How Vitality UK achieved 50% cost reduction by switching from ServiceNow to Xurrent

“Xurrent came in, and they just blew us away; it was really good. We did a comprehensive RFP with around 1000 questions per provider, and UK Xurrent partner Revo and Xurrent turned out to be a great fit for Vitality. Everyone was talking the same language. Xurrent only needed to spend 20 minutes on the demo. It is the simplicity of it that allows people to use it. What we try to offer our customers is a simple process that is easy to understand. The Xurrent tool just slotted straight in.”

Dave Kelsall, SIAM Lead at Vitality

ServiceNow was no longer working for Vitality UK (Vitality), a health, life, and (recent) car insurance provider that offers rewards and incentives for healthy lifestyle choices.

The platform couldn’t quickly and efficiently deliver everything Vitality needed. It was too slow to respond to changing service demand, and licensing and resources were too expensive.

As Dave Kelsall, Vitality’s SIAM Lead, explained, “We are driving the experience for our members. We want to offer that same experience to our staff and people who interact with IT.”

One of Vitality’s differentiators is how it uses incentives to reward customers for making positive lifestyle choices. Its shared value model is based on the idea that when clients make healthier choices and reduce their risk, both the client and the company benefit. 

Vitality is based in the UK, with head offices in London and Bournemouth and a contact center in Stockport. It has over one million members and employs around 3,000 people. In addition, Vitality works with many franchises across the UK.

Vitality wanted to automate and improve processes across the company further and not restrict itself to what its previous ITSM tool offered. It was looking for a state-of-the-art SIAM solution that would meet its growing service needs and enable them to add additional accounts and services in no time for a reasonable price.

Another primary requirement: Enable Vitality to collaborate with various people and departments across — and outside — the organization to become a proper enterprise service management (ESM) solution.

After a thorough RFP process …

… they chose Xurrent.

This after evaluating Ivanti, Cherwell, and ServiceNow.

Dave and his team were impressed, to say the least:

“Xurrent came in, and they just blew us away; it was really good. We did a comprehensive RFP with around 1000 questions per provider, and UK Xurrent partner Revo and Xurrent turned out to be a great fit for Vitality. Everyone was talking the same language. Xurrent only needed to spend 20 minutes on the demo. It is the simplicity of it that allows people to use it. What we try to offer our customers is a simple process that is easy to understand. The Xurrent tool just slotted straight in.”

Dave also loved Xurrent’s ability to implement and adapt quickly and provide an attractive and flexible pricing and licensing model << both considerable selling points.

By switching from ServiceNow to Xurrent, Vitality reduced its cost by 50% — and that included licensing and work with one of our implementation partners, Revo, a team Dave can “call at all times and handle everything for us. That, to me, is an absolute bargain. We definitely get value for money.”

90 days: from contract signature to full implementation

Fast implementation and time to value are things we pride ourselves on here at Xurrent.

Vitality got to experience both.

The entire process took just three months, from signing the contract to going live.

Per Dave, the “implementation went smoothly, and the collaboration with Xurrent partner Revo was great.”

“It was amazing,” he continued. “In three short months, we replaced what took us six years of work with ServiceNow to achieve. There was no negative  impact on the customer, the internal, or the external staff.”

Vitality was really amazed at what they accomplished over such a short period. Dave was incredibly impressed with Xurrent’s ability to scale, a “big difference” compared to the ServiceNow days … slow delivery, took months (vs. weeks with Xurrent) to add new services, etc.

Integrations have been an invaluable aspect of the partnership

Automation through integration is one of the key Xurrent benefits for Vitality.

Integrating Xurrent with other business-critical applications is easy and can be done quickly — much faster and more agile than the previous platform.

Vitality uses microservices to support internal DevOps teams. Its integration of Dynatrace to monitor and manage these microservices is essential. Xurrent, with the help of partner Revo, played an important role in ensuring this integration was successful.

Other integrations include those with strategic partners, HR system Success Factors, AWS, Active Directory, InTune, SCCM, and SailPoint.

Training was minimal

As Dave shared, little training was necessary* because “Xurrent is so easy to understand and work with, very intuitive.”

Dave admitted he had never gone through the training and still feels quite proficient. 

*30 or so IT people completed the official training while the others leveraged the Xurrent training videos.

All the wins

Automation. Automation. Automation.

According to Dave, automation is one colossal win. In his own words, “The benefit is in automation; we can now automate everything. The integrations are key for me. This has given us a true shift-left. Everything ends up with the right service desk people. That flow, that automation, works brilliantly for us.”

The customer experience has been much improved. Pushing services into the structure that Xurrent provides means that Vitality can accelerate the delivery and move them off shared mailboxes, delivering benefits to their customers quickly.

“Xurrent simplifies everything. We can add systems whenever we like. Service catalogs are living documents. If you need extra services, you can request them. I always say: all you need is a shopping bag because the complete shop is underneath.” 

FUN FACT: Vitality even uses Xurrent to manage everyday business resources, such as booking a hot desk. This capability was built within a week and proved especially useful during the “return to office” phase, post-COVID. From vaccination checks and confirmation of negative tests to reserving a hot desk, all managed in Xurrent.

Xurrent is easy, advanced, and complete.

Xurrent is a service and operations management company for modern enterprises. Our platform powers frictionless service transformation to improve your business. Easy. Advanced. Complete.

Easy

One-third of Vitality employees are specialists in one area or another, meaning that around 1,000 of the 3,000 employees use Xurrent.

 Why? The platform’s simplicity means more people use — and like — Xurrent. 

Our unique built-in trust system makes connecting multiple organizations within or across companies effortless.

Vitality took advantage of these trusts, providing Vitality access to third parties to log tickets directly. “Pushing it out to those teams and letting them handle those tickets themselves was a bit of a culture change, but everyone quickly saw the benefits,” shared Dave.

Advanced

The Xurrent platform helps organizations boost productivity and accelerate value.

Since implementation, Vitality has noticed a “tremendous” improvement in processes. The team gets the ticket to the proper resolver (specialist) nearly every time. Help desk calls have also dropped thanks to its new proactive approach to services.

Vitality’s strategy also includes making Xurrent users even more self-sufficient. Currently, close to 70% of issues are solved using the Self-Service portal. The goal is to continue driving self-service by structuring data and improving knowledge management.

Dave also sees some of the most significant efficiency gains, thanks to its end users’ greater understanding of its services and our service catalog. The team can now offer its customers the right services, sync with their needs, and resolve tickets more quickly.

Complete 

Xurrent offers extensive functionality across HR, Sales, Finance, Marketing, and IT. Having all of the major functions of an organization working within the same platform in perfect synchronicity has been working quite well for Vitality.

What started as an ITIL-based tool quickly became a “full-blown ESM tool,” much faster than Dave had anticipated.

Security and Operations
Group Risk and Compliance
IT
HR
Facilities Management
Vitality franchises*

All use Xurrent. 

*The franchises Vitality works with for its investment products are “very demanding,” so it’s essential they receive swift responses to tickets; otherwise, they just go somewhere else. 

“Being able to use Xurrent across the enterprise allows us to be much more agile for our customers,” says Dave, “driving our proactive servicing model. It also helps with our SIAM model — seeing what our suppliers are doing. Finally, we can leverage SLAs and XLAs to see how we, as a business function and deliver value to our customers.”

The future: further optimization

As the partnership between Vitality and Xurrent grows, the team plans to review ways to optimize the customer experience further… ideally through proactive servicing — understanding customer needs before they even know they need them.

Xurrent, according to Dave, is the perfect platform for this growth: “I never worry about the Xurrent tool. I know it can do anything. We just have to get our process right.”

Dave would recommend Xurrent (and one of our implementation partners, Revo) to companies looking to future-proof ESM. 

“We are 100% satisfied with Xurrent, and we only see it growing as a partnership.”

We look forward to it all.