The idea of customer self-service has been around since 1833 when Percival Everett’s first self-service vending machines appeared in London, selling postcards. But when it comes to IT, many organizations find self-service daunting (though they agree it can be a path to increasing productivity and profits while reducing costs). Self-service, at its best, allows users to access resources and find solutions on their own without requiring time-consuming and costly assistance.
Here’s what your IT department looks like without it: the lack or minimal use of self-service means IT pays for tools and a helpdesk to address each task. Let’s take the example of getting a new employee hired and making the laptop ready for that corporate user. IT will have to receive a new system, image it with the correct software, and then ship it to a remote employee. The IT helpdesk is simultaneously getting many calls and service-related emails from everyone else in the company. To get a good idea of how much this is costing the organization, multiply your average cost-per-call by the total number of calls each month to get your direct monthly costs for end-user issues.
Now, imagine if you can reduce that number by 25%.
Organizations pay when they lose productivity. Let’s look at a conservative example: say the lack of self-service results in 1% less productivity for a $1M business. That’s $10K a year for a smaller business – and we can help you calculate your ROI for your own company.
Imagine what this means for billion-dollar global enterprises with 100K+ employees.
How Banyan Security simplifies self-service security
Take a look at how Banyan Security helps with self-service from day 1 of a new hire to when the employee is productively working day-to-day:
- Integration with MDM/UEM to deploy client: using Zero Touch Deployments means being able to get a new computer directly from a vendor like Apple and getting the client software installed quickly.
- Configuring Banyan to trust device certificates managed by your organization’s Device Manager: many organizations deploy device certificates to all managed devices using an enterprise Certificate Authority (CA), such as Symantec. You can configure Banyan to trust Device Certificates issued by your enterprise CA and distributed by your organization’s Device Manager.
- Global app availability via http://getbanyan.app/ or mobile app stores: many employees start off installing the Banyan app on their desktop and then add it to mobile as the need arises (available from Google Play and Apple App Store).
- Configuring continuous device posture assessment to ensure the device is running the other software that is needed. Continuous authorization via the Banyan solution ensures, for example, that the personal firewall is enabled, auto-updates for the operating system are turned on, and many other system-level capabilities are enabled and running smoothly.
- Enable remediation when the device goes out of compliance: go a step further to provide custom instructions letting your end users know exactly what to do when they experience an issue. Often, this guidance points to software that needs to be installed along with detailed, step-by-step instructions to walk through installation and configuration of software.
- Automated client log uploads to help troubleshooting issues: the end user may run a Health Check using the built-in Diagnostic Tools, or an admin can go into the Banyan Cloud Command Center (Admin Portal) and retrieve logs from the end user system.
- Configure service catalogs and service bundles: when a user logs into the Banyan app, Banyan lists all resources and applications for which the user is authorized. The user will never have to ask or guess, and they can add the ones they use most often to Favorites to make sure they are easily accessible from the Banyan app.
To make self-service easier for the administrators, Banyan’s Everboarding capability allows an admin to start many of the onboarding workflows that they may have initially used when configuring Banyan. This allows quick configuration of some of the more frequently used features.
Test-driving our product for free is one of the easiest ways to try our self-service capabilities for your own organization and see how it can reduce the cost of your IT overhead.
