Customer Stories: Raven Housing Trust
Explore how Littlefish implemented world-class IT support and cyber security solutions to a rapidly growing housing association based in Surrey. Helping to reduce costs and incidents, overcome IT talent shortages, and provide happier user experiences.
Raven Housing Trust is a social housing provider based in Redhill, Surrey. It owns and manages more than seven thousand homes and is committed to investing in these homes and in local neighbourhoods to develop communities where people want to live.
As a customer-centred organisation, Raven’s vision is to excel at delivering people-friendly, valued, and trusted service to the local community. After initially engaging with Littlefish for cyber security services, and enjoying the way this partnership was unfolding, the organisation turned to Littlefish’s managed IT service desk to ensure its users could continue to work effectively day-to-day and to create a better, more user-friendly, environment for all.
Raven Housing Trust’s service desk challenge
Prior to engaging with Littlefish, Raven Housing Trust took care of all IT services in-house. Not only could this be costly and time-consuming (in terms of recruitment, training, etc.), but it left Raven quite tight in terms of IT resources.
For example, should a member of the IT team take leave, get sick, or even move jobs, this affected other team members who would have to pick up the extra work. As an organisation dedicated to its customers, this could be very difficult to manage, leaving gaps in service, and resulting in long, stressful days for staff who had other important work to complete.
While Raven understood that engaging with a managed IT and cyber services provider for support could help, they nevertheless didn’t want to work with a faceless provider whose engineers and consultants wouldn’t care about their users nor feel like part of the team.
Littlefish’s solution
Raven had initially engaged with Littlefish for cyber services, including managed SOC and SIEM and really liked the way this relationship was growing. As such, it was a natural next step to engage with Littlefish about service desk and find out more about how Littlefish could support the organisation’s day-to-day IT and its users.
The Littlefish service desk utilises an innovative pod system which ringfences a specialised and proportionate group of engineers to work with specific organisations.
This approach ensured that Raven’s users would always be speaking to someone uniquely qualified in their field and familiar with the organisation, but also engendered long-term working relationships, so Raven’s users really felt that Littlefish was an extension of their team.
Over time, Raven’s pod (which offers 2nd line support at the first point of contact) would build up a case history all about the organisation, making it easy to spot reoccurring issues and patterns, and helping Littlefish to resolve queries faster in the future.
The aim was to improve the user’s experience at Raven and Littlefish would manage and monitor Raven’s user satisfaction rating to ensure it was constantly advancing.
Littlefish continually measure their Net Promoter Score with us as a way of registering our satisfaction with their service. It’s good to see this score continually increasing, so we know we’re going in the right direction and that our users are having an improved experience.
Chris Pinfold, Service Delivery Manager,
Raven Housing Trust
Continually improving the service by listening to the requirements of Raven’s IT team and remaining agile to their environment was imperative. Littlefish worked closely with Raven to implement solutions to enhance the service and retained contact with their in-house team to resolve issues that couldn’t be approached remotely.
To ensure a smooth and swift handover, Raven’s team was also set up with a direct Teams chat to their Littlefish pod. This would drive efficiency and help build a working relationship, but it was also a way for Raven to highlight any urgent and important tickets quickly.
Outcomes
Importantly, Littlefish’s service desk proposal has given Raven Housing Trust peace of mind, helping the organisation to prioritise user experience (with clear KPIs, e.g., Net Promoter Score, in place) as well as the steps they need to take in order to reach these goals.
With this in place, Raven has benefited from knowing they’re going in the right direction and no longer struggle with the IT talent shortage which, prior to the engagement, had begun to wear on Raven’s resources.
Utilising Littlefish’s service desk provision, Raven Housing Trust are able to ensure flexibility for office-based and remote workers, as the service desk toolkit includes access to Littlefish Live (a secure instant chat and device management tool that lets users connect to the IT service desk) and Littlefish Lens (an innovative augmented reality tool, that enables the Littlefish Service Desk to ‘see’ users’ issues during a support session, using the camera on their smartphone or tablet).
The team note how they’re in constant contact with the Littlefish service desk over Teams chat, so issues are quickly resolved, and Raven really feel they’ve gotten to know their Littlefish pod.
Regular ‘knowledge reviews’ are also held with the Littlefish team to ensure that, as Raven’s organisational landscape continues to evolve and change, Littlefish are responsive to this and prepared to commit the time the organisation needs to be productive.
Moving forward, Raven also engaged with Littlefish for further cyber security services, benefiting from Littlefish’s Virtual Chief Information Officer (vCISO) service to provide guidance and advice on security practices and the implementation of mature security controls, policy framework, and a comprehensive user information security program.
As we continue to grow here at Raven, we would look to continue to work with Littlefish as the relationship has been so positive. Littlefish are communicative and remain agile to the changing landscape and the ways this might impact our IT estate and while this carry’s on being the case Littlefish will continue to be the right provider for us.
Chris Pinfold, Service Delivery Manager,
Raven Housing Trust
