Spirit Pub Company adapts ITSM to call time on customer dissatisfaction
- Summary:
- If you’re only using IT services management to manage IT, you may well be missing a trick, says Simon Clarke, service delivery manager for IT at Spirit Pub Company.
That’s the message from Simon Clarke, service delivery manager for IT at Spirit Pub Company, which manages 750 pubs around the UK under well-known brand names such as Chef & Brewer and Fayre & Square.
Clarke is speaking from experience: when he joined Spirit in 2012, he was dismayed to see how little use the company was getting from its implementation of ServiceNow, a product he had implemented in his previous job at Loughborough University. He explains:
At Spirit, ServiceNow was only being used for incident management and change management, and only in the IT department. What struck me was that we were paying quite a lot for licences when, in fact, we could have replaced it with a much cheaper solution and got more or less the same result.
But ServiceNow has actually got massive breadth and width in terms of what it can do and what applications can be developed on top of it. It’s not the cheapest tool out there by any means - which just makes it even more vital that you get as much out of it as possible. I wanted to use the shared platform model it offers to drive better value from our licensing.
In fact, he decided, ServiceNow had the potential to make a direct contribution to Spirit’s goal of becoming the number one hospitality brand in the UK. One of the biggest barriers to achieving that aim, he says, was the company’s ineffective handling of customer feedback and queries from pub managers: Where are my wages? Where’s my delivery? Something’s broken here - can you come and fix it?
ITSM deployed
The company was using FrontRange’s HEAT service management tool for guest services and pub queries, but it wasn’t well-liked by people in the business, according to Clarke, who says:
While Clarke’s initial idea was to tackle pub queries first, Spirit’s executive team insisted that guest feedback was the place to start. Clarke admits:In fact, when we conducted our consultation with them, they told us it was the number one thing that got under their skin. It lacked user-friendliness, responses were not well-structured and incidents couldn’t be reassigned to other teams in the business without creating a duplicate case. Everyone was pretty fed up.
I guess they had a point - because the customer experience is something we have to keep a close eye on. Complaints, after all, are one of the biggest risks to our business.
The Spirit project team, under Clarke, worked with implementation partner TeamUltra to design a new incident management system for guest feedback, based on ServiceNow. Whether the feedback comes via email, a letter to head office, a phone call or a feedback form on a pub brand’s website, it is now automatically captured and stored in ServiceNow, along with relevant information such as guest numbers and type of visit.
The 15-strong Guest Services team at Spirit look at each incident, categorise it and route it to the relevant team member, such as a pub or area manager to follow up. Once the process is complete, ServiceNow is updated with information about the outcome: was a complaint resolved, was a letter of apology issued, was the guest awarded a voucher, by way of compensation? Clarke explains:
The management information that the Guest Services app creates has given us real insight into our operations, allowing us to identify and proactively address any service issues before they negatively impact our brands.
It’s been a real eye-opener, forcing us to challenge some of our assumptions as to underlying issues in the business - but the overall result is better service for customers and fewer complaints in the long run.
With that success under their belt, the project team then moved on to building another custom app, the Pub Query System (PQS), which went live in March 2014. Pub staff can now log a query at any time of day or night, a ticket is raised and routed to the relevant support team. Automated workflow tracks response times and ensures that service failures are escalated to the appropriate manager.
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Clarke says the firm is seeing faster resolution of issues and more first-time resolution, too, but the work is far from over. Since March, he and the team have also rolled out an Employee Services app for Spirit staff to engage with the HR department, introduced PQS across different Spirit brands, and they’re now looking to tie social media - particularly from Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor - directly into the Guest Services App. Clarke jokes:
We’d like to take a breather, put our feet up for a bit - but we’re not allowed to do that. Two weeks ago, I was having a chat with our marketing department and it’s looking like they’ll be getting ServiceNow soon. The facilities management department has been knocking on my door, as have people from the employee benefits team. This thing is really growing arms and legs - in many ways, it’s been easier to sell the benefits of ServiceNow to the business than it ever would be to the average IT department.