St George

St. George

St. George, founded in 1861, is a city in southwestern Utah in the United States. It is the fifth-largest city in the state and, as of 2022, had a population of 108,535. 

Streamlining IT Service and Hardware Optimization in a Growing Community

SysAid was instrumental in the St. George IT team quickly achieving and exceeding their goals. This included a remarkable 90% improvement in software patch success rates in three months, onboarding automation, comprehensive asset tracking, and superior service to a diverse user base. St. George is now well-equipped to handle growing demands and ensure a seamless experience for both employees and residents. 

Due to their successful implementation, St. George wanted to deepen their partnership with SysAid by becoming Design Partners for SysAid’s new product, SysAid Copilot. This cutting-edge, generative AI tool enables admins to deliver exceptional and more accurate service, enabling them to get back into their flow of work, faster.

SysAid Copilot’s AI Chatbot swiftly offers tailored solutions 24/7 from organizational documents, knowledge base articles, and  historical tickets, ensuring hassle-free assistance with zero setup required. By simplifying issue resolution for end-users, the AI Chatbot was able to free up manpower for the St. George IT Team. Not only that, if a technician’s expertise is required, the AI Chatbot enables end users to submit tickets effortlessly with a single click from the conversation.

Furthermore, SysAid Copilot’s AI Emailbot sends users direct responses to their inboxes to assist in resolving their issues. This tool was instrumental in helping with initial low end-user adoption of AI, making it simple for end-users to submit their tickets via email as they were used to, while still enjoying the powers of SysAid Copilot.

Growing Pains

The city of St. George, one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the United States, faced significant challenges due to its rapid expansion and limited resources. Hardware and software were being purchased and implemented independently in each of the many divisions of the municipality. There was, therefore, no technology standardization or effective asset management. As a result, the IT team spent its time putting out a lot of fires and trying to provide continuity of service. This meant regularly delivering software patches manually and depending on users to execute them. 

St. George decided to address the issue, in part, by embarking on a five-year plan to fully refresh its entire inventory of desktop and mobile devices. This was a huge undertaking, as the IT team, with only three full-time employees, supports over 1,000 users, about 800 endpoints, and over 600 mobile devices. They are therefore continuously rolling out, replacing, managing and ordering equipment, alongside their day-to-day technical support activities. 

The absence of standardized processes and a reliable ticketing system was increasingly creating inefficiencies in IT support, asset management and hardware optimization. 

After evaluating several vendors, the St. George team found that SysAid was the only provider that met all their requirements. As Nathan Gleed, a Customer Support Representative for St. George, put it: “It was clear in our evaluation of vendors that the smart decision was to make a change to SysAid. It had everything we needed. It was almost too good to be true.”

Stepping Up Implementation

St. George needed to move fast on SysAid implementation, as their contract with their incumbent vendor was expiring. This meant there was not much room for error if service continuity was to be maintained. With such a small team, the city’s IT division knew SysAid support would be crucial before, during and after implementation.

“I’ve never seen an organization step up with the level of organization, commitment and resources SysAid brought to the project.”Jeffrey Brown Customer Support Manager

Proactive Efficiency

St. George has significantly reduced the time and resources needed for routine IT support and service. The SysAid platform provided the tools and centralization needed to automate ticketing, track and manage assets, and streamline the employee onboarding process.

SysAid allowed the IT team to be more proactive, which plays a key role in the plan to improve and standardize technology across the city’s many divisions. The team is  able to preemptively identify aging or problematic devices and equipment, saving time and increasing efficiency across the board. 

Additionally, as Design Partners, the St. George IT team was among the first in the world to enjoy all the benefits of SysAid Copilot’s generative AI-powered capabilities, while having direct influence over the direction of the product before it became generally available.

Automating Success with SysAid and SysAid Copilot

The St. George IT team uses SysAid to create and manage workflows for key process automations. This has included implementing software patches, employee onboarding tasks, and ticketing processes. The new workflow automation capabilities have enabled St. George to overcome resource limitations, save time, and meet increasing service demands.

Since using SysAid Copilot, the IT team at St. George has seen firsthand just how helpful generative AI can be both to their team as well as to their end-users. Not only have they seen a 20% improvement in MTTR but their end user adoption of the AI Chatbot has increased as well. 

“Those who are using SysAid Copilot have been impressed with the accuracy of the AI-driven responses and the assistance it provides.” says Nathan. 

SysAid Copilot also offers the team business analytics and comprehensive automated email reports through AI Insights. These weekly reports deliver a summary of KPIs, a comparison with industry benchmarks, and furnish recommendations and predictions for the upcoming reporting period. 

The reports have enabled the team to make informed decisions based on data and have empowered them to build a business case for which areas to focus on to elevate their quality of service management. The reports also include tips and tools to use to improve performance. “We love the business analytics aspect of it. Getting weekly reports that show different KPIs and how we measure up against an industry benchmark, really helps us to understand where to bridge the gap,” explains Nathan. “We can take that data to leadership and say we’re behind the ball here on X, Y, and Z so we need to do A, B, and C. So it gives us ammunition to go to leadership.”  

Human Resource Optimization

According to the IT leadership, obtaining funds for additional staff in city government is a challenge. The automation of routine processes that SysAid makes possible has enabled the city to optimize the use of its limited human resources in the IT division.

“With SysAid Copilot’s AI Chatbot end-users have been able to open their own tickets and get updates, which has decreased our call volumes and travel time” says Nathan. “With a small team, that saves us a lot of manpower.”

“It’s a big win for us because now I don’t have to dedicate staff for routine IT processes that we can do automatically.” Jeffrey explained

Future Challenges & Opportunities

The immediate next step for St. George is to move the entire employee onboarding workstream to be fully automated and managed by SysAid. Then, the IT division will begin looking at more processes that can be automated, with the goal of maximum optimization across IT service management. 

Part of the optimization process will be enhancing the self-service IT support portal for employees across the city. This will entail a cultural shift, according to IT leadership, as most employees are currently very comfortable physically visiting the IT office or calling in a request. 

Ultimately, the IT team seeks to share the benefits they have seen with SysAid and SysAid Copilot across the city’s many divisions,  integrating the various processes or ticketing systems into the service management platform. Using the self-service portal, the IT team can then create a main point of contact serving all city employees. 

Since they’ve successfully begun to free up time in their busy schedules for more urgent matters thanks to SysAid Copilot, the IT team aims to heighten adoption levels. “The expansion of the service and customer education will be my focus moving forward until SysAid Copilot is fully adopted and embraced,” says Jeffrey. “I am optimistic that we can fully realize the value of SysAid Copilot in our organization moving forward. There is enormous potential with this product and I am thrilled that we were engaged in the development and testing of this service.”