4,000 UK employees

45,000 customers

2,500 offices

Product: ITSM

Customer Since: 2017

With over 4,000 UK employees and a thousand vehicles on the road delivering food and ingredients to over 45,000 customers, Bidfood is a familiar name across the UK. Service is at the heart of its success, ensuring that customers have access to unrivalled food choice coupled with the reassurance that deliveries will arrive exactly when needed. There are over 2,500 office and remote employees who have an account with IT, and rely on devices and systems from phones and laptops, to bespoke logistics applications to keep the wheels turning.

What Bidfood were looking to achieve:

Faced with an outsourced IT Service Desk, which was a cause of dissatisfaction for the employees at foodservice provider, Bidfood, the IT leadership team felt a significant change was needed to turn around the perception of IT along with providing a more personal service to its employees. 

Early in 2016, the business made the decision to undertake steps to bring the service desk back in-house. To successfully achieve this, Bidfood’s Head of IT Services, began looking for a proven software provider with which they could build a strong and lasting relationship. Sunrise’s ITSM SaaS offering was selected following demos and competitive analysis of ten vendors.

How Sunrise helped them achieve this:

Underpinned by the IBM Cloud infrastructure, Sunrise provides Bidfood with a flexible ITIL-based platform to log incidents and implement both problem and change management processes, as well as an easily adaptable, user-friendly Self-Service portal.

“Our company mantra is ‘Service Excellence’, whoever the customer, and we wanted that personal touch from our ITSM partner. We saw that Sunrise’s employees are really enthusiastic about the company and hugely experienced. That made our decision very straightforward – Sunrise is just the right partner for us. Adopting the SaaS model means we don’t have to worry about release cycles or server management either, as it’s all managed by Sunrise,” said Bidfood's Head of IT Services.

Gaining employees’ acceptance of  self-service from day one was critical, and although asking for feedback on IT services can open a huge can of worms, especially when frustrations are already known, Bidfood’s approach has always been to bite the bullet and ask. Friendly ‘IT Champions’ across departments were involved early on with visualising the design of self-service and its key steps, gaining buy-in across the non-technical areas of the business. Prior to launch day, the switch to the in-house team and the portal was promoted across key office areas with posters alongside the companies Intranet and email promotions, making a splash to encourage use of the new approach.

The results

The team is now overachieving against its SLA sat between 95-98% of target and customer satisfaction hasn’t dropped below 98% for over 12 months, at which many would be content to sit back, but for Bidfood there’s always scope for better. Improved response and communication via the in-house team has had a knock-on effect on user behaviour too.

As a result of IT’s customers having more confidence in the outcome, selecting a call’s priority has seen a big change. With the bar now set at ‘please only phone us only if you cannot work – otherwise use self-service’, the team now only receives around 30 ‘phone calls a day, when it previously received 150 plus – with everyone logging calls via self-service unless they have an urgent requirement. Similarly, those classed as ‘major incidents’ have dropped from 10-15 per monthly period to just 1 or 2, some months achieving none at all. The consequent refocus has in turn freed up IT to use its time more effectively to progress other key work with more agility and overall problem management to reduce call volumes significantly The strategy has clearly paid off in employees’ eyes too, a recent customer service survey gaining a big thumbs up for the service desk: “quick & professional”, “always assist us in minutes”, with 100% positive feedback.