South Africa’s Fastest-Growing Retail Bank to Deliver 3 Pillars of IT Service Management

Bank profits from quantifiable time, automation, reporting, and performance gains with cloud-optimized ITSM.

Capitec Bank’s core vision is to help clients improve their financial lives by making banking simple, transparent and easy to access from anywhere. Rickard Chambers, Team Leader for Service Management Systems, IT/Business Development at Capitec Bank, supports internal and external clients and the branch network, with a service management platform that supports 284 teams and 1,200 agents processing over 31,000 tickets every 24 hours.

Supporting high growth and volumes

“It’s impossible to achieve great service on high volumes of requests without great supporting platforms,” says Chambers. “Our former desktop-based service management application had served us well, but as it reached end of life, we sensed that we could offer more effective services using a cloud-based delivery platform that transferred processing from the user’s desktop to our back-end servers. This upgrade would help the bank effectively record, track and service incidents to make agent interactions simpler, faster and more productive for clients.”

After detailed evaluation of three market-leading solutions, Capitec’s Service Management Systems team contacted Ivanti, who outlined how their cloud-based service management capabilities had expanded dramatically through their IT Service Manager solution. Ivanti detailed how the solution would meet Capitec’s high availability and ease-of-access requirements, while decreasing the time to market for agent performance gains. Procurement began with Capitec engaging their technical partner, Think Tank, for detailed advice on technical configurations and migration of the bank’s more complex processes, before the phased rollout began.

Cloud eases path to high availability

Nine months into full deployment of Ivanti Service Manager, powered by Heat, and with 95% of processes migrated, the new service management platform has positively improved SLAs with ramifications from the back-end infrastructure to front-end agent service delivery. Service availability was a top deployment priority along with avoiding service breaks, given that 1,200 agents could be affected by service drops at any one time.

To facilitate the highest levels of availability, the bank first deployed Network Load Balancing (NLB) across six back-end servers to share the load, should unplanned downtime occur.

This decision had an almost immediate benefit when three months into deployment, usage of NLB negated a total system and service failure. In this instance, when one server became unresponsive, all traffic was redirected seamlessly to the second application server with zero impact to users. Additionally, planned monthly downtime for release management of Ivanti enhancements was reduced from nine hours to less than 15 minutes per month, through the provision of web-based updates.

Cloud migration merits

At the front-end for agent service delivery, inbound query volumes continue to increase in line with the bank’s growth, with each agent handling hundreds of queries per day.

Today, the emphasis is on speed and efficiency by means of Ivanti’s automation tools, to increase positive client interactions without losing the friendly, human touch.

Using Ivanti, Capitec agents make a significant service difference by quickly locating client fields such as missing account numbers using full-text catalogue searches accessed from multiple data sources. Now, when agents are unable to fully answer an inbound query, they can simply deploy the Watch List feature to offer follow-up options. They tick call-back details such as "escalate" or "pin" into a Watched Item list, or simply use the list to shift back through the last 10 items, should a call become disconnected. Given that agent apps are now hosted in the private cloud, opening them is much faster, regardless of the type of agent device – desktop, laptop or mobile. The time to open a new incident request has been reduced from 20 seconds to six seconds.

“With such high volumes, literally every second counts,” Chambers said. “If we can use a platform like Ivanti to shave off seconds in opening applications on any device, then this has a positive knock-on effect on the quality of service our agents can offer. The agents themselves have fed back that the amount of time saved using Ivanti is ‘phenomenal’, based on the incidents appearing and closing far faster.”

Expanding business value

In the IT/Business Development team, the Ivanti platform has also notched significant productivity gains, reducing workloads and task complexity while facilitating quicker promotion intervals. Internally, the average time spent on tasks related to the Ivanti platform enhancements dropped by 65% compared to deploying changes to the former desktop-managed system. Downtime implementing new promotions and changes has also significantly decreased. In the former system, even simple additions such as inserting a new text-based capture box within a form, used to involved at least 90 minutes of system downtime while changes were implemented. Basic data-capture changes would invoke pages of implementation instructions across departments, with gatekeeping points to ensure compliancy.

Today, the system is designed to allow changes to be made as the business demands. Significant changes still flow through the Change Control process, but minor changes can be made directly on the cloud platform, or as Chambers notes; allowing ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ modifications to become ‘Run-the-Bank’ outputs. Usage of the platform not only increased the Run-the-Bank outputs, but also doubled the formal Change Control Outputs resulting in faster times to market; reduced import intervals of 60% and immediate access to client data for real-time decision making (previously access was restricted during the 30-minute upload times). In a similar vein, merchant data imports once ran daily and took 22 hours to complete. Now using Ivanti, the bank reports import times of just two hours.

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}