A cross-college enterprise platform

The Royal College of Art (RCA) has been educating students for over fifty years. But what was once a college focused solely on the arts, is now at the forefront of science, technology, engineering, arts and maths (STEAM) research and education.

Over the past ten years, the RCA has seen its number of students rise from 800 to over 3,000. Despite this incredible growth trajectory, the business processes to support that growth have largely relied upon supporting systems that were at hand—primarily email.

The college had 200 shared mailboxes. Some were obsolete but still live, some were monitored, some were not. So, the RCA embarked on creating a cross-college enterprise platform. It wanted students to be able to send a single email, and behind the scenes it could be routed to whoever could help that student quickest.

The RCA has replaced its existing ticketing tool with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and adopted ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) across all of its student-facing business areas.

With students from 80 different countries all around the world, providing support in their own time zone was a challenge. With Virtual Agent, RCA is able to give them access to almost the same service as a human would give, whenever they need it.

With a baseline of 0.5% take up of self-service, RCA set a target of achieving 5% of tickets logged by self-service after the first year. After just four months, the college has already achieved 14%. And, thanks to tickets now being routed correctly through CSM and ITSM, the team is also achieving 90% first-time-fix rates.