Belgian Homecare Provider Improves Service Efficiency with Freshservice

Related Services
Freshworks, Freshservice

Industry
Healthcare

Company
Xebia

Het Wit-Gele Kruis (‘The White-Yellow Cross’) is the largest home healthcare organization in Flanders, and operates in five Flemish provinces. In West Flanders, 1,500 people are employed, including more than 1,200 healthcare assistants and nurses. They visit various people in need of assistance at home to provide medical home care. The white cars with the white-yellow cross are therefore very well-known and trusted in the Flemish streetscape.

Why

To deliver high-quality service to care providers while still having enough time for other projects

What

By streamlining, automating and optimizing tickets using Freshservice as a ticket system

How

By smart ticket categorisation, growing a knowledge base and correct ticket transfer to the right agents

The Challenge: a Cumbersome Ticketing System

Het Wit-Gele Kruis is no stranger to using a ticketing system to help healthcare providers with technical questions. However, their previous solution was “basically an enhanced mailbox,” describes Callewaert. “It was one big pot where all the tickets ended up. We tried to empty it as quickly as possible, but more and more kept coming in. There were no reporting options or automations. It was anything but efficient.”

The IT department was too busy dealing with incidents, leaving little time to work on larger projects. It was high time for a new solution. During the search, ‘quick operational readiness’ was high on the wish list, along with user-friendliness and affordability. Automation, integrations (so that it could seamlessly connect with and to other tools), and being cloud-based were other conditions.

A Convincing Freshworks Demo

As a service desk employee, Maxime Maurau was closely involved in the selection process and introduced Freshservice at the last minute. Through Xebia, a platinum partner of Freshworks, Het Wit-Gele Kruis got to see a demo of Freshservice, and it turned out to be the best of the three they viewed, making the choice clear. Xebia was a pleasant and responsive partner throughout the entire procedure. Callewaert: “If you have to wait a long time for answers during the commercial process, that's not a good sign. But the service and collaboration with Xebia were truly top-notch.”

“Our last ticketing solution was very inefficient, the main reason why our IT team didn't have time for bigger projects.”

Benny Callewaert IT Director Wit-Gele Kruis

Smart Ticket Categorization

Het Wit-Gele Kruis primarily uses Freshservice as an internal helpdesk portal. The first-line helpdesk staff handle questions submitted by healthcare providers. These staff members first search for a solution in the knowledge base, and if that doesn't work, they create a ticket that is automatically distributed within Maurau's team. The solution is then communicated either via the first-line staff or directly by the service desk staff to the healthcare providers.

A common question is that certain devices don't seem to be working. The service desk then remotely observes the issue and assists further. “For example, if we notice that the person doesn't know how to use the device, we send them a link to a knowledge base article,” explains Maurau. And that knowledge base is growing significantly, resulting in fewer tickets on certain topics than before.

For the end users, like healthcare providers, the new way of working took some getting used to. They were used to sending an email when they had a question or problem, but this has been deliberately made impossible in the new workflow.

Now, either directly or through the first-line staff, they go through a structured set of categories on the portal to make their problem as clear and complete as possible. This makes it much clearer for the service desk what action is required. “And if there is still too much ambiguity, we can always choose to add more categories, for example with information that is always necessary to resolve a ticket in a mandatory field,” says Callewaert. This prevents many back-and-forth phone calls to get to the root of the problem.

“With Freshservice, it has become much clearer for our IT team what action is required.”

Benny Callewaert IT Director Wit-Gele Kruis

Benefits of Freshservice

A major advantage that Het Wit-Gele Kruis has noticed since implementing Freshservice is the ease of use and speed. “Especially in retrieving tickets,” says Maurau. “It used to be done manually, but now it's a lot easier and faster, and you can also find related tickets.”

Automations have also made Maurau's work much easier. “I don't have to manually assign half of the tickets anymore because Freshservice already does that automatically. We have set it up so that a large portion of the tickets automatically go to the right team and the right person.” Freshservice then clearly displays that workload on the central dashboard.

And that saves a lot of time. Maurau: “Previously, when I started up in the morning, I had a full mailbox. Now at least half of it is already automatically forwarded and picked up thanks to smart workflows.”

Standard answers also help with this, which were previously copied and pasted from a Word document that Maurau used. “Now it's just two clicks and done.” In terms of volume, the number of tickets has not decreased, Maurau believes. “But the turnaround time is much shorter.”

Another added benefit: “Our own server used to often get overloaded with many requests. Now with the cloud, we no longer have that problem.”

Future Plans of Wit-Gele Kruis

Het Wit-Gele Kruis also chose a very deliberate strategy for reporting, something that was previously not possible at all. “We started with Freshservice in September and chose to have the data and reports we obtained after four months analyzed by our Business Intelligence teams,” says Callewaert. Among other things, this produced a top 3 list of common problems, allowing us to very specifically allocate the capacity of the service desk and resolve issues more efficiently.

For the future, Het Wit-Gele Kruis has a lot of plans with Freshservice. For example, the knowledge base will be expanded specifically to address complex and technical issues. In addition, the company wants to further explore Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management soon with Xebia.