP) and release updates to add more functionality every month. Since day one, the portal included a knowledge base with searchable articles to help customers self-serve and subscribe to updates on relevant topics.

The portal was designed to be personalized, relevant, and to proactively notify customers when items are being shipped, for example. The landing page is customized based on which product the customer has purchased, and keeps them informed of renewal dates, when new versions of products are available, and if there’s a known issue that needs to be resolved.

The first workflow automated was return merchandize authorization (RMA), which involved integrating ServiceNow with the ERP to get full visibility of devices being returned and their status.

“Our previous approach was siloed, and our ticketing solution lacked basic functionality. For example, there was no way to include an attachment when submitting a request, so it took multiple emails to collect all the information to resolve the case,” Andrew recalls. “Now, case creation is so streamlined we can capture 90% of the details at first contact, and customers can open a ticket quickly and easily by clicking a button on the portal. Our MTTR has improved year on year by ~5% as a result.”

Turning feedback into action
For the IT team, ServiceNow is much simpler to maintain than the previous solution, which gives them more time to focus on rolling out new features. “Moving to ServiceNow was like switching a light on in a dark room. We hit the ground running to stand up a new portal quickly, and ServiceNow was like a Swiss Army knife with all the features we needed to do just that,” reflects Susan Wolfe, Manager of Communications and ServiceNow Administrator at Thales DIS.

To shape the portal experience around the customer, Thales has a dedicated team capturing feedback via surveys. The automatic feedback loop is triggered when a case is closed, and with data captured all in one place, Thales DIS can pull reports to further identify areas for improvement.

“The portal is customized for both customers and partners to make sure both groups have the support they need. Partners raise cases on behalf of their customers, so it’s really important to make sure they can answer customer queries quickly to protect our brand,” explains Tasha Payne, Customer Advocate, Client Services/Technical Support at Thales DIS.

With better insight into customer demands, Thales has increased its net promoter score (NPS) from ‘Good’ to ‘World Class’, currently ranking at an impressive +70, which is testament to the company’s dedicated team and smarter reporting.

“In general, the portal is very well received by customers and partners, but if a customer does give us negative feedback, they trust us to take it seriously and put processes in place to resolve the issue. We have SLAs to make sure everyone hears from us within 24 hours,” says Tasha.

Focusing on adding more value
To empower customers with greater levels of self-service, the team is expanding its use of Service Catalog to enable them to order new products, purchase licenses for 2022 - 2023, and manage product returns from a menu of services.

The chat bot, powered by Virtual Agent, is also being scaled up to handle more basic requests such as finding contact numbers, updates on open cases, and helping to reset passwords. “Some users will always prefer to speak to a person, while others want to self-serve. ServiceNow gives us the flexibility to serve everyone,” adds Tasha. “We’re looking at connecting other channels with features such as ‘click to call’ or SMS updates, and rolling out an app built on ServiceNow App Engine.”

In Q1 of 2022, as part of its mobile strategy, Thales will make all services on its dedicated Mobile App with ServiceNow accessible on Apple and Google store for its end users.

With the success of the support portal, other departments at Thales are looking to Andrew’s team to set a gold standard that can be easily rolled out across the organization. But the culture of continuous innovation is ingrained.

“What impresses me about ServiceNow is the company’s dedication to continuing to develop its products. The feature set is always evolving with new functionality and enhancements that benefit both developers and our customers,” says Susan. “With ServiceNow, we’ll always be able to delight our customers.”

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