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With improved workflow and automation, the team has decreased both response time and resolution time by 50% – transforming the IT Service Desk.
The platform has reduced the time it takes to onboard a new employee from days to just a few hours using automation and workflow to facilitate.
The no-code platform makes it easy to quickly adjust or create a new workflow, automation, or integration – from basic escalation to complex processes.
Industry: Financial Services
End-users: 500
Previous System: Homegrown
Financial services organization, AgSouth Farm Credit, headquartered in Statesville, North Carolina is driven by top customer service and employee engagement, while meeting strict federal compliance standards. Its Business Solutions and IT service teams must deliver timely and effective service to employees and customers — as a failure to do so would be costly for the business, from dollars to an equally costly lack of efficiency/performance.
“AgSouth provides loans to farmers, families, and rural communities in our tri-state footprint. The types of loans that we offer are overseen by several regulators. If during the loan process, we answer a question incorrectly or miss a key deliverable date, not only could we be fined, but we could also impact the financial needs of the end customers that we serve,” says Director of Business Solutions Rebecca Wood.
Using the Velentix platform for IT and enterprise service management helps Wood and her colleagues provide fast and reliable service in support of organizational goals. Since moving to Velentix, the Business Solutions and IT teams have not only improved their response times in answering peoples’ questions and resolving IT issues, but they have also standardized the quality and consistency of responses that employees receive. The platform also helps AgSouth team members manage complex projects which include many moving pieces and multidepartment engagement requirements.
“Velentix has been a game changer for us in making sure we’re providing the kind of timely, exceptional service that’s needed to support a large employee base from our relatively small department,” Wood says.
AgSouth Farm Credit is an agricultural lending cooperative serving 147 rural counties across the Carolinas and Georgia. With $6 billion in assets under management and 500 employees in about 60 locations, AgSouth provides loans to farmers for land, farming needs, equipment, crop insurance, leasing, and other key services.
The regulations that AgSouth faces are typical for the financial industry. “We have to be able to provide loan decisions or disclosures within a certain number of days,” Wood explains. “There are many timelines that are set in stone, and if you miss those, you not only could be fined, but you could also impact your customer’s closing date and damage the reputation of our strong organization.” So, if an employee has a question on how to do a task or is having trouble logging into a particular software program, they need the issue resolved promptly.
Improved ticket triage is improving response and resolution times by 50% each.
The team is now onboarding employees in a few hours versus several days.
Highly regulated environments benefit from no-code ITSM/ESM platforms with enterprise integration and automation. Quickly build, adopt, evolve and deploy workflow to streamline operations.
Prior to Velentix, the organization was using a homegrown solution to manage its IT and enterprise services. As the cooperative was preparing for a merger with Carolina Farm Credit, Wood and her colleagues realized this bespoke solution would not be sufficient to handle the volume of technical and practical questions that employees were sure to have in the wake of the merger.
“Mergers bring a lot of varying impacts to different departments, and communication is always a challenge,” she notes. Half of the organization’s employees were going to have a new email address, and there would be many questions about new policies, procedures and technologies that were unfamiliar to essentially all staff members.
As they were looking for an IT Service Management (ITSM) platform that could help, Wood and her business solutions team were invited by a neighboring Farm Credit Association to see Velentix in action.
“We immediately saw from the demo that it would have a fantastic impact here, and moved forward quickly to implement it,” she says. “Velentix was incredibly responsive in helping us deploy the tool on a faster track than usual, and we went live with the tool just as we went live with the merger.”
With the assistance of the Velentix services team, AgSouth launched the platform with a fully functioning help desk, which can be attributed to one of the reasons the merger went so smoothly, according to Wood.
“Kudos to the Velentix team,” Wood says. “We had several technical questions, and they were answered immediately. We had a phenomenal facilitator to get things set up, which made the process easy. We were able to get the big pieces in place quickly, which led to rapid buy-in—not only from our users but also our senior-level executives, who immediately saw the tool’s benefits at work.”
Business Solutions Analyst Tonja Walker credits the smooth implementation to the flexibility of the Velentix no-code platform.
“I appreciate that we were able to evolve on the platform,” she says. “We started with the basics and then let the product help us advance, grow and adapt.” Walker has built customized workflows and automation for managing various types of services within Velentix. For instance, an onboarding/offboarding workflow streamlines the process of getting a new employee set up with the right network permissions and technology and canceling their access when they leave the organization.
The required permissions and signoffs are routed automatically throughout each department to ensure rapid completion. And once an employee has been assigned a device, the IT team can keep track of its status automatically through the Velentix asset management module.
“Onboarding a new employee had previously taken several days to complete all of the steps, and now we can complete this process in a few hours,” explains Walker.
The system’s automated workflows ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner. If someone does not respond to a request right away, it is escalated up the chain to keep fulfillment moving forward.
“Whenever there are questions, we need to connect clients with a subject matter expert quickly, because it matters to our bottom line,” Wood observes. “By having a tool to streamline those communications and escalate them whenever somebody may be out of pocket and cannot respond right away, we can make sure those questions get routed and resolved. They are not sitting and waiting in someone’s inbox.”
Beyond ensuring timely service, Velentix has helped AgSouth standardize how it answers users’ questions and provides support. “Previously, we would have everybody reaching out to the person they thought was the correct employee to answer their question, and that person would answer the question in the way they thought was best—but it might not have been the most correct answer, especially post-merger,” Wood says. Now, she says, questions are routed automatically to the appropriate person for the right response.
Velentix has also allowed AgSouth’s Business Solutions and IT teams to be more agile in responding to issues. It has ensured that everyone is communicating effectively and is on the same page. “By instituting proper ticket triage and automation, we are responding to tickets at least 50% faster and resolving tickets more than 50% faster,” explains Walker. “Plus, we then have a record of the answer which can be referred to easily for further questions. If we notice the same question coming in frequently, we can also develop a report/graph from Velentix to determine if there is a training, communication, or technical development need to assist staff in their understanding and lessen its recurrence.”
Due to the platform’s ability to manage all work – across tickets and projects, it has been instrumental in helping AgSouth undertake the large-scale digital transformation they are now working through to upgrade all systems to next-generation technologies over a three-year period. “Being able to track all of our projects in an easy-to-use product that gives everyone visibility into their status is huge,” Wood says. “Because everything is connected, we have a much better feel for where our projects stand and our resource capacity at any given moment. We have always been a project-centered organization, but now we can track that effort much better and make sure we are doing things in the most efficient ways possible. We can take the knowledge we have learned from one project and apply it to another. That is something we are extremely excited to see.”
AgSouth continues to find new ways of using Velentix to improve its IT and enterprise service and support. “Velentix has met us where we are at and is now advancing us forward through full digital transformation. The solution is so functional and easily customizable,” Walker concludes. “The sky’s the limit in terms of how we can use it, we love that it enables us to adapt and advance our operations without draining IT resources to do so.”
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