A public retail company with over 5,000 users and 400 stores deployed Avatier to synchronize passwords across two Active Directory environments, reducing help desk tickets by 90%.
Large retail corporations face many challenges when it comes to maintaining a smooth operating procedure. These challenges include a wide variety of ages and backgrounds among employees, high turnover, and periods of temporary growth during the holiday season. This type of constantly-evolving environment can create a nightmare for the help desk. New and temporary employees must have their accounts created, and longer-term employees who log in infrequently must be assisted in resetting their passwords after confirming their identity. In 2008, the Director of IT Security of one such company knew that he needed to bring order to the chaos so that he could improve the efficiency of his help desk. In addition to a consistent high volume of password requests with exceptional spikes at several points throughout the year, his company needed a solution that could accommodate their two concurrent Active Directory environments. After careful consideration, he decided that Avatier’s Password Station was the best candidate for the job. Once the decision was made, implementing Password Station was fast. In fact, even with the necessary customizations to allow for connections to two instances of Active Directory, the full installation was completed in under 45 days. It wasn’t long before over 5,000 employees were enrolled in Password Station and taking full advantage of the new self-service environment as IT Security opened the system to outside users and in-store associates.
Help desk ticket volume has been reduced by 90%.
Avatier’s Active Directory compatibility allowed for the creation of much smoother processes for account enrollment and password management despite the complicated nature of the system. According to the Director of IT Security, “Password Station was integrated with Active Directory twice. We have named users, and every named user has a numeric account. Avatier helped set it up so that both accounts for a user exist in the same Active Directory domain… They are set up to be synchronized, so that you only have to change the password once to update it for both accounts.” After integrating seamlessly into a complex setup, Password Station was rolled out to a diverse employee population spanning from teenagers to retirees. There are many challenges to training such as a broad user base on a new piece of technology, but Avatier’s simple user interface helped enormously. “We were able to ensure that the correct prompts were put into place so that we could maximize the educational benefit that could be put into each page.” Since Password Station was installed, the results have spoken for themselves: Help desk ticket volume has been reduced by 90%, with only one or two password requests coming in per week. Avatier has created a solution that is elegant in its simplicity for users and administrators alike, and companies are taking notice. “Avatier’s product just worked best for us. It had the best combination of GUI for our users and administratability for our service desk.” Best of all, after successfully implementing Password Station, the IT Security team is able to turn their attention towards other projects knowing that introducing new systems in the future will be easier with Avatier. “We know that we can roll out any new system to any number of new people and let them use the self-serve process to enroll themselves and we know that we don’t have anything to worry about from a password standpoint.”