Do check signers have significant pain?
- Understand pain points of CIO/VP Customer Service
- Significant pain must exist for senior management to sign a check
- Giva White Papers will help you "listen" for pain statements
- Tell vendors your pain. Otherwise, they will ignore you
Are funds approved and set aside?
- Check in with CIO or VP Customer Service
- Don't invest time until given iron clad assurance that funds are available
- Determine what you are already paying for application maintenance
- Find a cloud based replacement product for less money than annual maintenance
Learn latest IT service desk or customer service best practices.
- Prepare to ask vendors tough questions with confidence
- Prod and poke at vendors...you lead the questioning
- Acquire best practices fluency: first call resolution, service level agreement compliance, root cause analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, KPIs/metrics, dashboards, etc.
- Subscribe to Giva Blog & review Giva White Papers. Join "Linked In" groups, industry associations and user groups
What are problems with current call tracking system?
- Hire consultants/technical experts, if necessary
- Call vendor CEO; list of issues ready to send.
- Proposal to fix? Cost, timeline, guarantees
- Is fixing less expensive vs. buying a new application
What are feature needs/requirements?
- Obtain feedback from all stakeholders; prioritize the list
- Use Giva's Needs Assessment Tool as a starting point
- Check signers like a rigorous quantitative analysis
- Share requirements openly with short list of vendors
Ask vendors tough questions early and often.
- Early on share complex "must have" & "deal killer" requirements to eliminate vendors
- Ask for an estimated price quote. Is it in your budget ball park?
- Ask for customer case studies and references
- Poke and prod, listen carefully, get it all in writing
What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of all vendors?
- Calculate TCO of all vendors for applies-to-apples comparison
- Acquisition costs only 30% of TCO over 5 years according to Gartner Group
- Ongoing lifetime costs vary significantly between vendors
- Compare cloud vs. on premise hosted software licenses
What are important license agreement terms?
- What happens if stop paying annual maintenance?
- Arbitration clause - inexpensive means of recourse
- SLAs for product support & reports to measure SLA compliance
- Termination clauses
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download the case study 
Art.com
Art.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty Images, the largest international provider of visual content in the world for design, broadcast, and new media customers. Art.com has more than 2,400 employees working in offices in more than 50 countries.
"Giva eHelpDesk has the same functionality as any of the other enterprise-class products, but our set-up only required about a week. The reliability is excellent. We've had 100 percent uptime without any problems."
Don Fosen
Chief Information Officer
Art.com
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Results
Art.com chose Giva for a solution to track and reduce software quality issues for its continually evolving e-commerce Web site, as well as to manage its internal IT help desk.
The Giva Service Management Suite™ provided Art.com with:
- One week set-up, customization, and deployment
- Self-service employee Web portal to log service requests
- Easy-to-learn solution that allowed Art.com IT professionals to get up to speed quickly
- Enterprise-class features and functionality at a significantly lower total cost of ownership
- 100 percent uptime without any problems
Challenge
Art.com needed a solution to track and reduce software quality issues and help improve its customers' experience, as well as an internal IT help desk that would allow employees to log and monitor the status of their own service requests.
Solution
Giva eHelpDesk™
Giva eCustomerService™
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