Industry :
 

Local Government

Location :
 

Australia

Usage :
 

IT Support

Challenges:
 
  • Disparate systems to document and service customer issues
  • Difficult to keep track of approvals
  • Limited context for the IT team to handle tickets
Favourite Features :
 
  • Modern UI
  • Service catalogue
  • Built-in workflow automator
About the City of Whittlesea

The City of Whittlesea is one of the largest municipalities in Melbourne, Australia. The city caters to a little less than 210,000 residents, spread across 489.9 sq.kms of land. Being a local government council, they are responsible for providing and supporting a variety of community services, from protecting the cleanliness and safety of the community to planning for their future. The council’s IT team is tasked with capturing service requests from within the council.
 

Manual Processes Led to Service Inefficiencies

The City of Whittlesea’s IT team generally used a variety of tools to capture service requests, get necessary approvals and delegate them to appropriate departments for resolution. The IT team built Sharepoint forms to collect service requests, both internal and external. These requests would then be manually logged as issues in their helpdesk system. When any one of these requests required approvals, the IT team shared an Outlook template to the required stakeholders to capture and document them. With over 300 tickets coming in per week, switching between different systems, to keep track of incoming tickets and approvals, became cumbersome and led to gaps in reporting.
 

Streamlining and Scaling IT Support with Freshservice

The council’s IT team was on the lookout for a single tool that can streamline this process and ensure a lot more data and information flow through their team. After a careful evaluation of other tools on the market, the City of Whittlesea chose to partner with Freshservice. With a modern and intuitive UI, the council’s IT team was immediately able to get up-to-speed with minimal training. Leah Dinas, IT Projects Officer, The City of Whittlesea’s IT team said: “Freshworks’ services have allowed our customer experience and IT teams to work more closely together, which has improved efficiencies across our organization.”

The team took a phased approach to implement Freshservice:

  • First, the forms (from Sharepoint) and approval workflows (from Outlook) were moved into Freshservice to have a holistic view of their tickets

  • Next, a dedicated support email was set up to automatically create tickets and efficiently handle external service requests
  • Finally, a service catalogue was rolled out to internal teams to eliminate repetitive and frequent requests.

Leah Dinas, explained, “Freshservice streamlined how we gather and act upon customer feedback, helping us solve customer issues quicker.” 
 

Next Steps - Digitize service requests with Freshservice

The City of Whittlesea has already begun expanding Freshservice to other departments and eventually move away from their traditional paper-based service requests. As digital transformation is a big part of their future plans, the team will also venture into introducing change and release management. This will help them bring structure, governance, and compliance to their upcoming IT projects.

“Freshservice streamlined how we gather and act upon customer feedback, helping us solve customer issues quicker.”

Leah Dinas

IT Projects Officer

The City of Whittlesea