An iconic catchphrase attributed to the world’s number one fast food restaurant, Would you like fries with that?, seems rather arbitrary. It’s as if the McDonald’s marketing department decided off hand to have their customer associates begin asking one simple question with the hope of improving service quality.

Well, according to business analysis, that’s exactly what happened.

Knowing that a McDonald’s burger only tastes as good as the fries you have with it, the company’s formula was brilliant. One phrase, billions in additional revenue, and happy customers.

Wouldn’t you like a silver bullet for your user endpoint management system? The Would you like fries with that? for the IT world?

Well, perhaps you can with an automated and unified endpoint management solution. Such a simple approach to UEM seems like the McDonald’s value prop—too good to be true. Can you really experience the following benefits with automation?

Let’s take a look at how service quality and compliance can be improved:

1. Reduce fines and penalties

With the complexity of today’s environments, ensuring compliance from an IT perspective can become incredibly complicated, resulting in fines/penalties. Change, Release, and Configuration Management improve compliance and governance with: change and release templates and workflow that ensure separation of duties and oversight; and multi-level approval assignment to streamline change approvals and provide detailed audit trails.

The sample organization was able to reduce fines by one fine per year and the cost per fine by 10 percent, with an impact of $110,000 in annual cost savings.

2. Improve service quality by increasing service desk agent motivation and productivity

When call centers are outfitted with hardwired/land-line phone systems, it results in very little mobility or choice of work location for the service agents, essentially keeping them at a single desk in a single room all day. Voice Solutions allows service desk agents a great deal of flexibility in work arrangements. The software-based system doesn’t require agents to be stationed at a hardwired phone all day, allowing them to take calls from various locations, including tele-commuting. In addition, call overflow can be handled easily by having more agents sign on, as there is no constraint on the number of phones available.

The sample organization witnessed a five-percent improvement in overall service desk agent productivity, with an impact of $70,000 in annual revenue gains.

3. Reduce the risk of exposure to hacking and malware

Ineffective patch management can expose an organization to security compliance risks such as hacking and malware, which often target weak points of operating systems and applications. Ivanti enables a high level of automation for all phases of patch management, from identifying vulnerabilities in the network and selecting relevant patches, to quality control and rules-based implementation. Automated searches provide a complete overview of threats.

The sample organization reduced the time per patch deployment by 80 percent and the exposed vulnerabilities still affecting machines by 50 percent, with an impact of $171,600.

4. Reduce time spent transferring data between systems

When the IT service and endpoint management systems are not integrated, it can result in users having to wait a long time to have software installed, as the process would often contain a number of manual steps to enter and pull the needed data from the two separate systems. Combining the IT service management and endpoint management systems allows requests that require information from both systems to be handled much more quickly, as no human interaction is needed in transferring the information from one system to the other.

The sample organization was able to reduce the time spent transferring data and requests between systems by 95 percent, with an impact of $168,700 in annual productivity improvements.

5. Improve overall customer service/end-user uptime and customer satisfaction

Interrupted business processes can significantly impact employee productivity and satisfaction. And given the complexity of today’s IT management challenges, the risk that service disruptions could occur is considerable.

IT Service Management allows for the measurement of actual service-delivery quality against established benchmarks and availability metrics for every component within a service. Robust analytics help to determine where fine tuning will improve and transform the overall business service, so that productivity, performance, and quality can be optimized. In addition, Endpoint Management works across all areas of desktop and server management to reduce the amount of downtime incurred by end users, whether it be from waiting for new applications and upgrades installed, re-setting their preferences once an upgrade is complete, having vulnerabilities removed, or other issues and trouble that can arise. This reduced downtime increases end user productivity and satisfaction significantly.

The sample organization improved overall end-user productivity due to better uptime and customer service, with an impact of $140,000 in annual revenue gains.

With Ivanti, we enable you to improve service quality and compliance—a true Would you like fries with that? value, where with the power of unified automation, your end user is happy and your organization securely compliant.

To look back at the other two value props associated with an automated and unified IT solution, check out the other blogs in this series:

And to see how the Ivanti Service Manager solution could help your organization, download the full whitepaper here.

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