– How Green Mountain’s customer portal improves the customer experience
Green Mountain’s Customer Portal, based on ServiceNow, is an important part of the day to day co-operation with our customers. This is the portal where customers log in to place orders, to ask for help/assistance or to find relevant information in our knowledge base. It is a critical tool to obtain first-class customer service and quality management – and the customers love it too.
Since the very beginning, Green Mountain has been dedicated to the “ITIL way of thinking”. (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) ITIL is a structured framework for quality assurance of delivery, operation and support within the IT sector. The IT Service Management system, ServiceNow, is what we use to manage this on a daily basis.
Multifactor authentication process
All our customers receive a log-in to the system where they must perform a multifactor authentication process to access. “This was enabled for security reasons, but it was also a wish from our customers. They often have critical information in the system and require a high level of security”, says Knut Erlend Haus, Security and Compliance Manager in Green Mountain. He was the person responsible for the implementation of the system and knows it well. “We would like most inquiries to be handled in this system. This way we can ensure a rapid response and quality of the delivery.” Haus continues.
The three sections of ServiceNow”.
What do you want to order?
When logged in, the system is divided into three sections: Order something, Get help and Knowledge base. In the first part people can place orders for different products or services. For instance, “Smart hands”-services, cleaning services, goods delivery or different types of physical products, like cables. The most common order is actually “request for access”. In Green Mountain we place a great emphasis on security, and therefore enforce a strict access control. Only authorized administrators can request access for their employees, and when access is granted it is only for a limited time and for specific areas. Furthermore, access to the data centre facility is secured with biometric identification systems, video surveillance and mantraps. “We have a complete overview of people entering and leaving the sites at all times. The customer receives a monthly access report but can also request an immediate report of access activity at any time.” Haus explains.
Get help fast
In the Get help section, the customer can create an inquiry, report a problem or a safety/quality issue. The issue will be delegated to the right person and the customer will be notified of progress. “This systematic approach also helps us report on developing trends and is a basis for our analysis and quality management work.”, says Runar Espeland, the Service Manager in Green Mountain.
Everything in one customer portal
The final section of the system is the Knowledge Base where you will find instructions, monthly customer reports, service descriptions and so forth. Access to these documents is based on the user’s assigned role in the system. Through the customer portal the customer can also access the Green Peak Report. This is a dashboard solution giving the customer a real-time view of the environment in the data room; measured power usage efficiency (PUE), temperature, humidity and O2 level. In addition, the customer receives detailed historical data on power consumption, PUE, CO2 footprint and data room environment. It is a huge benefit for the customer to have everything gathered in ONE portal: customer orders, customer reports SLA, power bill, customer incidents and change process. This also means that the customer has full documentation of all their orders and cases over time.
Customer feedback drives development
Green Mountain performs an annual customer satisfaction survey and has always received high scores. “We believe our systematic focus on quality and service management is one of the main reasons for this. From the start we implemented both the philosophy and the systems to back it up. ServiceNow is used consistently and with the customer feedback, system data analysis and our own experience we can further develop it.” Espeland explains. New functionality such as maintenance calendar, service messages and several new automated processed are in development.
“When we first started to implement the system, we created a pretty complicated process map as a basis for the set-up. I am very proud to see that it is working and that our customers highly appreciate it.”, Haus concludes.