Elis Improves Customer Service with TOPdesk

How Elis use TOPdesk in their day-to-day global operations

Elis is the only rental and laundry company in the UK that can offer customers a one-stop-shop for a wide range of safety and hygiene solutions. The company has been a pioneer of the circular economy for more than 75 years.  Elis has a diverse range of customers that includes healthcare facilities, hotels, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and retail outlets for whom it provides a range of laundry and hygiene solutions including PPE and workwear rental, flat linen laundry, floorcare and washroom services.

They use TOPdesk across multiple departments in their day-to-day global operations, to help them provide a superior service to their 400,000 customers.

Enterprise Service Management

When looking for an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution, they had several requirements. As well as having solid ticketing and categorisation functionality and great reporting as a given, they needed a platform that could work for multiple departments across 28 countries, with the flexibility to host multiple languages at once.

Elis were looking to take a Shared Services approach which would allow an increased level of quality and savings across the organisation. The first step required a shared tool which would allow them to share processes and improve collaboration across the organisation.

After undertaking an analysis of three ESM solutions, TOPdesk was chosen as Elis’ partner of choice.

A Phased Implementation

Georgie Hewson, IT Technical Project Manager, was tasked with the onboarding roll out.

The first priority was onboarding the UK IT team, with the objective of implementing TOPdesk quickly and correctly. From here, Georgie’s team worked to onboard Ireland, as they had several sites and departments without a centralised system, so they were working from multiple spreadsheets.

The UK and Ireland saw a huge benefit in streamlining their processes straight away, which led to Poland being onboarded next.

From here, Georgie acted as a real TOPdesk champion, showing the product to several departments across different countries, demonstrating how they could benefit.

This led to their supply chain team being onboarded, resulting in them moving away from a shared inbox. New processes were created within TOPdesk for supplier relationships, and extra training was put in place for the supply chain team.

This created a feedback loop of positive implementations, with other countries coming to Georgie, requesting to be added to the project plan.

Nearly 100% of the implementations have been remote, (with the exception of the Netherlands, which Georgie travelled to so she could visit the TOPdesk head office!) with Georgie and her team having meetings remotely with the team manager of the relevant department, to set up forms and Active Directory before each onboarding. They have prioritised departments and countries based on both their immediate and longer term needs, and now have 5 or 6 departments onboarding at any given time.

Challenges within the onboarding usually involve departments who don’t have fixed processes, as they differ by country – for example, HR. This makes the onboarding process more complex than some of the departments who have more straight forward fixed processes.

Measuring Success

Elis have seen great success with TOPdesk already. They were able to implement TOPdesk with the first IT teams in the UK and Ireland quickly – within two months for each country. The collaboration between teams is another success, as Georgie has seen advocates of TOPdesk within the organisation promoting the platform to other departments.

They now have better visibility of what everyone is doing, allowing for reporting on ticket durations and where there might be bottlenecks, plus approval workflows mean that a lot of paperwork has been eliminated.

The Next Steps

19 branches out of 28 are using TOPdesk so far, with the intention of having every IT team and supply chain team implemented, and then finance, commercial support, facilities, operations, sales, and HR teams where possible.