Pan Pac Forest Products Ltd is New Zealand’s leading specialist in sustainable forest products, processing 1.5 million tonnes of logs per year into pulp, lumber and cut logs.
Managing forests, felling trees and processing thousands of tonnes of wood takes considerable heavy industry. But that hasn’t stopped Pan Pac from making extensive use of digital technology and automation too. As IT Manager, Jason Simons, explains, the company has carried out a complete technology stack refresh over the last 12 months.
Not your usual customer satisfaction survey
“There’s been a huge amount of change for our users within the business. Migration to Office 365, a new fibre LAN/WAN, integrated BI analytics, hyperconverged server farm, hybrid cloud, Citrix for legacy apps; the works.
As part of this digital journey, I needed to find a low touch, yet direct method of finding out what our internal customers thought of the service we were providing. My goal was to measure every interaction we have with our customers, and not the usual 6-12 month survey.”
The Pan Pac corporate IT team services 500 users across various locations in the Hawke’s Bay region of New Zealand, with around 160 office-based and 340 production staff. In previous roles at other companies, Jason had executed surveys using Google Forms as a means of tracking customer satisfaction levels, but felt that repeating this approach would be a non-starter.
“We field approximately 900 tickets a month,” he explains. “What I really wanted was a survey tool that could fit inside the support ticket management process so we could gain immediate feedback from individual users. Specifically, to sit directly inside each service ticket closure email.”
Native ITSM platform integration
In evaluating the market, Jason sought a tool that could satisfy this scaled-up requirement while integrating natively with Pan Pac’s Connectwise ticketing system.
“The Customer Thermometer product set, with its embedded survey capability, was spot on and exactly what I had in mind. In practice, the Connectwise integration turned out to be superb and very straightforward.”
Today, all newly closed Pan Pac service tickets are followed up with a notification email that embeds the Customer Thermometer rating tool with the question: “How would you rate our service on this ticket?” According to Jason, the stats have been outstanding, netting a response rate of 64%.
“What’s even more impressive is that we launched the tool with zero fanfare and no instruction or explanation to users. They just respond! We’ve had no queries as to ‘what is this extra thing you’re asking me?’”
Valuable CSAT insights
The result is that Pan Pac has, within a few weeks, been able to gain immediate and real-time insight into the satisfaction level of the majority of its 500 or so internal IT customers. Not only that, but the insights obtained have already been fed back into further service and support improvements.
“Now that we have a baseline, I’m working with my staff to understand the responses, both at an individual level, and trend analysis such as per division and per technology/project,” says Jason. “Ultimately we’re asking ourselves, how can we do better? How can we make the next ticket a better experience for our users?”
The success of Jason’s Customer Thermometer initiative has been gaining attention among colleagues from other departments who are drawn to the potential value of applying it themselves. While no plans have been made so far, it’s clear how Pan Pac could evolve its use of the technology among external paying customers and other audience groups.
“Customer Thermometer has delivered an excellent product and service,” says Jason. “The wide acceptance, with zero explanation, has been great. I think everyone is watching to see how the business receives the surveys before deciding where else we might take it. And that’s all been positive so far.”
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