By the end of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was everywhere. Businesses were shut down, and many companies around the world were trying to figure out how to continue working remotely during the crisis.
At InvGate, we were not strangers to this. But we had a competitive advantage: a product that could make the whole difference to organizations that needed to adapt quickly and efficiently.
So, we decided to activate a COVID-19 Response Program and make InvGate Service Management available free of charge for any organization that requested it.
The result? 100+ organizations from multiple countries enrolled in the program. Here are some of their experiences.
InvGate's COVID-19 Response Program
During the pandemic, we offered our full cloud-based InvGate Service Management solution for free for 120 days to help organizations resolve any issues they were experiencing.
We put together a series of video tutorials for basic setup, encouraging organizations to kick off their configuration process in the Human Resources department.
Due to the tool's flexibility and the health situation, it was a no-brainer that employees needed an easy and efficient way to communicate with their HR colleagues, and vice versa, the HR department needed a channel to communicate with the workforce.
What Are HR Operations? HR Ops Definition, Roles And Strategies
COVID-19 Response Program results
Apex America
Apex America is one of the leading Customer Experience Digital Services companies in Latin America, with offices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, and Paraguay. It was already an InvGate customer pre-COVID-19 – using InvGate Service Management to manage its help desk and InvGate Asset Management to manage its IT assets.
Then, due to the pandemic, more than 5,000 Apex collaborators needed to move overnight from working in the office to working remotely from their homes. With the help of the free additional licenses for their InvGate solutions and the hard work of Apex's IT department, this was achieved in just four days.
Bilbao Makers
Bilbao Makers is a community of 3D printer enthusiasts in Euskadi (Basque Country, Spain) manufacturing PPE and respirator parts for the pandemic response. At the time, they had 600 3D printers scattered in their homes and shops.
Diego Maroto, one of its organizers, knew InvGate's products from personal experience and applied to participate in the program to support makers in setting up and operating the printers needed to build the specific parts needed for COVID-19. The machines need to be calibrated and tweaked specifically for the parts at hand.
Neenah Joint School District
In 2020, Neenah Joint School District — a highly rated public school district in Neenah, Wisconsin — served over 6,200 students and was a frontrunner in many areas, including academics, athletics, and the arts.
It was already an InvGate customer, but during the pandemic crisis, all of Neenah's students had to move to virtual classes. To help with this change in the education delivery model, Neenah extended its use of the InvGate Service Management tool — using additional free licenses obtained via the InvGate COVID-19 response program — to technically assist the parents of students in moving to and managing the new virtual education delivery tools.
Bryan VonDeylen, Help Desk Manager for Neenah Joint School District at the time, said, "I'm very happy with the solutions' ease of use and especially happy with InvGate's response to our feature requests and how quickly they're implemented."
"This ease of use and how quickly you can implement changes are why a tool like InvGate Service Management is needed during times of crisis. We needed to adapt the tool immediately. You can do this in minutes with InvGate Service Management and without professional services (as you might need to with other service desk tools)," he added.
Silvateam
Silvateam is a family business and a world leader in producing, transforming, and commercializing vegetable extracts, tannins, and their derivatives. Founded in 1854, it is headquartered in San Michele Mondovì, Italy.
In 2020, it operated in more than 60 countries worldwide and had a turnover of over 100 million euros. Due to the pandemic, part of the company's global workforce had to work remotely from their homes.
So, it applied to the Response Plan and got additional free licenses, so many types of requests related to the moving of employees to homeworking and any resulting incidents were submitted as tickets that were assessed and assigned to the corresponding service desk agent, according to their country.
"Silvateam needed an IT Service Management (ITSM) system because until now, all requests were handled informally, with us managing them without any criteria. Furthermore, we could not demonstrate what was being done within a given time frame. After trying various ITSM solutions, including open source products, we opted for InvGate Service Management because it covers all of our needs and has very good post-sales support," explained its IT Manager back then, Diego Lecler.
