Streamlining the customer experience at STFC Hartree Centre

The national supercomputing research centre prepares for growing customer demand.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre is home to some of the most advanced computing, data and AI technologies in the UK. From early stage SMEs to international corporations, their team of experts work with industry and the research community to address real life challenges and accelerate the adoption of high performance technologies, delivering transformative gains in performance, productivity and time to market.

Hartree Centre receives support requests from industry and academic communities to encourage collaboration and data-driven decision making. Their continued growth resulted in increased demand and the requirement for a new service management application to more efficiently serve their end-users.

When FlyForm came on-board, Hartree Centre were relying on their ITSM instance to work with an increasing number of external partners. Applying our extensive experience with these types of projects, FlyForm helped the organisation address a few legacy issues to prepare them for the introduction of CSM and enhanced best practices.

Once these issues had been addressed, we implemented the ServiceNow Customer Services Management (CSM) workflow. Since the Hartree Centre collaborates across many different sectors with multiple organisations, this was not a typical CSM implementation. Taking into consideration their specific needs, FlyForm selected the most relevant features to introduce - tailoring them to work with Hartree Centre’s requirements. By pursuing the middle ground - one that didn’t require too many customisations, FlyForm was able to leverage the work that the Hartree Centre team had already done and enabled the organisation to be self-sufficient for future development cycles.

Throughout the project, FlyForm and the Hartree Centre kept an open line of communications and collaborated closely. From the moment the project kicked off, every project team member was invested in the outcome, and used the final goal to adjust along the way. Thanks to the unique knowledge and preparations that both sides brought to the table, we were able to mitigate all potential roadblocks and achieve the project goals within budget and timeframe.

FlyForm implemented the following ServiceNow modules for the Hartree Centre:

• Customer Service Management Professional (CSM Pro)

The CSM instance went live with rousingly successful results:

• Removal of manual ticket routing through advanced work assignment resulting in significant time savings.
• Reduction of services time and number of raised tickets by restructuring the knowledge-base.
• Decrease in number of raised tickets by using Virtual agent - powered by artificial intelligence.
• Increased visibility and more accurate decision-making with performance analytics, allowing for the automatic creation of reports and a more consistent approach to data.
• A new, more robust data model is better tuned to customers’ needs, whilst increasing data accuracy and producing more meaningful, relational data.