How Freshworks revamped employee experience for Wellington’s city council

At a recent Gartner conference on IT infrastructure and cloud strategies, Hein Beukes, manager of technology services for Wellington City Council in New Zealand, talked with Preethi Bridgement, senior director of solution engineering at Freshworks, about how the council simplified service delivery while improving employee experience with Freshservice.

Edited excerpts from the conversation:

Why did you decide to move your service desk to Freshservice?

As a council, we have a lot of systems—we’ve got a golf course, a cemetery, libraries, and pools. All the services we look after are different, and so are the solutions, the outcomes, and the SLAs. So we need something that can accommodate all that variability and flexibility.

We originally had an outsourced ServiceNow solution that presented a lot of challenges. We use a lot of disparate systems, but we couldn’t get it to integrate with a lot of the platforms. And we have about 2,500 permanent employees and a lot of contractors who work for short terms—say, six months. We need to be able to move those people very quickly into the [information and communications technology] environment so they understand what their roles and responsibilities are.

How has Freshservice helped you improve employee experience?

In the past, when somebody joined the council, it was a manual process. It was like: “Welcome to the council! What day do you start? What applications do you require? Okay, you can take your laptop in two weeks.” That’s how long it took!

We needed a solution we could tailor to our requirements and integrate with a lot of platforms. We integrated [Freshservice] with our payroll system and our HR system so we know when people start working and when they leave. These integrations don’t cost us apart from the labor of making sure that the APIs work together. 

Now, we have a totally different approach to onboarding. It’s a single form that is required to be filled in, whether it’s a permanent staff member or a contractor. We’ve now further moved it up into the HR system and the payroll system. So the moment you create a new employee—and that system feeds into Freshservice in a totally transparent way—it knows what the start date is and what applications they require, putting them into the right AD [Active Directory] group. So by the time an employee starts, the laptop is preloaded with the applications they need.

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We can do the offboarding in a similar way on the same day by revoking access to AD or to various applications. Freshservice keeps track of our assets, so we know who’s got what laptop and access to what software and how much they are using it. So we have now got full control, and it has saved us a lot of money.

How have you benefited from self-service and automation in Freshservice?

Previously, people would call up the service desk and there was a lot of back-and-forth for requests like a new SharePoint portal or an external link someone needed. It often annoyed everyone involved. Now, users log in requests through Freshservice, which “talks” to the right platform and creates that [portal or link]. If there’s a level of approval required, it will go to the relevant manager; if not, the system will simply execute it. And the user who logged that ticket gets a mail saying that it’s done.