CDL takes a customer-first approach with ServiceNow

CDL thrives on technology differentiation in the insurance market
Cheshire Datasystems Ltd. (CDL) is a market leader in the highly competitive insurance sector. The company’s corporate strategy has always been focused around technology, but today’s leading-edge developments quickly become tomorrow’s commodity. To stand-out from competitors, CDL identified a clear differentiator—recognition by customers for providing world-class service alongside its state-of-the-art software.

CDL’s customer service strategy mirrors this mission, with a clear desire to shift away from being a technical helpdesk function to bringing the customer experience to the forefront and adding value to interactions.

Clive Simpson, Head of Service Management at CDL, explains, “In a way we had become victims of our own success. Due to client growth, our service desk was a bottleneck and a drain on resources. We hired more people to try to help with email and telephone enquiries, but it could still take up to eight hours to respond to and process a request.”

The company set out to implement a new service management system that could scale with its rapidly growing client base and empower its customers through a self-service portal for 24/7 access to information, services, and knowledge.

ServiceNow adds speed, availability, and reliability to the CDL helpdesk
CDL reviewed more than 15 service management system providers. ServiceNow was the clear choice, with a cloud-based delivery model that provided maximum flexibility. CDL partnered with KPMG, which enabled a fast deployment and strong alignment with the ITIL framework for a best-practise approach.

“Speed, availability, and reliability of CDL’s software is critical, as our insurance customers can see a direct financial impact if they are not able to complete transactions,” says Clive. “With ServiceNow Customer Service Management, we can rapidly process and act on incidents and queries for fast resolution and minimum impact on our customers.”

Through a 24/7 self-service portal, clients no longer have to call or email the CDL service desk, as they can complete and submit service requests online, following an intelligent question set to prioritise the severity of the incident. The tickets are automatically triaged with intelligent workflows and directed to the right team or specialist for the best outcome.

In many cases, CDL customers can bypass the support and ticketing process completely, with instant access to a knowledge library of technical information and “How To” articles through the self-service portal.

CDL meets customer service SLAs for P1 incidents
The self-service approach to customer service has enabled CDL to increase its incident resolution service level agreement (SLA) to 97% in just four months, by stripping out manual inputting, saving both its service team and customers time and effort.

Clive continues, “If we hadn’t changed anything the service desk would be twice the size and feel like a never-ending spinning wheel, which would have impacted our service levels.”

The benefits go beyond time savings to transform the approach to service delivery. According to Adrian Japp, ServiceNow Manager at CDL, “Our clients were asking for self-service and customers have reported a massive difference in service delivery thanks to ServiceNow. Most importantly, they now benefit from significantly faster assignment and fulfilment of enquires and P1 incidents.”

CDL gains visibility through real-time reporting with ServiceNow
Reporting is a key area that has evolved within CDL, adding value for both customers and the service desk operation. Rather than having to spend three days a month manually creating performance reports, these are now automatically generated by ServiceNow’s reporting dashboards. Dashboards provide at-a-glance transparency to clients and has eliminated requests for insights.

For CDL, it has given the service team access to advanced trend analysis to measure and improve service performance. “Putting ServiceNow at the heart of our service desk has enabled us to improve our customers’ experience with reports and knowledge at their fingertips,” says Clive. “There is so much potential to evolve our approach, which includes offering dynamic, real-time reports through the self-service portal for customers.”

Success with ServiceNow influences CDL company strategy
The service team at CDL quickly identified opportunities to expand the use of ServiceNow across the business. Other business tools can be readily integrated with the customer service management platform, including Sumerian capacity management, Microsoft Office365, and Dynatrace software intelligence, providing a more holistic view of customer satisfaction and behaviours in real-time.

Further integration is also possible with strategic insurance clients that also use ServiceNow, to interconnect software and log requests on their internal system, which will then automatically appear in CDL’s platform.

Other operations within CDL, such as software development, HR, sales, and finance, are also looking to reap the benefits that the service management team is experiencing, in terms of time savings, personalisation, and service improvements.

“The feedback from our service desk has been extremely positive and other business units are really starting to take note,” Clive says. “Customer service management is now influencing our company strategy for the first time and we’re really excited about the future!”

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