STF Turist improved efficiency and achieved higher customer satisfaction with Freshdesk

About Company

Founded in 1885 in Uppsala, STF (Svenska Turistforeningen) is one of the largest tourism association in Sweden. With over 2,38,000 members across the globe, the association offers mountain stations and hostels around Sweden along with several recreational activities organised throughout the year.

STF availed Freshdesk to improve its member experience and communication services.

Goal (Challenge)

Established with the motto to aid people to explore Sweden, the Business and IT support team at STF provided necessary support to association members. The team received member requests and tickets via emails. With expanding tourism and increasing enquiries, the support team found it difficult to communicate with their members via emails. The email support provided proved insufficient for the immediate support that the members needed and this affected the on-time resolution capabilities of STF’s Business & IT support team.

The company needed a centralized channel to interact with the members for booking and other tourism support services. Prior to Freshdesk, the company used Multisoft, a home grown application, primarily for the internal use.

Elaborating the situation before Freshdesk, Magnus Krantz, Head of Business Support, explained “The old tool was ineffective and quite complicated as we had to sort out the emails in it and convert them manually into tickets every day.” With number of emails in line, it was challenging to keep track of their status and maintain their statistics. This led to multiple agents working on the same request several times, thereby affecting the efficiency and productivity of the association.

Having identified the gap in ticket management, Magnus decided to find a suitable solution. He reached out to multiple internal teams and created a common wish list for a ticket management solution suited for the requirements of STF.

Apart from Freshdesk, Magnus evaluated, Zendesk, Jira, Pureservice and Easit. Freshdesk won over the rest owing to its compliance to the wish list, competitive pricing, and structured pricing plans.

Solution we provided

Implementation and transition from old platform to Freshdesk was seamless and un-interruptive for STF.

Magnus added, “Marcus from Freshdesk was here from the first day to guide us through the implementation. So, we had a good backup and Helena and I got to learn a lot about the tool. Within 2 weeks of time, Freshdesk became very useful tool very fast and people had forgotten about the earlier one.”

Freshdesk solved one of the biggest challenges faced by STF. It automated the ticket generation process from the emails received. Freshdesk aided the support team at STF in efficiently managing emails from internal as well as external customer groups.

Magnus elaborated, “External groups raise tickets via emails while 40-50% of internal tickets are received through the portal. Using Freshdesk, we efficiently manage and track these requests through various channels of communication.”

Automation

Magnus implemented the automation rules extensively. He managed day to day workflows more efficiently with dispatcher, supervisor and observer rules.

Canned Responses

Understanding the business needs of STF, Freshdesk was able to help the agents deliver the service at the right time and acknowledge the member requests proactively. Magnus found canned responses and Team Huddle feature to be highly efficient and timesaving. Using the Team Huddle feature STF could consult their internal support team easily and quickly update the member. “Team Huddle helped us a lot when we could not find the data and helped us make data-driven decisions” added Magnus.

Magnus also found the parent-child ticketing functionality very useful especially in the case of onboarding a new personnel.

Agent Collation

A very unique feature in Freshdesk, Agent Collation, enabled instant alerts if two agents started working on the same ticket. This avoided duplication of efforts and saved the agent’s time in working on similar tickets.

Overall, STF extensively leveraged functionalities including knowledge base, reporting, and automation rules in Freshdesk to improve the communication process in the association.

Successes

With synchronised data and streamlined process, STF achieved higher customer satisfaction and improved overview of the statistics. Magnus being a data loving person, benefited from Freshdesk as he gained better control over the numbers. He leveraged reporting to measure daily, monthly and quarterly data. Also before using Freshdesk there were no parameters in place while after implementation of Freshdesk, Magnus defined the SLAs.

Magnus observed 100% increase in the tickets and yet Freshdesk empowered the team to provide quick response to all the tickets.

Moving forward, Magnus plans to use Freshchat, FAQs, CSAT surveys in the next few months.