Coomeva Drives IT Service Control and Satisfaction

Coomeva Group is a cooperative of nine companies providing services to over 3.5 million Colombians. Twenty-four departments across the country include healthcare and security, education, finance and entrepreneurship, and business development.

At Coomeva’s core is the Valle Medical and Professionals Cooperative of Colombia (Cooperativa Médica del Valle y de Profesionales de Colombia), the biggest workers’ union in Colombia, covering around 270,000 associates and their families. Coomeva also operates a bank with nearly a million clients.

One of the 30 largest organizations in Colombia, Coomeva thrives on cooperative principles, contributing to the development and progress of associates and their families. This makes it the biggest social enterprise in Colombia. Its abiding philosophy is “making life easier,” which it practices by offering services that support the wellbeing of its people, users, and clients throughout their lives.

Sonda

A multinational IT company headquartered in Santiago, Chile, Sonda is the largest IT services provider in Latin America. Founded in 1974, the company has four divisions: Work Place Services (including outsourcing); Applications (supporting client business processes); Platform Services (through a network of regional alliances); and cloud and data center Services. The company has:

• 50 years of experience in Latin America, including three decades in Colombia
• An active presence in 11 Latin American markets plus the U.S.
• A longstanding, strategic relationship with BMC
• Experienced double-digit growth in Colombia in 2023

Despite Coomeva's commitment to making life easier, at the start of the 2020s, the help desk was delivering a subpar experience to its users. As the organization grew, it inherited a range of IT systems from various business units, but without any central oversight.

Victor Manuel Torres Carvajal, General Manager of Technology and Digital Transformation at Coomeva, says, “We had a mass of ghost technologies, software, and systems bought ad-hoc by our employees.”

He adds: “We had no traceability or control, and this affected our levels of service and led to operational inefficiencies. For example, if ATMs stopped working, it was our job to fix them, but sometimes we weren’t even aware of the situation. Quite often, we only found out when customers complained.”

This poor response to IT service issues had an impact on customer satisfaction and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the Coomeva net promoter score (NPS). Another issue was a lack of a centralized IT service monitoring system, which made it hard to integrate new companies into the organizational structure. This was a concern for leadership as Coomeva sought to expand into new areas such as retail.

Coomeva had begun outsourcing IT services including infrastructure, cybersecurity, and connectivity throughout the 2010s, and this led to a review of outsourced IT service desk options. “My team found BMC, and we started looking for references,” Torres comments. “We realized it could help us reach new levels in terms of managing our systems. This became the benchmark for an IT service management tender.”

Sonda was the IT service provider that responded to the RFP with a BMC solution—BMC Helix. “We’ve been working with Coomeva for over a decade,” says Ricardo Rodríguez Vásquez, Andean Regional General Manager at Sonda, “providing things like consultancy and professional services.”

The IT service desk request came as Sonda and Coomeva moved towards a strategic partnership. Bringing BMC Helix into the picture proved a winning formula, not least because Sonda proposed delivering the solution as a managed service on software-as-a-service basis, minimizing the need for new infrastructure. “Sonda demonstrated deep knowledge of the BMC Helix platform and their support was key to the implementation of this vital service,” says Torres. “Once we got started, we decided to go a step further and use BMC Helix not just for IT, but also for business process outsourcing.”

The BMC Helix implementation took 10 months, during which Coomeva’s employees also learned to use the tool to report issues on their own, driving a 28 percent increase in self-service issue notifications.

Torres says, “Now that we have everything under control, we feel more secure and supported. We’ve managed to achieve service levels that we just couldn’t reach before. It’s really changed us.”

BMC Helix has yielded a huge drop in the use of older channels for issue reporting, with a 20 percent reduction in phone tickets and an 11 percent reduction in email tickets. “The arrival of BMC was a milestone in terms of our culture, because beforehand we hadn’t been able to permeate the organization with a minimal technology service model,” Torres says. “Now I rest easier knowing I have most things under control.”

This control is also delivering results for associates and customers of Coomeva. Previously, Torres says, it had been almost impossible to guarantee service commitments because issues in underlying IT systems were hard to detect.

“I’d say there was a before and an after,” recalls Rodríguez of Sonda. “Previously, the response to internal service incidents was more reactive. What we’ve been able to do with BMC is provide a service model that complements the enhanced Coomeva reality.

In addition to improving Coomeva’s IT help desk capabilities, BMC Helix is delivering wider benefits for the cooperative. Since being implemented by Torres’s team, the platform has been adopted by a growing number of other business units, including finance and entrepreneurship and legal, which are now benefiting from increased service levels and business agility.

Furthermore, Torres says BMC Helix could play an important role in enhancing the speed and depth of new business integration as Coomeva seeks to expand its service offerings. After a period of consolidation, where the number of constituent companies has dropped from 14 to nine, Coomeva is looking to move into areas such as retail and pharmacies. It has already begun expanding into the latter with the opening of its first drugstore.

Extending Coomeva’s IT help desk provision to cover new business areas, each with different corporate objectives and regulatory environments, would have been a mammoth task without BMC Helix. Now, however, Torres estimates the time for integrating a new entity into the IT service infrastructure has been halved. “With BMC Helix, we have absolute confidence in having chosen a path that will allow the Group to pursue organic growth,” he concludes.