Industry :

Energy & Utilities

Location :

MEA

Challenges:
  • Legacy Platform

  • Lack of workflow automation

  • Lack of IT service SLAs

  • Scalability and ease-of-use

About Conlog (Pty) Ltd

A worldwide leader, with over 30 years of experience in smart metering, Conlog (Pty) Ltd is the world’s leading metering solutions provider to utilities, municipalities, and property management companies in South Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Conlog’s innovation in smart metering assists customers with revenue management, revenue protection, load management, and demand management. 

Conlog offers holistic solutions to improve efficiencies in energy management, through quality products and solutions supported by exceptional customer service. Qualified service personnel are available 7 days a week, 365 days a year with technical support accessible through telephone, internet, and email.

Established in 1965 and spanning across over 4 continents and 20 countries, Conlog has a very strong focus on big data analytics and smart city solutions. Over 70 utilities use Conlog metering solutions, along with thousands of vending units and over 400 revenue management systems installed internationally and locally.

Background

Conlog used an IT Service Management system for incident and service management. With escalating licensing and customization fees, non-user-friendly user interfaces, and the absence of workflow automation becoming a bottleneck, the IT services team at Conlog began looking for a flexible solution that would increase service efficiency and; 

  • Allow the creation of new fields on mandatory information, contact creation, incident/service creation, and a summary description

  • Have the provision to add tasks to a service request with ease

  • Provide customization for the description, category, and product fields

  • Support a fully integrated workflow escalation process

In short, Conlog was excited and looking forward to finding an ITSM solution that would digitally transform the IT service landscape. Conlog investigated solutions considered best of breed for evaluation to specific use cases.

The Solution

Conlog was looking for a solution that would provide agility, scalability, zero maintenance and overhead challenges, value for money, and easy to deploy with out of the box integration. After thorough due diligence, Conlog decided to enroll Freshservice, Freshworks' ITSM suite, to modernize the organization’s IT services.

“Because of Freshservice, our organization has identified that IT is the central heartbeat of services and the reliance they need from data analysis and statistics has given concrete evidence about IT being a game-changer,” said Bianca Gulston, Services Team Leader at Conlog.

Benefits

With Freshservice, Conlog has been able to fulfill its objective of defining organization-wide ITSM processes and policies. They now have configured semantics for ticket inflow via several channels. The creation of request forms, categories, and new users is executed conveniently and with the workflow automation capability, agents can curate automated responses per different stages of the ticket management process, thus reducing the number of follow-up calls. 

Monitoring, tracking, auditing, and solving incidents or service requests from users has become easier, therefore user adoption and adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have increased drastically. Additionally, the IT Support team at Conlog have created dashboards to monitor SLAs and the different stages of incident and service requests. They can now focus on streamlining processes and increasing visibility and accountability. “Freshservice has afforded me the ability to introduce ITIL into the organization. With the product, my entire team is now ITIL Foundation V4 certified. Huge kudos to Freshservice,” says Gulston.

What’s next?

The IT Support team at Conlog plans to enhance its customer service by leveraging the Freshworks Bots and Asset Management functionality. With a special focus on project management, the team is looking forward to integrating Freshservice with Freshworks’ Project Management solution, Freshrelease. To increase the breadth of ticket log-in channels, integration with Freshcaller and Freshchat is also in the pipeline. 

With ease-of-use, excellent support, and valuable return on investment - apart from the current implementation and use by their finance, marketing, commercial, and supplier functions - Conlog plans to roll out the solution to other areas of the business such as facilities management.

“Freshservice has afforded me the ability to introduce ITIL into the organization. With the product, my entire team is now ITIL Foundation V4 certified. Huge kudos to Freshservice.”

bianca bianca
Bianca Gulston

Services Team Leader

Conlog (Pty) Ltd