Establishing effective support practices for a UK-based fintech organisation

The challenge

Business Need

Being a subsidiary of a large UK-based bank, our Client handles the mobile app for the bank’s customers. In order to maintain excellent customer experience standards, they needed well-designed IT service management processes alongside the other tools they use in their daily work. 

The Client needed to create an organised support structure that would allow them to deliver the desired stability, while continuing to improve the application with new releases. This included an efficient way of prioritising tasks, excellent backlog management, risk mitigation, and more. 

Objectivity was selected to provide the expertise required to help the Client implement effective IT support processes, tools, and best practices. The Client also needed Objectivity to provide a level 0 IT support team that will provide continuous service monitoring as well as ticket and event management. The company’s experience in providing support to multiple clients, including ones in the financial industry, made them the right choice for this project. 

The solution

Project Details

The project was delivered with an agile approach, starting with the implementation of the most crucial elements. This allowed the Client to generate business value as quickly as possible. The first tool that was introduced was Jira Cloud for the tracking and prioritising of backlog tasks. Then, the team implemented procedures for request fulfilment and incident management in accordance with service-level agreements (SLAs) required by the Client. At this point, the most important parts of the support service were already operational. 

The following steps included an integration with the Slack communicator. Designated channels now receive notifications about major incidents and reminders about the tickets that are nearing the deadline.  

The Objectivity-provided L0 support team works in a 16/7 model and manages ticket queues, sends follow-ups, implements the three-strike rule, and ensures that the ticket statuses and categories remain correct. The Service Delivery Manager (SDM) oversees the escalations and helps the support teams maintain efficiency. Additionally, statistics of the reported and resolved tickets are now presented on dashboards. This provides the Client with the assistance and visibility they needed to deliver excellent support to their customers. 

Furthermore, Objectivity helped implement several crucial processes in the Client’s organisation — e.g. major incident, risk, and problem management as well as governance through monthly service reviews. Standardised workflows were implemented to improve the reviewing and optimisation of these processes. This improved the internal governance of the client’s teams, allowing them to manage their support services effectively and transparently. 

To further facilitate the daily work of the Client’s support specialists, the L0 team built a library of vendor information pages, containing important information such as contact points and escalation procedures.

The results

Business Benefits

As a result of the implementation of IT service management practices, the measurability of the Client’s work has improved significantly. They gained clear visibility of the number of tickets and the distribution of tickets amongst teams, which has allowed them to identify gaps and bottlenecks.  

The Client’s team has precise knowledge of the workloads and ease of prioritising tasks according to their parent company’s needs. They can also quickly group tickets that are associated with the same problem. All statistics from their support services are displayed on dashboards that the Client can later show to their parent company.  

The Client’s risk management process became more efficient after the migration to Jira. The new ticket lifecycle is more logical, and the information flow has improved significantly. This all contributes to the excellent quality of services the Client provides to its parent company.  

The automation and smart implementation of tools reduced the amount of effort needed to monitor ticket queues. Moreover, the L0 team took over a portion of the workload, taking care of event management and collaborating with key stakeholders during major incidents. At the same time, the SDM ensures operational governance and the implementation of best practices during daily work.  

As a result of joining forces with Objectivity, the Client received the assistance and guidance they needed to set up effective support services. The implemented best practices and optimisations answer the needs of their parent company and the application’s end users as well as enable the Client to uphold their excellent standards.