Flight Centre Travel Group’s IT service management takes off with ServiceNow

Implementing a modern service management platform

Legacy systems didn’t support Flight Centre's scale and growth
Flight Centre Travel Group is a $20 billion global travel business–one of the world’s largest–with operations in 23 countries and a corporate travel network spanning 90 countries.

The company’s rapid growth created challenges for its IT service management capabilities in Australia. The business was relying on a basic service management system that had not been upgraded in years.

“Our ITSM processes and systems were spread across multiple platforms and spreadsheets, and we lacked data analytics and reporting capabilities,” explains Henry Do, Delivery Manager, IT Service Management, Flight Centre Travel Group. “We were experiencing inefficiencies and service disruptions as a result of the legacy technology.”

The nature of the platform meant that many Flight Centre employees worked around it by submitting requests via email, face-to-face, or phone. Henry explains: “We weren’t able to accurately track or understand how much work our teams were doing. It was hard to make decisions where service improvements could be made, and how many resources were needed and where. We also had minimal visibility over how our people and services were performing.” 

Flight Centre’s simple approach for service delivery success: hire good people and select a world-class platform
Over the years, Flight Centre invested in talent to transform IT, boosting team members’ skills and streamlining processes to improve its service management capabilities. The final component was to implement a world-class IT service management platform.

On discovering that multiple Flight Centre vendors used ServiceNow, Henry became an internal advocate for the Now Platform^®. He explains: “While I’d not used ServiceNow before, I became the thorn in everyone’s side, saying we needed to implement the platform. By leveraging ServiceNow’s power, we could provide the best possible service to our internal customers. The arrival of a new Enterprise Operations leader further endorsed my view and cemented our decision to choose ServiceNow, along with support from the CIO.”

Flight Centre adopts ServiceNow and achieves rapid deployment
Flight Centre broke the project down into two phases. Phase one entailed deploying an ServiceNow^® IT Service Management incorporating ServiceNow^® Incident Management, ServiceNow^® Problem Management, ServiceNow^® Change Management, a knowledge base delivered through ServiceNow^® Knowledge Management, a service portal delivered through ServiceNow Portal, and integration with OKTA—a cloud identity management platform for SSO authentication.

This enabled the IT service management team to support any technologies Flight Centre chose to deploy. With the project completed in under eight weeks, the business then moved onto phase two: deploying ServiceNow^® IT Operations Management to achieve improvements to service mapping, cloud management, and discovery capabilities. The team completed phase two in less than ten weeks.

“The deployment process was enlightening as none of the team had used ServiceNow before,” says Henry. However, strong support from a key stakeholder and expert assistance from ServiceNow’s technical and account teams ensured the project was completed on time and on budget. Henry adds: “ServiceNow had deep technical skills and fit well with us from a cultural perspective.”

Now Platform delivers services to Flight Centre employees faster and more efficiently
“We immediately started seeing uplift in terms of our internal customers having a new way of contacting our support desk, receiving help, and being able to help themselves,” Henry says. “We’ve also seen our record of change become more accurate. A key success has been keeping our implementation as close to out-of-the box as possible so we can ensure seamless and issue-free upgrades on an ongoing basis.”

Flight Centre Service Desk average call wait times decreased from fourteen minutes to four minutes, and engagement efficiency saw a directional shift from calls to chat to web forms to self-help. In fact, chat volumes increased by 300%, while call volumes decreased by 3,000 calls per month.

Knowledge base article views are in excess of 3,000 per month, and FTE effort in duplication of ticket handling to third-party suppliers has been reduced by two FTEs. Flight Centre has also seen a reduction in mean time in the restoration of incidents by 80%, along with a 50% reduction in the number of incidents due to the integration of the monitoring and communication platforms.

“ServiceNow helped us create a single platform for incident, problem, and change, giving us unprecedented visibility of incidents, planning activities, and service reviews.” Henry adds. These capabilities enabled Flight Centre to align more closely with ITIL benchmarks for service management and create a platform for future improvement. 

IT success paves way for future ServiceNow deployments to drive automation and data-driven decision-making
“It’s almost daunting how much we can push ServiceNow to deliver further improvements,” Henry says. “Our aim over the next few years is to drive automation and gain visibility that enables our people to make data-driven decisions.”

Flight Centre is now considering the expansion of ServiceNow beyond IT into functions such as facilities, and into other regions. Doing so would streamline processes and provide a single platform to enable internal customers to further automate internal support functions.