The Solution
"I pay a lot of attention to customer reviews," says Caldwell, who found Vivantio via the pcmag.com website. At the last minute, she added Vivantio to her short list of vendors to evaluate and scheduled a demo for her team. The simplicity of the interface, reporting, and robust task management capabilities caught her attention immediately. "I wasn't expecting to be so impressed, honestly, but during that first demo, I put myself on mute and ran to a colleague's office to say, 'Are you hearing this?' It was really cool. We were very excited."
Beyond Vivantio's foundational commitment to above-and-beyond customer service—delivered by dedicated Vivantio employees—Caldwell and her colleagues zeroed-in on some of Vivantio's advantages that were a great fit for their needs, including:
- Being able to assign tasks to different people within the same ticket. Greenbrier would often require cross-team collaboration to resolve a complex issue, which Vivantio accommodates
- The ability to tie-in tasks to established workflows
- Robust—and easy-to-create—reporting capabilities
"We were impressed with Vivantio's feature set, and then the ability for our in-house team to configure the solution even further themselves was the icing on the cake," Caldwell says. "We wouldn't have to send in a ticket to make a little change."
The Greenbrier team noticed immediate improvement, especially in the user experience.
"It was such a nice change of pace to have something that just looked like an email instead of this complex form or job ticket type of thing," Caldwell explains.
Vivantio's reporting has allowed Greenbrier to use new KPIs to better understand why certain teams feel so busy—and how they can adjust their activity to improve service—especially to high-priority customers with strict Service Level Agreements.
Here again, Greenbrier's previous solution fell short for them. As Caldwell explains, "We weren't doing much reporting with Zendesk's canned suite of reports. They had a tool you could use to data dump, but figuring it out was difficult. Vivantio is so much more straightforward and actually useful."
Another unexpected advantage of choosing the Vivantio solution was a jump-started ability to support additional customer self-service efforts at Greenbrier.
" We first thought that [self-service] might be a nice-to-have-someday, but that day came sooner than we expected," explains Chris Bisnow, a Project Manager on the team who now serves as an internal ambassador as more service groups are evaluating and adopting Vivantio within Greenbrier.
Bisnow has been able to help bring new internal and external customers into dedicated self-service portals that give them access to custom-tailored information in one place.
"Now that we're looking at self service, our minds are racing with additional possibilities for reducing volumes and addressing routine issues that people can resolve themselves with just a little support," Bisnow says. "And I'm now getting people from other areas of the company asking me to tell them more about Vivantio because they think it will work for their areas. It's exciting to see it, and I think it says a lot about the product that we're getting the traction we are using this [organic adoption] approach."
Almost six months in, both Bisnow and Caldwell remain enthusiastic.
"Things change really slowly in the rail industry," says Caldwell. "But it's been a comparatively fast process to get other people excited about using Vivantio and seeing the potential. I don't think I'd be happy with any other system at this point."
