Business Support Desk

Functional needs

Gerry and Maarten, you took the initiative to launch a Business Support Desk (BSD). Why has TriFinance built this platform?

Both of our units have a lot of customers where we implemented our solutions. MI&S has tens of customers where our reporting dashboards in PowerBI are running, CroXon has implemented several ServiceNow environments.

Customers of both applications sometimes have functional needs to change the initial setup. Before, they addressed the consultants that have worked on the assignment. Now they can log their question in the BSD.

Was the former way of working no longer valid?

It still functions but we made it a professional environment. Customers can log their questions in a portal that gives them more information on the status of their inquiries.

They can see if the question is logged and in which status it is to get resolved.

Before, they were dependent on the availability and follow-up by the consultant they already knew. If this consultant p.e. was on holiday, it could take some more time before the issue was resolved.

As from now on, we will ask all our customers to only use the portal to get help. Because we have too many clients, we cannot guarantee anymore a professional follow-up of questions sent through by email.

Knowledge sharing & training

This seems a professional approach for a bigger client base, are there any other advantages for them?

Next to the section to launch their questions, they also get access to a knowledge base where updates will be posted on the specific solutions they work with.

Via the search engine, they will be able to analyze if similar issues already are solved before entering a new ticket.

With this knowledge base, they have access to a new community of clients working with the same solutions.

And in the help section, they will have an overview of the questions they launched: what is already asked for, who has asked what.

Is there also an advantage for TriFinance?

Sure, the portal also supports our internal planning. depending on the capacity planning of our consultants and the specific competencies needed to solve the questions, the issues can be handled by the most appropriate consultant. In this sense, the client will be served most professionally in respect of the SLA agreed and the quality that is promised to keep our customers happy.

We also can analyze the type of questions we receive. If an important share of questions always is related to the same category, we maybe have to invest upfront to avoid being confronted afterward with these questions.

Or we can stress these topics more in the training we give to our customers.

One-stop-shop support

What kind of questions can be asked in the BSD?

It is important that we speak about a Business Support Desk. We will resolve not only technical questions but also functional ones. We want to be the one-stop-shop for the support of our customers.

Maarten, could you give some examples of business-related questions?

We resolve questions like ‘We like to change the dashboard layout’’, ‘my measure should be calculated another way’ but also ‘my report has not refreshed’ or ‘the report is becoming too slow’.

And Gerry, what are typical questions for ServiceNow-related projects?

Customers are constantly evolving and following their business. The platform enables them to implement smaller solutions with a very fast time to market and an ROI within 6 months. So the questions are mostly related to the following kind of change request “Can we add a new service catalog item to automate the onboarding flow”.

What is the advantage for a CFO to use the BSD?

The finance manager or CFO receives a sort of confidence he/she will be helped within the agreed timeframe for the solutions they have in place. We start with 2 solutions embedded in the BSD (PowerBI and ServiceNow), but it would be interesting to also open the Business Support Desk for other solutions that TriFinance offers to the finance community. The technology of the BSD is open and foreseen to make it a wider support desk for business-related applications.