About the company

Foster Clark Products (FCP) was founded in 1894 by three brothers in the United Kingdom. Foster Clark Products is a local manufacturing company, operating internationally, which produces food and beverage products.  The company has a market presence in over 80 countries, ranging across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. With nearly 500 employees, Foster Clark Products is an industry leader both in Malta and abroad.

The challenge

As with any large and fast-growing organisation, seamless lines of communication between various teams and departments is critical to Foster Clark Products’ operation. Any issues that arise need to be communicated with the appropriate teams quickly and actioned efficiently and effectively to reduce any downtime to degradation of service. Internal teams originally used a series of shared Outlook mailboxes for issue reporting and communication. Although this system is quick and easy to implement, it ultimately lacks any kind of accountability, offers no visibility on ownership of tickets, has no reporting capability, and could be unstable with large enough volumes.

Businesses need structure in order to function and grow. At Foster Clark, the IT department services the company with all its IT needs and provides support on IT systems, being hardware or software.  It has two main teams: Infrastructure and Business Applications, which manage the relevant systems as required.  The Infrastructure section ensures that all systems are up and running with minimal downtime while the Business Applications section ensures that the business needs are being catered for through the current systems and strive in increasing automation and efficiency.

This meant that employees were sending emails or calling the IT department to describe what their issue is. This resulted in having a mailbox that could never be managed, and the department had no visibility on who was working on an issue and the amount of requests made by each department. This created a lot of confusion and the IT department was not handling support effectively and with no clear direction on a strategy to reduce the amount of requests. Hence this system was too time consuming and definitely needed more organisation and structure.

The solution and the iMovo experience

In such a scenario, it was clear that Foster Clark needed a system which was quick and easy to set up, efficient to use, with audit log and reporting functionalities. It was also crucial for the IT department to have visibility on ticket ownership to see who is currently solving the issue. Lastly, the ideal platform for Foster Clark would be one that offers a knowledge base for users to self-service.

After a few internal meetings and viewing demos of three help desk systems, Zendesk proved to be the best option for Foster Clark. The system was up and running within four weeks, with all automation in place.  

Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide fulfilled all of the requirements and currently powers the support operation of four teams across two departments: the IT and Engineering department. Each team, despite using a shared platform, operates independently of the others and has bespoke customisations that optimise the system for their unique requirements. Tickets are automatically created in Zendesk via email and are automatically routed to the correct team depending on the email address used by the end user.

Zendesk Guide also offers an internal help desk for Foster Clark Products employees to self-serve, with a dedicated portal and widget embedded on their internal employee portals to deflect tickets away from the teams using Zendesk, and free them up to focus on the truly challenging issues.

The support model implemented by iMovo for Foster Clark proved scalable when the Engineering teams were brought on board with minimal changes made to the existing platform and allowing Foster Clark Products to instead build on a strong foundation.

The benefits 

Thanks to iMovo and their partnership with Zendesk, Foster Clark now have better visibility on the type of issues that the company receives and the type of problems that arise by department and system.  Users are now proactively trained on recurring issues. Zendesk is also providing better visibility to management on the actual time spent per agent/department solving support issues in parallel with day to day running of operations and implementing new projects at the same time.

Thanks to the built-in reporting functionality, Foster Clark Products is now able to report on the nature of issues raised, the timeliness of replies, and have better visibility of the ticket volumes worked on.

With automatic routing, ownership visibility, and macros, Foster Clark Products agents within the IT and Engineering teams are able to focus on actioning tickets rather than organising them in folders within a shared mailbox. Visibility of ticket ownership has also eliminated incidents of multiple agents working on the same ticket simultaneously. This has highly improved the IT department’s efficiency, with better organisation and therefore more productivity and a better workplace.

Paul Demanuele, Technical Director at Foster Clark Products explained that the recent uptake of Zendesk worked out great for their team. The best function was the ability to give feedback quickly and remotely, especially since they travel a lot.

If you would like to learn more about Zendesk or any of the services offered by iMovo, please contact us on [email protected].