Freshservice helps OfficeMax deliver measurable, efficient, customer centric and ITIL aligned IT service

About OfficeMax

OfficeMax is an industry-leading workplace solutions provider, known for excellence in customer service. From its origins as Pedersen Stationers in 1965, OfficeMax has grown over 43 years to have sales and distribution centres in every state and 1500 employees across Australia and New Zealand. OfficeMax is a total workplace solutions provider, serving Australian and New Zealand organisations including offices, schools and government with office products, technology solutions, furniture, medical and kitchen supplies, and promotional products.

Freshservice in action

The objective of this project was to implement a new ITSM tool built on the ITIL framework, which would further enable the OfficeMax team to achieve its goals — delivering measurable IT service that is efficient and customer focused. Within this, there were three challenges that needed to be solved.

Customer satisfaction was an area that the OfficeMax team was most focused on fixing, as IT users faced multiple challenges with the existing process. Key challenges included the lack of visibility in ticket resolution, a non-existent self-service portal and the inability to raise tickets unless a service attendant was logged in.

OfficeMax also wanted to further its internal operations with the IT team working hard to resolve multiple issues, which were preventing the staff from optimally using their own resources. This included weak insights and reporting systems, difficulty with measuring the SLA compliance and lack of an ITIL-aligned framework.

Aside from customer satisfaction and IT operations, there was a lack of transparency across IT teams at OfficeMax. The team therefore aimed to use Freshservice to conquer difficulties in collaboration across IT teams, create a central repository for knowledge sharing and build a transparent performance landscape.

The implementation of Freshservice was an overwhelming success, achieving all project objectives and enabling the company to enhance its customer focused IT service. In particular, SLA adherence for IT service delivery increased to 97.1 percent and improved differentiation between service requests and incidents increased the FCR to 88.7 percent. Improved ticket management increased the overall customer satisfaction levels to 91.03 percent.

Exploration of its journey to purchase Freshservice

With the belief that people are just as important as products, OfficeMax functions like an in-house procurement team and is known for excellence in customer service. As part of the company’s dedication to continuous improvement of customer support, OfficeMax initiated a project to implement an ITSM tool that would serve their 1500 employees within business units across Australia and New Zealand and address existing challenges in customer satisfaction, internal operation and knowledge transparency in IT service. They were looking for a solution built on the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) framework that would enable the team to achieve their goal of delivering measurable, efficient and customer-focused IT service.

The team chose Freshservice as it stood out with its intuitive user interface that packed powerful ITSM and reporting capabilities. OfficeMax took a hybrid approach to the implementation, combining the waterfall model and agile project methodology.

Joseph Orquejo, IT service manager at Officemax Australia adds, “Our in house tool was built using SharePoint and was nearing end of life. We also understood that to continue our journey to deliver a measureable IT service that is efficient and customer focused each and every time, we required a tool that equipped our IT teams to service our end-users with ease whilst using the ITIL framework as a guide.”

“Five tools were evaluated by our IT management team across Australia and New Zealand and from a capability, cost, customer support & engagement perspective, Freshservice was definitely our preferred partner.”

How OfficeMax uses Freshservice

Led by IT managers and agents, the team collaborated across two countries, four different time zones, sixteen training sessions and countless daily stand-ups to implement a robust solution using Freshservice. It provided an intuitive user interface, powerful ITSM and in-depth reporting capabilities.

Despite being restrained by budget resources, the project was successfully implemented through a hybrid approach, combining the waterfall model and agile project methodology. The company witnessed significant improvements in performance and end user satisfaction following the integration of Freshservice and the replacement of the in-house ticketing system with an ITIL-aligned system, which provided a single interface for tracking and managing all IT requests.

Conclusion

OfficeMax approaches each and every client with the view to building a strong partnership to assist customers in getting the job of ordering workplace supplies and solutions done. It knows that business needs and circumstances change and that workplace solutions need to be adaptable. With Freshservice, OfficeMax has equipped itself with a robust service and support infrastructure, that grows and adapts to changing customer needs.