In rural New Zealand, the Selwyn District Council transforms IT support

The Selwyn District of New Zealand, on the east coast of South Island, is a mostly rural area, with residents scattered over 2,500 square miles. Its governing body, the Selwyn District Council (SDC), provides not just basic services like maintaining roads and picking up trash, but its digital services team serves as the council’s central nervous system, supporting the 280 employees that keep the area humming.

Outdated IT tools and processes recently left the team with no means of tracking requests or prioritizing tasks, overwhelming staff. The SDC needed a solution that would handle efficient tracking, beef up resource planning, track employee performance, and provide other assistance to employees and partners.

With the help of Freshworks Platinum Solution Partner Synergy Enterprise Solutions, the IT team replaced its legacy system with a custom-designed implementation of Freshservice. A self-service employee portal reduced inbound email requests, and a dashboard provided the digital services team with greater visibility on the status of those email requests and other ongoing projects.

The organization

The Selwyn District Council is the governing body that manages essential services for some 65,000 residents in a rural area of the Canterbury region of New Zealand. The district covers over 2,500 square miles with a rapidly growing population, offering services like road maintenance, emergency management, and land management.

The challenge

Before implementing Freshworks, the SDC's IT infrastructure was inefficient and outdated. Employees had to email to request assistance for problems with account access or setting up new devices, with no system for tracking or prioritizing requests. Tickets were opened manually and even simple tasks like requesting software could take weeks. Agents were bogged down by a lack of information about inbound queries, constantly having to look up the issue, dragging down response time. Many employees, waiting for a response, were unable to do their jobs. 

To solve these issues, the SDC sought a mobile-friendly, cloud-based, flexible solution that would offer a self-service option and offer better logging, tracking, and reporting for tickets. 

The solution

The SDC partnered with local solutions integrator Synergy Enterprise Solutions to implement Freshservice. This platform—powered by AWS—introduced a user-friendly self-service portal, significantly reducing email requests and automatically routing tickets to relevant teams. It also provides employees with better access to self-service information so they can resolve issues—such as setting up a device—before a request even gets to those teams. The change management feature has helped to track changes and provide analytics on tickets. Having a service catalog provides a single source of truth of all available IT services, and asset management helps the SDC capture issue history to improve visibility into employee queries.

Integrations with apps like Azure AD Provisioning and Microsoft 365 Calendar are helping boost productivity by syncing tasks, changes, and meetings in one platform. This allows IT agents to resolve tickets remotely, prioritize urgent issues, and manage tasks more efficiently.

Impact

Freshservice has delivered rapid impact to the SDC. With 95% of requests now coming through the self-service portal, the IT team can manage and prioritize tasks more effectively. Tickets are resolved faster, with Freshservice helping to shave off 20-40 seconds per ticket. Employees find the portal user-friendly and appreciate the real-time tracking of their requests. The reduction in email requests has freed up IT agents to focus on more complex problems, improving overall productivity.

By streamlining workflows and automating processes, Freshservice has helped the SDC make better decisions and allocate resources more effectively. The council can now maintain a record of every ticket, ensuring transparency and accountability in their IT operations—shifting the focus from a backlog of tickets to providing essential municipal services.