Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council

A unified service catalogue for the user and the service desk

Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council’s approach to service delivery was largely siloed before they welcomed TOPdesk into the organisation. This not only affected customer experience, but also back-end processes, efficiency, and interdepartmental collaboration.

We spoke to Danny Gibson, Infrastructure and Support Officer and Conleth Donnelly, ICT Services Manager, about their journey.

Where it all began

The council’s story originated in 2015 when the independent Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon councils became one entity. Their service teams merged, but their siloed working style continued. The users’ service experience across the council was fragmented, with different avenues to contact each team. TOPdesk’s solution? A unified service catalogue with a singular portal for every available service.

“When we put TOPdesk in we started thinking: What services do we provide? What is it that we do for the user?” says Danny. “Our self-service portal (SSP) was just two slides: log calls and review calls. By looking at what we do, we designed categories and subcategories related to our services and now have a self-service portal with a whole page of information that users can access in one place.”

Happy users with an online service portal

The council recently implemented a comprehensive service catalogue and portal, resulting in many benefits for users, such as:

• Visibility on the services available to them.
• An extensive knowledge base with articles and ‘how-to’ guides.
• Varied services, including staff surveys, data protection impact assessments, the ability to submit hardware and software requests, access to update personal active directory details, and more.
• Easy access to the portal through a link on the council’s intranet, with single sign-on.

The result of a new, comprehensive Self-Service Portal? Users are flocking to the portal, and their experience has skyrocketed. Around 14% of all calls are now logged via the portal compared to 0% before TOPdesk, as the council had no SSP.

A unified service catalogue = a unified organization

With siloed service delivery, comes siloed working. The independent service teams at Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council noticed their lack of collaboration both in the back-end and customer-facing aspects of their work, and wanted to change.

This is where TOPdesk came in, providing visibility and enabling multiple departments to work together, says Conleth: “The tool breaks down the barriers between teams, triggering conversations and making meetings more beneficial.”

Currently, the IT and Finance departments use TOPdesk within the council, however, plans to onboard Information Governance and Estates and Facilities Management are in progress. It doesn’t end there. Graphic design is the most recent team to notice what the tool could do for them: they added a request form on the portal for those needing a website or flyer design. “We want to do more integrations with different departments and push the SSP even more with our users. We bought TOPdesk because it’s not static, we have so much more scope that we can utilize,” continued Conleth.

By embarking on a journey to unify service departments and, ultimately, unify their entire offering in the service catalogue, Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon council are well on their way to becoming a unified organization.