At ‘warp speed,’ Carrefour Belgium’s 15 helpdesks come together

In the heart of Belgium, Carrefour reigns as the go-to shopping destination for nearly 80% of households, earning it the moniker "the Walmart of Europe." As a staple of daily life, the retail giant has to be at the top of its game, from supply chain logistics to in-person shopping experiences.

But even as its Belgian operation catered to over 700,000 customers each year, the company faced internal operational challenges hidden from the public eye. Disjointed workflows and fragmented helpdesks threatened to derail efficiency for its 11,000 employees. Fifteen helpdesks managed support for IT, supply chain management, logistics, franchisee support, HR, and other functions.

“The ability for Carrefour Belgium to have a single view of customer situations was really difficult before Freshservice,” says Loïc Wydouw, CIO of Carrefour Belgium.

A digital transformation plan was underway to streamline operations and simplify tools and processes, including unifying helpdesks. But for Stijn Stabel, CTO of Carrefour Belgium, the plan was overly complex and moving too slowly. When he joined in 2019, he recalls, “I got five binders full of processes that we were going to implement,” he says. “We would have all retired before we got that implemented.”

Instead, Stabel turned to Freshservice to improve visibility across these functions with a single self-service portal for all business functions and to explore the possibility of a “warp speed” implementation. Leveraging Freshservice, hosted on AWS, for both its IT service management (ITSM) and enterprise service management (ESM) needs, Carrefour Belgium has already centralized eight helpdesks to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and better equip 350 support agents across the organization. Agent satisfaction and productivity have soared.

“It used to take a year for a helpdesk implementation,” says Rineke Renema, senior project manager at Carrefour. With Freshservice, “it took three to four months.”

The company

The Carrefour Group is the seventh-largest retailer in the world and one of the largest in Europe, with 360,000 employees and over 13,000 stores in 30 countries, including Belgium. Selling everything from TVs to clothes to food, Carrefour Belgium’s hypermarkets, Carrefour markets, and Express outlets capture over 80% of Belgian households, cementing its status as an industry standard for retail excellence.

The challenge

Beneath the surface of Carrefour Belgium’s existing IT service framework, Stabel discovered outdated workflows, scattered tools, and disorganized subcontracting. Carrefour had pushed its legacy ITSM tool, BMC Remedy, to the limits, with no room for further customization or support. This posed a critical obstacle to innovation for a company on the cusp of exponential growth.

Carrefour also faced the challenge of uniting more than 15 helpdesks within the organization. Without a single integrated helpdesk solution, internal teams struggled to link all customer interactions and gain a full view of operations. 

“If you look at Carrefour as an organization, the multiplicity of services we provide is so vast,” says Carrefour Belgium CIO Wydouw. Leaders wanted to dismantle these silos to foster efficient interaction across business units and achieve better visibility. “Having a single view of our internal situation was extremely difficult, which is why we pursued a Freshservice implementation.”

The solution

Carrefour Belgium now uses Freshservice for its enterprise service management needs. While a significant focus is on IT operations, Carrefour also relies on Freshservice for retail store support, logistics management, data management, and forecasting and replenishment.

“Freshworks allowed our organization to evolve together with the solution. We gradually made the parts of Freshservice we used more mature, and at the same time, our teams were maturing,” says Stabel.

For Carrefour Belgium, Freshservice has transformed incident management to easily track, prioritize, and assign tickets while automating resolution processes. Multiple integrations ensure proper incident routing for Carrefour and its vendors to provide better first- and second-level support. With better service request management, users can submit service requests and monitor their progress from a portal. Better handling of service requests—primarily submitted by employees at Carrefour’s warehouses and corporate headquarters—has bolstered communication and user satisfaction.

With a new change management framework, Carrefour has better control over customizations, statuses, lifecycles, and fields. Replacing legacy systems like Google Sheets and email, Freshservice has brought much greater transparency to the change management process.

These enhancements have delivered significant gains in productivity and issue resolution, both in IT service management and enterprise service management. “Freshservice opened up a world of automation we didn’t have before,” says Christophe Doguet, Carrefour Belgium’s IT helpdesk manager. “It’s made our helpdesk processes smoother and more efficient.”

Impact

In less than two years, Carrefour overhauled its legacy ITSM solution and empowered more than 350 agents with Freshservice. Eight out of Carrefour's 15 helpdesks have seamlessly transitioned to Freshservice, with others currently in the pipeline.

Carrefour now enjoys a centralized, comprehensive view of its internal logistics and a unified self-service portal that simplifies incident management. Agent satisfaction and productivity have soared. 

“Our Freshservice implementation has really been a success story,” says Stabel. “It allows us to delight users with a single, unified experience. And because of the low overhead, we can focus on what matters: making our customers happy.”