The Importance of the Human Element in Managed Services
As the Managed Services market for Identity Management continues to grow and mature, any and all managed services companies should competently be able to resolve system issues, assist with break-fix operations, and have a general understanding of an IAM implementation.
These are the basics for a mature and efficient managed services program. But what makes a managed service stand out from the rest? Low ticket resolution times? Reporting capabilities? High levels of customer satisfaction?
Most managed services conversations focus primarily on incident tickets: how many tickets closed/resolved a month; average resolution times; service level agreements; etc. While those metrics and data are important, IDMWORKS believes that the “human element” is what makes us different. Our focus on business value and customer success sets us apart from other managed services providers.
Unique Approach to Identity Management
At IDMWORKS, we move beyond the mentality of “take a ticket/close a ticket” because that doesn’t address the human element of managed services. We understand that Identity Management needs to evolve over time, and that there will be days, weeks, and even months, that will strain your environment.
IDMWORKS recognizes this and injects the human element into each facet of our product offerings. From Sales working with each organization to ensure the solution is right-sized & purpose-built to meet your specific needs, to our assigned engineers who go above and beyond to anticipate our customer’s needs by identifying efficiencies, trends, and enhancements to improve your implementation.
Case Study: Transforming Challenges into Success
Here’s a recent example with a current client, a large financial institution, where we help demonstrate our commitment to quality and bring in “the human element” of IDMWORKS. The client had a goal of onboarding more applications, while aggressively tackling an expansive backlog of items.
Our Managed Services offering was onboarded to “keep the lights on” while the development team focused on their backlog. As more applications and features were deployed, more incidents were introduced into the environment. What was initially projected to be 70-90 tickets a month, quickly grew to nearly 200 tickets per month. Not a problem for us, being experts in the field, we accommodated the increase deftly. That’s not what made this special.
In our own unique way, we worked with the people in the managed service and delivery teams, to identify several paths for the engineering team to decrease the overall ticket count, while also making their environments more stable. Within one month of these recommendations being implemented, the ticket count went down from 184 to 96! Every month, we continue to evaluate all the tickets received for the month prior, separate them into separate categories, and compare those results to previous months to evaluate changes in overall ticket counts.
Once a trend has been identified, we evaluate the stories that were deployed in the sprints for that time frame and try to associate code deployments to ticket changes, to give us a lead on long-term solutions. Other times, we can pinpoint a single point of consistent failure for multiple issues, such as a timeout error every 3rd Wednesday at midnight during scheduled aggregation.
A little issue like that is easy to fix, and just sporadic enough that can go unidentified for months! But with the human element we bring to clients – one we can identify early and resolve.
Beyond Ticket Counts: The Value of Relationships in IAM
Anyone with a little common sense and a little passion can identify trends and suggest improvements, but there’s more to it than just tickets! It’s the human element. It’s the relationships and the trust that we build along the way. It’s knowing that when we work with you, you can rest assured that the work is not only going to get done, it’s going to be done right, and you will have a positive experience along the way.
Simply put, it’s about customer service. Identity Management is stressful enough, working with your Managed Services team shouldn’t be a part of that stress.
The IDMWORKS Difference: Matching Skills with Personality
So, what is this human element? While competency and skill set are our top priorities in all things, personality and compatibility are essential facets of our employment goals.
Understanding the nuances of a company’s culture and matching individuals who complement those nuances can be just as, if not more important, than skill sets alone. Understanding that we can’t interact with a government agency the same way as a hospital, not just from a standards perspective, but from the human element as well. We take these considerations into account when assigning people to customers.
From the primary resources who will be the main points of contact for our customers, all the way to the backup staff that is assigned, to assist at a moment’s notice when emergencies arise. That flexibility, paired with the expertise of our staff along with the exceptional human element we naturally provide, is a fundamental and critical point of ALL our service offerings.
IDMWORKS tries to build a relationship with the customer based on trust, openness, and honesty. If a customer environment is broken, IDMWORKS will fix it. If there is a better way for an internal customer process to work, IDMWORKS will offer suggestions for improvements. If there is something fundamentally wrong with an IAM system, we have to deliver the bad news to the customer. With the norm for communication becoming virtual meetings, emails, and sometimes instant messaging, it is sometimes easy to forget there is a person at the other end of the communication.
Our IAM team maintain these human interactions; turning the camera on for a virtual meeting, taking time to actually speak to our customers, and sometimes just having a good old-fashioned phone call helps keep relationships strong. We try to make sure that we build the service around the needs of the customer and that we build a team together with a mix of the right technical and social skills to ensure the smooth running of contracts.
Putting the Right People in the Right Place
Putting the right people in the right place not only provides a better quality of work, but it also provides better experiences while that work gets done. We offer more than just a vast technical skill set to assist our customers’ needs; we inherently bring top-notch customer service skills into every interaction we have, because that’s simply the right way to do business.
Conclusion: Commitment to Excellence
IDMWORKS goes beyond the traditional scope of IAM Managed Identity service by emphasizing the human element. Our approach is not just about resolving tickets or deploying technical solutions; it’s about building lasting relationships, understanding unique organizational cultures, and providing tailored, empathetic service.
As a leading Manage Identity Services Provider (MISP), we recognize that the success of identity management lies not just in the technology, but rather in the relationships we nurture and the personalized experiences we deliver. We’re proud to share this human-centric approach sets IDMWORKS apart, ensuring that our clients receive not only expert IAM solutions but also a partnership built on trust, understanding, and a shared goal of achieving excellence in identity management.
Author: Tommy Yung, IDMWORKS, Technical Operations Manager