SailPoint builds trust and wins new enterprise identity governance customers

The leader in identity governance, SailPoint helps companies protect their digital networks and assets. Each company’s access and security needs are custom-defined based on the unique requirements of their business and employee base. Because safeguarding customer data and systems at every stage of a service request is vitally important, a single help desk staffer is assigned to manage each incoming customer request to provide the most seamless possible experience while working to solve a customer’s challenge.

The company offers a range of service level tiers to large and mid-market enterprises, encompassing user access to networks and data, password management, compliance, and more. SailPoint’s products leverage automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies to help companies define user identities and access needs, ensuring that each employee has exactly the access they need: no less, and no more.

“SailPoint was the first player in this market to shift identity management from an IT tool to a business tool,” says Igal Dar, technologies and operations manager at SailPoint. “The manager needs to make decisions about who has access to what. He knows his employees. With SailPoint, if a manager onboards a new employee, he wants the system to set up access and attributes based on that employee’s role, without needing to fill in forms and open up tickets with IT. That’s old school.”

Integrate With Your Existing Enterprise Tools

To document every step of the help desk ticket process for the customer record, SailPoint needed a tool that would integrate smoothly with Slack, which the help desk staff uses to get technical support and troubleshooting in real time, as well as the company’s Zendesk ticket system. SailPoint offers 24/7 support, so it’s important to assign a new ticket to a staffer who’s available to give it the attention it requires.

Without reliable schedule information, the help desk ticket process often started by causing problems for both SailPoint staff and customers. Smartsheet helps SailPoint integrate its communication and ticketing solutions to provide the most effective and efficient problem resolution.

“If someone is ending their shift at 5, they don’t want to get tickets assigned to them at 5:01, nor do they want a ticket assigned at 4:15,” Dar says. “At 5:01 it will it will annoy the customer; at 4:15 it will annoy the customer and the engineer, because they think, oh, I can’t go home now.”

But keeping track of each day’s schedule was difficult. Dar and his team tried to coordinate shifts, time off, training, and work-from-home status via spreadsheets, but circulating them in email led to version control problems as people made their own changes before sharing them further. With a centrally saved spreadsheet, tracking changes was difficult; people didn’t know what had changed, or whether they were overriding someone else’s edits. The company tried locking access to the central spreadsheet, which just put the burden of updates on a single admin, who was inundated with emailed updates and corrections.

“Looking back, it was such a waste of time and resources,” Dar says. “We had a lot of work-arounds, business processes that kept changing because we didn’t have any consistency. One organization did something and another organization did something else, and starting everything from scratch every single time.”

Create Autonomy and Accountability Across the Organization

Smartsheet helps SailPoint connect the whole customer help experience while ensuring that the right help desk staff are assigned to each ticket. Dar and his team can create a set of sheets in which employees can update their own status to indicate shift schedule, vacation or other out-of-office time, training commitments, or other commitments that affect their availability for customers. If an employee chooses to work from home, a Smartsheet form accessible via mobile device lets them alert managers and colleagues — whether from the home office, doctor’s office, or car mechanic’s waiting room. Teammates can see at a glance who’s available to take on a customer ticket or help troubleshoot a tricky problem, and to trust the information they’re viewing.

“Everything people had to do — download the sheets, check the version, check for updates — all that is gone. The information is in Smartsheet,” Dar says. “It’s in a row in a Smartsheet report, because that’s very easy; it’s in a dashboard for those who need that. And we also have an integration that runs twice a day through Smartsheet’s API; it reads that report and sends that data to the contact center Slack channel with a message saying these are the people that are out of the office today and why. Because this is where they need their information.”

Make it an Easy Decision for IT and Procurement

SailPoint reviewed several solutions before selecting Smartsheet; Dar’s first big surprise was how quickly the purchase process moved. The company’s RFP process for tech purchases includes security certifications, integration review, and other IT checks before purchase approval can be granted. It’s normally a six- to nine-month cycle, but Dar says that thanks to the Smartsheet sales team’s collaboration and the solution’s integrity, getting the green light for Smartsheet took only three weeks.

Improve Service Quality and Spend Time on Strategy Instead of Repetitive Work

Dar also saves significant time setting up new status sheets for a new year and archiving the old one; what used to take three weeks of copying data and formulas, consolidating documents, and checking for accuracy now takes about 15 minutes of effort.

Smartsheet’s seamless integration with Slack also helps SailPoint speed up ticket resolution, cutting a day off the typical seven-day closure period. Integration is especially useful for SailPoint’s platinum-level service offering, which handles some of the most complex and urgent requests. Help desk staff can capture customer trouble reports and ongoing conversations in Smartsheet, do research and troubleshooting with colleagues via Slack, and monitor issue status, without having to jump between applications or risk losing sight of crucial details.

Dar’s team has benefited directly from Smartsheet, as he’s been able to take admins whose jobs were consumed with tracking employee work schedules and assign them to more strategic, business-critical roles. Together with the ability to resolve help tickets more quickly and track customer needs more closely, Smartsheet has made it easier for SailPoint to maintain its high customer satisfaction levels, which is vital to sustaining customer trust and winning new business.

“Our customers understand that the core of security is the people that work there,” Dar says. “As many security tools as there are out there, at the end it’s the people. Their access — or their mis-access — is what’s most important for a company. And Smartsheet helps us.”