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IT investment boost franchisee support at Kwik Kopy

Sarah Stowe

 

Kwik Kopy’s award-winning graphic design and print services has enabled Australian businesses to attract and retain customers, and increase sales for almost 40 years. But to do this effectively franchisees need quick responses to problems, and in a high tech environment, providing excellent IT support is an essential.

Up until early 2011, Kwik Kopy’s Management Information System (MIS) was managed by its internal IT team of five. But with a high volume of incoming support requests from its more than 100 centres, and a relatively small team, the process of managing the help desk was becoming increasingly cumbersome.

C-Y Thew, business solutions manager, Kwik Kopy, explains lack of data and tracking facilities in the incumbent customised system was holding back service improvements. “It was really difficult for us to gauge just how busy the IT support team was becoming and whether we were providing them with the level of resourcing required to service our franchises efficiently and effectively.”

The business wanted clarity amongst every team member on the tasks that had been assigned to them. It also sought a system that would allow the management team to have a quick overview of outstanding issues.

The solution was a cloud-based system that functions entirely online so there is no need for users to install the product, no maintenance and no upgrades required. In supplier trials the Zendesk system received only positive feedback. Ease of use with just minimal training added to the system’s appeal.

“Most importantly, it saves us time and money and enables us to have a much more transparent and intelligent view of our customer support. For our business stakeholders this has proved invaluable,” explains Thew.

Franchisees can now spend less time problem solving and more time building business.

 

Flexible, easy to use and fast, instant access

“The beauty of Zendesk for our particular business model is that it gives us the ability to ensure we support each store equally. Because we can prioritise easily, we can also identify problems quickly. There is more visibility for the amount of support that we, the franchisor, provide. Our franchisees can see that we are delivering fast and effective issue resolution and support,” says Thew.

 

“Each of our five team members has a different support function. For example, if one of our Kwik Kopy franchisee stores contacts us in the head office, we log them in Zendesk. It may be a question, problem or request that they have for their MIS system to be looked at. Once it is logged in, a ticket is raised and we are able to action it — we assign it to a relevant team member for the task to be resolved. At the end of the month, we then generate reports to see which categories have the most tickets, and which team member has resolved the most. This allows us to plan resources in line with business needs or to provide training to a particular Kwik Kopy store if there are many issues logged against it.”

Thew explains there had been no data to track such information. “We now have the ability to search previous issues easily, which takes the guess-work out of support.”

Thew describes the cloud-based solution as a one-stop-shop, an effective shortcut to service, condensing information that would otherwise be accessed by emails and phone calls.

The team works to a same-day response time, so on a practical level the system provides IT team members with easy access — there is no extensive server security process, and the system loads quickly, adding to the efficiency of the process.

The cloud-based structure also means there is no installation to worry about and no servers to fix or plug in. Most support is software and product based and for Thew, with web to print responsibilities, the support is effectively training franchisees in how to use the system.

Kwik Kopy has just started to monitor through Zendesk whether, with the widespread use of technical tools such as the iPad, the requests for IT support have increased. “We’re finding it’s on par with before, because people are more savvy and use the technology themselves anyway,” says Thew.

 

Future forecast

When Kwik Kopy first started using Zendesk it mainly used it to log issues that had been resolved. The team has since moved on to use it in real-time to log issues that are being worked on, and exchange notes between team members. As workloads increase, the vision is to roll it out across its network of franchises so that they can log their issues through Zendesk directly. Thew expects this to take place within the next 18 months.