Client in focus: Thorsten Lüdtke, arvato mobile
German company arvato mobile (sic.), part of Bertelsmann AG, offers digital entertainment contents to customers around the world, together with innovative concepts and interactive applications. Their products range from mobile games and ringtones to movies and music. Thorsten Lüdtke, arvato mobile’s IT service manager, explains how TOPdesk is used within their organisation.
What is your name and job description?
My name is Thorsten Lüdtke, I am director of IT service management as well as leader of IT operations.
What does your company do?
We provide mobile entertainment. That means that we provide entertainment for the mobile phone; things such as wallpapers, ringtones, Java games, etc. Our main focus is business-to-business, but we also provide business-to-consumer services, like the website handy.de in Germany and tj.net in Italy. At the moment, we are the largest mobile entertainment provider in Europe.
How many callers does your organisation have?
Our organisation has about 250 people. Most of them, about 200 people, work here at our headquarters in Hamburg. There is one other location in Germany, in Güthersloh, and the other seven locations are spread across the world: London, Rome, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro…
How large is your service desk?
Our service desk has six people. We mainly register first line incidents. Second line incidents are passed on to either our development team or our content team, depending of the type of incident.
Which version of TOPdesk and which modules do you use?
For a year and a half now we have been using TOPdesk Professional ES, since we mostly support external customers. And as for the modules: apart from the standard modules Incident management and Configuration management we have Problem management, Change management, Event management and SLA.
For what purpose was TOPdesk implemented in your organisation?
Before we used TOPdesk, we had an open source application, but that did not function as well as we wanted. We could resolve the incidents, but the internal communication was not optimal. There was also no possibility of creating reports. We needed a professional solution for our service management and therefore introduced TOPdesk.
Which feature of TOPdesk appeals to you most?
One of the handy things in TOPdesk is the log-ins in the web-interface, allowing users to report their own incidents. In the past, they sometimes went directly to the development team or content team, so we were not aware of all the problems. Now, all problems have to be reported at the service desk, so we have a good overview of the incidents and the customer can follow the status of his or her incident.
What is an example of a call which occurs frequently?
We do not really have large operational problems. The problems reported by our external customers are generally small and vary in character. Any large problems that occur are mostly internal and short-term.
Future plans?
We want to implement the TOP-desk modules Reservations and Lease management and Project Management. We also plan on further professionalising our facilities management by registering all of our company items, and reconfiguring our communication – set up automatic email notification for example. The problem is however is that I am the only one responsible for configuring TOPdesk. At the moment, I don’t have enough time to properly do so, but I hope to get to that in the near future.
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