Leading regional housing association Curo is focused on its mission of providing great homes to its customers across the South West of England. Enabling its 550 staff to work efficiently, ensuring that they are able to focus on customers and their needs is vital, particularly as many employees are mobile. With Sunrise ITSM enabling comprehensive and cost-effective IT support, Curo‘s users benefit from simplicity, with the control and flexibility to easily change how the platform operates to meet evolving business needs.

Opening the door to easier support!

Curo’s existing service management software – Hornbill’s Supportworks – was holding the organisation back. It wasn’t flexible enough to meet its needs, was difficult to operate and failed to provide the functionality that Curo required. Consequently, Curo carried out a full research and tender process in 2014, shortlisting four vendors and choosing Sunrise Software’s IT Service Management (ITSM) platform.

“With Sunrise how we operate the service desk is very much in our hands – while there’s lots of training available and support is excellent, we find configuring and changing the system simple. We can tinker with it ourselves – it really is configurable, flexible and cost-effective, giving us the ability to make continuous improvements so support is as seamless for users as possible. With Sunrise we can help Curo grow and ensure staff can get on with their jobs, even as the business and its needs change”.

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Read their story below:

Building on a platform for efficiency
Leading regional housing association Curo is focused on its mission of providing great homes to its customers across the South West of England. Enabling its 550 staff to work efficiently, ensuring that they are able to focus on customers and their needs is vital, particularly as many employees are mobile. With Sunrise ITSM enabling comprehensive and cost-effective IT support, Curo‘s users benefit from simplicity, with the control and flexibility to easily change how
the platform operates to meet evolving business needs.

A housing association and house builder based in Bath, Curo is one of the largest landlords in the South West of England. It provides high quality homes and support services to more than 25,000 customers in over 13,000 homes. As well as renting properties, it has a growing 
construction arm, working to build hundreds of new homes every year. As a housing association Curo has no paid shareholders, so is focused on using its profits to re-invest into its mission of providing great homes. Ensuring that its technology is effective and efficient is central to the business, and Curo’s service desk, headed by Phil Bex, supports 550 staff, some based in
its 20 offices and others mobile tradespeople providing services to its properties.
“We’re responsible for looking after over 1,000 devices, including phones, PCs and Chromebooks across the company,” says Phil Bex, Service Desk Manager, Curo. “Our aim is to keep our users happy, helping them to focus on Curo’s key mission of providing great homes to the people of the South West.”
However, in 2014, Curo’s existing service management software was holding the organisation back. It wasn’t flexible enough to meet its needs, was difficult to operate and failed to provide the functionality that Curo required. Consequently, Phil carried out a full research and tender process in 2014, shortlisting four vendors and choosing Sunrise Software’s IT Service Management (ITSM) platform. “We wanted a service management platform that combined ease of use with flexibility, as it was vital that we could configure it ourselves to personalise it, as the
organisation evolved,” says Phil. “Given our focus on delivering our core social purpose around housing, it also had to be cost-effective for us to buy. Sunrise ticked all these boxes and we remain extremely pleased with both its functionality and flexibility.”

Opening the door to easier support
Sunrise was initially deployed within the service desk  organisation, with 14 users split into three teams, looking after the service desk, infrastructure and application support. While all teams share a knowledge base, each has its own queue within Sunrise, with in-built SLAs to ensure that end users receive a fast, effective response within three hours. Over 44,000 tickets have been raised since Sunrise went live in 2014, with usage growing and 10,500 raised in 2018. Around half of inbound tickets come through email, with the remainder being submitted through the Sunrise Customer Portal, the phone and face-to-face. “As many users are not technical, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to log a problem, hence giving them a variety of options,” adds Phil. “A lot of queries are from mobile users around password resets, as
they normally use single sign-on, meaning they don’t need to remember them until they have to be changed. Dealing with requests quickly and effectively is key to our success. Feedback has been consistently high, with a satisfaction rate of 98.4%, showing that users really value the service we deliver to them.” The Sunrise Customer Portal, which went live in 2015, provides a ‘one stop shop’ for both end users and the service desk team. It includes an asset register of
all devices assigned to a member of staff, as well as providing an up to date view of any outstanding tickets. The asset register functionality within Sunrise also helps Curo to track devices from when they are bought, through their lifecycle to final disposal, providing a full
audit trail for regulations such as WEEE.

Building support across the business
Since Sunrise went live, Curo has been able to extend  the platform to other departments. The facilities management team now use it to log requests from employees, such as replacing office equipment, while the HR team is running onboarding through the platform. All new starters are registered via Sunrise, ensuring that they receive the right devices and technology for their role, making the set up process smooth and straightforward. Building on Sunrise’s asset  management capabilities, a future plan is to log all tools on mobile tradespeople’s vans via the platform. That will ensure that employees know exactly what they have been issued with, and
ensures that all necessary regular checks (such as PAT testing for drills and electrical equipment) and safety certification for tools such as ladders are flagged when they are due.

Making service simple
The Curo service desk team see Sunrise as both flexible and  supportive for their daily work. As Sam Maggs, a new member of the team says, “What stands out is that the dashboard shows everything in one place – we have a register of devices, knowledge and contact details. You don’t need to switch between screens, and it is really simple and easy to use, with a modern interface that was very straightforward to learn.” Phil concludes, “With Sunrise how we operate the service desk is very much in our hands – while there’s lots of training available and support is excellent, we find configuring and changing the system simple. We can tinker with it ourselves – it really is configurable, flexible and cost-effective, giving us the ability to make continuous improvements so support is as seamless for users as possible. With Sunrise we can help Curo
grow and ensure colleagues can get on with their jobs, even as the business and its needs change.”