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Unqork Insider: Customer Management Platform

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Unqork has revolutionized ITSM systems with our latest launch, the Unqork Customer Management System. Here’s how our CRM improves efficiency, optimizes service, and reduces costs.

Built for Unqork by Unqork, the new Unqork Customer Management System (UCMS) is an IT management service super-app that helps us provide high-quality IT service for our clients and maximize efficiency. Here’s an inside look at one of our most exciting initiatives featuring insights from Bert Amadi, our Head of Platform Operations & Services and the architect behind UCMS.

What is ITSM? 

IT service management, also commonly known as ITSM, is the framework an enterprise’s IT team uses to administer and manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. It includes all of the discrete activities and workflows that support an application throughout its lifecycle and ensures that IT issues are resolved as quickly as possible to reduce downtime.

Effective ITSM speeds up incident resolution, minimizes risk, improves the customer experience, and leads to more reliable performance on the client-side. Did you know that effective and streamlined ITSM can also help enterprise tech teams improve? Customer management systems gather metrics in key areas like customer environment uptime and the average cost per support ticket so tech teams can see what matters at a glance. This data can then be used to improve processes, prevent future incidents from occurring by analyzing past trends, and power strategic initiatives. 

Challenges enterprises face when implementing ITSM systems

It’s clear that having a robust ITSM system is beneficial for clients and IT teams alike, but building one falls to the wayside far too often. Why? In Bert’s experience, one of the primary reasons why enterprises don’t prioritize implementing a high-quality ITSM system is because operations teams must always do more with less. “The challenge has always been getting individual department heads to agree that ITSM is a top priority against other business asks and the constraints we have with engineering. We have to pick and choose what we do, so a project like this never got off the ground and is dropped to the bottom of the priority list until an outage occurs.” 

“I’ve tried to build this tool in almost every single organization I’ve been in and it’s taken months, sometimes years to build it,” Bert notes. 

From a purely technical standpoint, building ITSM with code is also an issue. “The person building the ITSM system isn’t really an expert at ITSM, they’re just an expert at the coding,” Bert explains. “The ITSM expert has to set the requirements, which takes a while, and then they have to give it to the engineer who has to write the code. Then the engineer and the business analysis team have to make sure they’re in sync, then they have to deliver it to the QA team, but the QA team doesn’t know the code themselves, and so on. That’s where gaps happen. The farther you move down the chain, the more removed you are from the person who wrote the initial requirement. You end up delivering something that isn’t what the user wants just because information must be transferred from one person to another.”  

Unfortunately, situations like this are far too common. “I’ve tried to build this tool in almost every single organization I’ve been in and it’s taken months, sometimes years to build it,” Bert notes. With the power of no-code application development, Bert along with 2.5 other Unqorkers from his organization found a faster, more secure, more powerful, and affordable way to build this ITSM tool.

Inside the Unqork Customer Management System

The Unqork Customer Management System (UCMS) is a no-code super-app that revolutionizes ITSM. This platform gathers source data from the external systems customers use and consolidates them in intuitive dashboards for further analysis. You can view important metrics like the total number of clients being served, SLA achievement percentages, the average cost per support ticket, and much more. You can also examine how these metrics have changed over a set period of time to better observe trends, isolate any common issues, and personalize your service.

UCMS also makes it easier to provide best-in-class support. With a single click, you can drill down on specific platform and configuration changes that might be causing issues and roll them back just as easily. Your support team can spend less time wondering where the problem is, and more time resolving it as quickly as possible. 

What’s the most exciting aspect of our platform? “When you get a ticket request from a customer, you can see the previous history for that customer in terms of what they’ve done and what they’ve cost you in terms of operational support, hardware, and people. You can look at the data in UCMS and say, ‘Okay, this customer has been having an issue for the past two weeks and their ticket number is going up. How can I personalize their service? Am I meeting their SLA or is there something else I should be doing?’ UCMS gives you more personalized access to all of your clients that you just wouldn’t have with another tool.”

Thanks to the no-coding Unqork platform, Bert’s team built a robust ITSM platform — a project that would typically take at least 24 weeks using code — in only 3 weeks.

Since the launch of UCMS, we’ve seen a drastic drop in our ticket resolution time, and the numbers behind this platform are incredible. Thanks to the no-coding Unqork platform, Bert’s team built a robust ITSM platform — a project that would typically take at least 24 weeks using code — in only 3 weeks. That’s an 8x faster build! Also, we used the calculator function in UCMS to crunch the numbers and found that building an app like this using Unqork is 91% less expensive than doing so with code. Those are game-changing statistics! 

What’s Next for UCMS?

UCMS is an internal-only application right now, but eventually, Unqork clients will be able to purchase it for their own use. In 2022, we’re going to introduce command-and-control functionality so you can take more extensive corrective actions directly in UCMS and introduce both real-time and on-demand “What-If” scenarios. Soon you’ll be able to use UCMS to see what would happen to your costs if your customers doubled, for example, and use that analysis to make smarter resourcing decisions. Also, we’re leveraging more AI and prediction analysis based on historical data to make UCMS even more of a one-stop shop. Stay tuned for more exciting updates! 

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