Overview

Founded in 1976 and headquartered in London, UK, Travelex is a leading provider of currency exchange services. Trading in more than 90 currencies and 29 countries, the company operates a network of over 1300 ATMs, over1,500 branches and thousands of concessions in banks, supermarkets and travel agencies worldwide.

The challenge

With a major corporate reorganization under way, Travelex wanted to continue offering business users the high quality of IT support they had come to expect. With changes coming from all quarters, the service desk team needed to react fast to ensure that business users could perform their roles effectively.

Cherrie Pinner, Global IT Service Desk Manager at Travelex, explains: “Our service desk supports the entire business – a user base of 7,000 people and a software landscape of more than 600 mobile and desktop applications. We cover everything from the Microsoft Office suite to custom-built order processing systems.

“We wanted to empower our administrators to enhance our support processes in line with the changing requirements of the business. The challenge was that our previous support desk management software was essentially a black box, and we were heavily reliant on the vendor for modifications. As well as increasing our costs, this reliance on the vendor meant that changes were taking a long time to implement.”

Selecting a flexible solution

To solve the challenge, Travelex decided to replace the existing system with the LANDESK Service Desk solution.

“What impressed us most about the LANDESK solution was that it offered rich functionality at a cost-effective price point,” recalls Cherrie Pinner. “LANDESK Service Desk delivers all the benefits of our previous tools – including a self-service portal for our users, mobile application support and tight integration with our reporting platform – straight out of the box, and without the need to purchase additional modules.”

Fully aligned with Travelex’s ITIL-based approaches to IT service management, the LANDESK software enables authorised users to redefine key processes through an intuitive visual interface.

Cherrie Pinner adds: “Using LANDESK software to make workflow changes ourselves will help minimise our reliance on third parties, which could help cut our operational expenditure substantially.”

Supporting change

Travelex, working together with a team from LANDESK, deployed the Service Desk solution to drive its global IT support process. Today, more than 450 support staff use the LANDESK solution to manage fast resolutions to requests from the Travelex community – providing constant service levels as the business changes.

“The LANDESK team is currently helping us redefine key processes based on feedback we’ve had from the IT support teams, which will help make their work easier,” says Cherrie Pinner. “Ultimately, we intend to use the LANDESK tools to make process changes ourselves, which will help us to respond quickly to changing operational requirements.”

Streamlining support

Thanks to LANDESKService Desk, the support team can resolve common IT issues more quickly.

“Simple issues which can be resolved as soon as a support ticket is raised – for example, unlocking a user account – required our support teams to save and close the ticket, and then retrieve the ticket to close it,” says Cherrie Pinner. “With LANDESKService Desk, our teams can simply check ‘resolve on creation’, and the ticket is logged automatically without the need for additional manual processing. In many cases, LANDESK templates enable us to streamline incident resolution and enable our teams to work more efficiently.”

She continues: “The LANDESK solution opens the way for greater levels of automation in our support workflows. Currently, if a member of the business logs a request for a new piece of software, we work with the procurement team to confirm if the company owns a valid licence for the software or if we need to purchase a new one, apply the licence to the machine in question, and then update our back-end systems accordingly.”

Ready for the future

In the future, LANDESK Service Desk will enable Travelex to automate many of its workflows – from logging the initial request to updating records in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Processing licensing requests automatically will release the support teams from a large amount of time-consuming work, and enable them to drive service improvements in other areas.

Cherrie Pinner concludes: “Without a doubt, LANDESK Service Desk is easier to manage from an administration perspective than any other service desk management solution we have worked with. Looking to the future, we are planning to extend our LANDESK instance to cover our human resources and call centre departments – creating a single, centralised platform to help support teams in areas other than IT to get similar efficiency benefits.”