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Infra enables figleaves.com to deliver continual improvement in IT Service Management excellence

Founded in the UK in 1998, figleaves.com is the world's largest online retailer of branded intimate apparel, including underwear, swimwear and nightwear for men and women. The company successfully expanded into the USA marketplace in 2004. Today figleaves.com customers can place an order online from a selection of more than 200 brands; from big name favourites like Wonderbra through to top of the range designer lines such as Maliza by La Perla.

Based in London, figleaves.com's Technical Operations department comprises a team of 20 IT professionals responsible for providing networking and development expertise, as well as supporting the company's many internal and external customer-facing systems. In total there are 150 servers and almost 100 applications to maintain - including the web servers that power the company's mission-critical 24/7 online business. However, the company's existing inhouse call logging system was proving difficult for the Service Desk to prioritise the diverse range of support requests. Furthermore, the system did not enable management to monitor how much time was being spent on particular issues or, crucially, to assess which systems were proving costly to maintain.

Integrated Service Desk

As a result, figleaves.com decided to invest in a new system to support its burgeoning operations. In 2006, the company issued an invitation to tender to six IT Service Management vendors including Infra Corporation. According to Paul Kennedy, Technical Operations Manager at figleaves.com, "Using the previous system, support personnel were working to a long list of requests rather than clearing priorities. They couldn't automatically assess the importance of each call or relate its impact to business needs. It became obvious that we needed a more flexible Service Desk solution. "Having carefully reviewed the market, we selected infraEnterprise Service Management software because it represented the best value for money in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and scalability to future needs. "Infra also provided easy plug-ins to third party technology: for example, the system's easy integration with Active Directory allowed a single signon, which is more convenient for users and of course, much simpler to maintain."

Easy implementation

The rollout of the 100 per cent webbased Infra software took just eight weeks from start to finish, including operator training. Using infraEnterpise, figleaves.com can now track issues through to resolution, producing timesheets to monitor the time spent on each incident. According to Kennedy, "Infra produces a summary of exactly how our time is being spent. Not only does this make it easier to identify training needs, but it also enables the department to make a strong business case for extra resources or system upgrades if required. For example, using statistics from Infra, we have identified that supporting the in-house logistics system is proving relatively expensive, allowing us to take steps to rectify the situation."

Increased customer satisfaction

The new Infra Service Desk supports internal customer service and logistics staff, as well as third party operations, which include an outsourced call centre. Service Desk personnel handle a wide variety of Incidents, such as difficulties with publishing stock items on the website, queries about validation errors on customer orders, and time-outs on the hand held scanners used by the warehouse when picking products. As figleaves.com aims to dispatch in-stock items within 24 hours, the onus is on the Technical Operations team to resolve such calls quickly and efficiently. Over 90 per cent of service calls are now logged through the Infra Customer Portal. When logging a call, users can now highlight the impact of an issue, indicating whether it affects a single online customer, multiple customers, or the entire operation. The Service Desk can then respond with email updates on the status of the request. Being able to deal with queries in order of impact and urgency has boosted departmental efficiency significantly. "'Reliability' is a figleaves.com brand value, and one that the Technical Operations team strives to achieve through continuous improvement to service delivery," comments Paul Kennedy. "Prior to implementing Infra we surveyed our users to see how satisfied they were with the services we provided. We achieved a rating of 6.5 out of 10. Just three months later, in October 2006, this rating had gone up to an 8 - a significant improvement and well ahead of expectations."

Meeting business needs

The department has also introduced formal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the first time. Calls are now categorised according to type of item and user profile. For example, an issue with an individual's email or desktop system would be assigned a lower priority than a problem with a web server. Performance against agreed SLAs is now reported, enabling the business to assess the effectiveness of IT service delivery.

Global support

As a global operation, with sites both in the UK and the USA, figleaves.com uses time-zoning within infraEnterprise to automatically log internal Incidents with their associated SLAs, while applying global SLAs to the website. There are plans to introduce automated SMS alerts for out-of-hours callouts for website support in the near future.

Enhancing the system

Following the success of the new Service Desk and Customer Portal, figleaves.com is planning to implement an integrated Change Management system using Infra software. The company is also due to add additional internal teams as operators to the Infra system. This would enable the Finance team to handle first-line calls relating to management reporting, and the Buying team to respond to nontechnical issues about the product range. All calls can then be escalated to the technical team where appropriate and tracked through to closure. Paul Kennedy concludes, "Thanks to the new Infra system, we are able to run an extremely efficient Service Desk. We have a much better view of how issues are likely to impact the business, and can ensure that we target our resources appropriately. Publishing Service Level Agreements has also helped us to align our services with business needs." "We began our search looking for a comprehensive solution that would meet our needs straightaway and in the future, and infraEnterprise proved a perfect fit. We are absolutely confident that we made the right decision in choosing Infra."

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Infra provides ITIL Service Management and Help Desk solutions including Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Release Management, Service Level Management and Availability Management software.