ITSM improves service for Tasman District

As one of 11 regional councils across New Zealand, the Tasman District Council (TDC) provides basic services for 60,000 residents spread out over nearly 3,700 square miles—everything from taxes and trash to managing roads and public transport. The council’s 400 employees rely heavily on modern IT solutions to provide reliable, continuous service to its diverse and growing population. 

Since 2000, the TDC has used BMC Software’s Track-IT! for IT service management (ITSM). But as the council expanded services, the IT team realized that it needed an adequate framework compliant with industry standards set forth in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which Track-It! lacked. Plus, after an extended pandemic lockdown, the council decided that an on-premise solution like Track-It! was simply too restrictive and unable to scale. Remote employees who could not access their laptops or connect remotely had no means to contact IT. The TDC sought a cloud solution that could respond effectively to its workforce’s requirements.

With expertise from Freshworks Platinum Solution Partner Synergy Enterprise Solutions, the TDC successfully migrated its legacy on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud with Freshworks. By implementing Freshservice, powered by AWS, the IT team added a self-service portal for employees to log IT requests, installed asset management software on employees' laptops, and introduced Freshservice’s mobile app for IT requests, as well. The cloud solution also enabled agents to respond to tickets remotely, cutting response times for service tickets by 86%.

The organization

The Tasman District Council serves as the regional governing body for about 60,000 residents in the remote region of the South Island of New Zealand. The council oversees a wide range of essential services, including voting and taxation, water conservation, drinking water supply, building permits, trash collection, and road maintenance.

The challenge

Track-IT! from BMC wasn’t suitable for ITSM in the cloud era. Its on-premise solution often prevented employees having an issue with their laptops offsite from logging IT service requests. Nor could they easily retrieve answers to their issues, since the software had such poor search functionality that the IT team could not get other teams to use it. The legacy system also lacked automation features that would reduce agents’ load and did not follow ITIL standards, a necessity for IT to scale and manage a modern cloud infrastructure.  

The TDC began looking at cloud-based options that would improve ticket tracking, routing, and allocation, and add automation to streamline workflows. After talking to other New Zealand councils, the council became particularly interested in the Wellington City Council's improvements by implementing Freshworks. The TDC was impressed by how easily Wellington automated processes, added self-service, and reaped the benefits of Freshservice’s mobile app.

The solution

Local solutions integrator Synergy Enterprise Solutions led the implementation of Freshservice, delivering a cloud-based solution and a mobile app, along with a new self-service portal that allowed employees to find answers on their own in an FAQ section. For more complex inquiries that can’t be answered by the knowledge base, employees log and track their requests through the portal. The implementation also included automated workflows for simple, repetitive tasks like employee onboarding, offboarding, and user termination.

The TDC also leveraged the user-friendly Freshworks Marketplace to deploy Servicebot for Microsoft Teams. Employees now resolve issues within Teams by chatting with a AI agent and without having to open a new request in a browser window, minimizing support channel usage. For requests that require further support, agents receive notifications and resolve service requests without ever leaving Teams. Smart suggestions link IT tickets to solutions in the service catalog, improving agents' ability to respond faster and more efficiently to tickets.

Impact

The self-service portal, the addition of the Freshservice mobile app, and the introduction of ITIL standards have all improved IT’s response time to tickets. Where previously it would take up to a week for a response, now all tickets are responded to in under 24 hours. The self-service portal has helped to reduce the number of tickets the service desk handles and streamline IT service delivery. 

The IT team is now better able to serve all the various departments of the TDC and provide the necessary support for the region’s digital future.