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Highlights
88% reduction in time spent sending communications
85% reduction in time spent engaging stakeholders
Reduced incident engagement time to three minutes
When it comes down to it, connecting people — families, friends, businesses — is what O2 does best. But it’s more than just a connector of people. With its technology, the company is a critical part of British infrastructure, providing services for connectivity for tracking and payments on the London transit system.
For George Guthrie, Major Incident Lead at O2, the company’s integral place in British society comes with significant responsibilities. “You realise how critical your job is,” Guthrie says. “You realise, as an organisation, we must prepare ourselves to lead and be prepared for when things go a little off.”
The company excels in the market because of its innovative technology and looked to develop innovation internally by reducing its critical steps to initiate major incident communications and engaging stakeholders. After taking the helm of the major incident management group, Guthrie wanted to enhance IT communications so the internal staff could be as well connected as O2’s customers.
xMatters: More Efficient, More Effective Communications
Looking to modernize, automate, and simplify its incident management operation, O2 identified xMatters as a world-class provider of enterprise-grade service reliability. “xMatters offered us four key benefits,” Guthrie explains. “A mobile app, targeted messages, automated escalations, and easy-to-build, easy-to-send templated communications.”
In addition, xMatters’ ability to target the right people has proved invaluable in an organization with so many different teams. “If our systems fail,” says Guthrie, “xMatters dramatically improves our ability to send targeted messages.”
Lastly, xMatters configurable templates simplified O2 incident managers’ jobs. “Today, we have 200 different pre-populated xMatters templates,” says Guthrie. “When there’s an incident, xMatters makes it easy to quickly find the relevant resolver, understand the pertinent information to communicate, and then get the communication out fast. That efficiency and effectiveness make all the difference.”
The Smartest Solution for Incident Management
xMatters has transformed the way O2 manages incidents, and the results have been impressive. They’ve lowered the number of engagements required to notify stakeholders, reduced the amount of time spent sending communications by 88%, and can now engage incident stakeholders in just three minutes.
Guthrie and the team aren’t resting on their laurels, however. “Now we’re looking to integrate our monitoring tools with xMatters even more,” says Guthrie. “Once we’ve integrated, we’ll be able to go directly from the alert to the communication, and we can take the incident manager completely out of the loop.” At the end of the day, the more xMatters can simplify and automate communications when things go awry, the more Guthrie’s team and the broader O2 IT team can focus their skills and talents on more strategic initiatives.