Driving resilient IT services and optimizing costs
Southern Cross Health Insurance (Southern Cross) is New Zealand’s largest private health insurer, providing health insurance to more than 950,000 members.
Supporting New Zealanders on their health journeys since 1961, today Southern Cross provides cover for nearly one in five New Zealanders.
As a member-driven organization, Southern Cross has an ongoing focus on evolving its products and services to empower members to live well for longer.
However, with decades-old applications and infrastructure, its approach to IT service management was siloed, limiting collaboration between teams. Southern Cross wanted to consolidate its internal IT services onto a single platform to improve the efficiency of its service operations and make it easy for users to interact with IT.
“As a member-driven organization, a key focus is on operational resilience and cost optimization. The goal is to ensure that technology investments support our purpose without being driven by profit,” says James French, Principal Lead – Platform Experiences at Southern Cross Health Insurance. “With the Now Platform, we have a strong roadmap to modernize IT experiences and adapt to future changes.”
Taking service levels to new heights
Southern Cross previously used a vendor for IT service management, but processes lacked control and transparency. Southern Cross decided to bring service management in-house and rolled out ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) in 2018. Its initial focus was on incident and change management, but with multiple tools used by different IT teams, collaborating and resolving issues became difficult.
“Siloed IT behavior was like a black hole for end users,” James explains. “Requests could take weeks for a response with no visibility for users to track progress. This resulted in low engagement and satisfaction with the IT department.”
By implementing ServiceNow Employee Center, employees now have a unified service portal to access services for specific IT functions, workplace management, and facilities. IT teams across these functions can use the Now Platform’s single view to easily identify, track, and prioritize service requests, giving Southern Cross clear visibility into its operations while significantly improving resolution rates.
“Thanks to ServiceNow, we can bring our teams together to manage work and collaborate on one platform,” James says. “This has improved our service-level resolution rate by 36%—from 61% to 83%.”
With evolving technology and increasing DevOps adoption in the organization, James and his team understand the importance of enabling high-velocity changes to drive productivity in development teams. By using ServiceNow DevOps Change Velocity to automate change request creation and approval processes, Southern Cross has increased the volume of IT changes by 69% in five years. Developers can now focus on innovation and deliver higher-value outcomes for the business.
“This would not be possible without a tool like ServiceNow to drive the volume and velocity of changes. Greater process efficiency also helps us reduce overheads for IT and delivery teams,” James says.
“Using one data model and one platform, we gain deeper visibility into the relationship between services and applications. This empowers the IT team to make decisions based on data instead of opinions.”
Elevating user experiences with automation
As part of its business transformation journey, Southern Cross deployed Virtual Agent—the AI-powered conversational chatbot—within the Now Platform to give employees access to 24/7 self-service, resolving common requests without agent involvement. This has enhanced the service desk’s ability to work more efficiently even with fewer resources in its team.
“With the AI-powered Virtual Agent, we now have a 24/7 service desk where employees can easily find what they need anytime and have deflected 761 calls since we went live with the chatbot,” James explains. “For example, users are directed to a relevant knowledge article via the AI-enabled chatbot. If the issue remains unresolved, they simply log a request and an agent will call them back first thing the next morning.”
Before Virtual Agent, Southern Cross saw the number of catalog requests increase by 52%. With automation routing issues to the chatbot, the organization has seen another rise in the number of employees using service requests and knowledge articles in the platform. The next step is to further improve the conversation experience in Virtual Agent and drive higher self-service rates.
“Since the adoption of the Now Platform, transparency has become a big win for us and people appreciate it,” James says. “Users can now track the status and resolve issues quickly. Even when there is a delay, they know why and how they can follow up. This improved our user satisfaction rating to 99.3% last year, up from 70%.”
Establishing a single source of truth across IT operations
As a highly trusted health insurance brand, ensuring service availability is critical for Southern Cross to maintain its reputation and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Since 2019, Southern Cross has been using ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) to increase visibility into its entire IT infrastructure. It then consolidated various sources of data—including architecture, operations, and development—into ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to provide a single, trusted system of record for all IT components.
“ServiceNow is built on a single data model with common processes. In a multi-vendor environment, it helps us reduce silos between IT teams and enables them to work together seamlessly to resolve issues,” James adds. “The transparency provided by the Now Platform has led to a 40% cut in major incidents—the best year-on year reduction yet.”
AIOps powered by Event Management is set to become an increasingly important focus in the next year, and Southern Cross will use ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric to integrate events and alerts from various monitoring tools to create a single source of truth for service health.
The health insurer also uses ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric to integrate with Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Workday, and Azure, to automate end-to-end user access provisioning processes for new hires and leavers. This not only enhances the onboarding and offboarding experiences but also minimizes business risk by ensuring accurate access management.
Going forward, Southern Cross will leverage Service Mapping to create a logical representation of IT services to support critical business processes.
Certificate authorization was historically a pain point for the company, so the integration of ServiceNow Certificate Management to make the process more seamless is another key priority.
Reducing lower priority incidents and single-user issues is also a focus area for Southern Cross as it looks to improve through better cross-team collaboration.
“Our goal is to empower our IT teams to be more proactive and give end users visibility into what’s going on in their environment,” James says.
Maximizing the impact of the Now Platform
ServiceNow is seen as a critical platform for Southern Cross’ business transformation. To that end, the health insurer has adopted ServiceNow Impact, the industry’s first human and AI-powered value acceleration solution to track progress and business outcomes.
“ServiceNow Impact is very useful for validating what we are doing,” James adds. “Connecting with experts and receiving tailored recommendations and guidance have also proven to be valuable.”
Southern Cross is also utilizing the training available with ServiceNow Impact, enabling its IT teams with the courses needed to learn new skills for ITSM and ITOM. This has reduced the number of hours needed to address incidents while creating a culture of self-sufficiency within the team. As a result, upskilled staff can now be redeployed to different jobs internally.
“When the time is right to deploy Event Management, we will use Jumpstart Your Event Management and other Impact Accelerators to help us accelerate the usage and adoption of our ITOM investment,” James explains.
“I have no doubt that AI and generative AI will also be an important part of our transformation journey. I am keen to see how ServiceNow Impact will help us adopt new technology in the future.”
The successful implementation of the Now Platform would not be possible without the support of ServiceNow partner, Integrated Knowledge Consulting (IKC). Its team worked with Southern Cross to identify key challenges and build a roadmap on how the company could better adopt ServiceNow and maximize its return on investment.
“IKC has been proactive in its engagement and has often identified opportunities before we do,” James says. “We now see IKC as part of our internal team rather than an external party.”
In terms of ServiceNow’s implementation, James explains that the best strategy is to keep the process simple and use the platform’s out-of-the-box capabilities, as they represent best practice and are easily configurable to meet any business’s needs.
“As a not-for-profit organization, it is important we make the most of our investment by ensuring that the technology is future-focused, scalable, and adaptable to the changing environment,” James concludes. “This is where ServiceNow adds real value.”