Axios and Virgin Money bag Innovation award at itSMF

November 21, 2007

Unique ‘lunch ordering’ approach to ITSM recognized by top industry body

Axios Systems, along with Virgin Money, today announced winning the itSMF ‘Innovation of the Year’ award. Virgin Money has been using Axios’ web-based version of their leading ITSM tool, assyst , to drive service quality. By building into the web portal something that nearly all Virgin Money staff do each day - order lunch from the in-house canteen - they ensured everyone was happy to use the portal, first for ordering lunch, and then for logging service calls.

The sought-after itSMF award is presented to the most novel project developed over the past year and recognizes innovative ideas that have yielded clear benefits for the organization. The awards honour the top service management professionals in the UK that demonstrate a commitment to the concept and application of Best Practice IT.

Wendy Peck, service support manager, Virgin Money says, "Virgin Money is thrilled to receive the itSMF 'Innovation of the Year' award. It's brilliant to have our Service Desks hard work and creative thinking recognized by such a prestigious award. Our objective was simple; to grow the use of the recently launched intranet-based ITSM portal, to make us more efficient and improve the service we offer to our internal customers.”

Voice logged incidents to the Service Desk fell by 40% and efficiency improved along with measures of service quality. The Service Desk saw a 60% increase in the portal usage with users taking the repetitive workload of first-line calls off the Service Desk and freeing up valuable time for them to handle more complex issues. Using assyst in such an every day way reduced users 'fear' of the technology and resolution times noticeably decreased.

Peck continued, “We were already using assyst by Axios Systems to power our service desk and intranet ITSM portal. Once we had the idea, it was easy and took no time at all for us to customize the system. I am not sure it would have been rolled out so easily with anyone else’s software. This is one of the most successful quick wins ever for our IT department."

Tasos Symeonides, CEO, Axios Systems, added, “For their innovative and fun approach, Virgin Money thoroughly deserves this award. It’s a great example of how a clear objective and a good creative idea with some smart technology behind it enabled the organization to tackle a very common business challenge quickly and easily. It also puts on show the flexibility and ease of use of Axios’ ITSM software, assyst. Within a matter of days Virgin implemented the idea and was seeing payback in the dramatic change in the way the Service Desk was interacting with the business. Like most good ideas, its simplicity is its brilliance.”


About Virgin Money

Virgin Money is Virgin’s financial services arm and was established in 1995. It has almost 2 million customers and offers a wide range of financial products across lending (e.g. credit cards and personal loans), savings (e.g. deposits, investments and pensions) and protection (e.g. life assurance, household and car insurance) to the UK market.

Press Contacts:
Kate Hamilton
Hotwire
T. +44 0207 608 4671
kate.hamilton@hotwirepr.com

Emily Birks
Hotwire
T. +44 0207 608 4699
emily.birks@hotwirepr.com

More information from:

[ Print Press Release | Back ]

Top Downloads