Opening context
Carbery is a global food ingredients business with 1,000 employees operating across manufacturing sites, laboratories, offices, and partner locations in EMEA, the Americas, and APAC. Its workforce spans production, engineering, R&D, and commercial teams — each with different technology needs and proximity to IT support.
IT is mission-critical at Carbery: keeping supply chains moving, ensuring compliance, enabling productivity across a distributed operation in environments that range from factory floors to commercial offices. The question was not whether IT was performing. The metrics said it was. The question was whether those metrics were telling the full story.
The situation
CIO Anthony O’Callaghan had good operational data. Ticket volumes were manageable. SLAs were largely met. But the picture those metrics produced was incomplete in a specific way.
“As useful as SLAs and Help Desk stats were, they didn’t show us the day-to-day experience.”
— Anthony O’Callaghan, CIO, Carbery
Ticket feedback was transactional. When positive, it masked recurring problems and silent frustrations. When negative, it reflected only the fraction of friction that had reached the help desk — not the broader picture across manufacturing floors, laboratory environments, and remote sites. A single loud voice in any site-level conversation could set the agenda. Representative patterns across roles and locations could not be reliably separated from isolated complaints.
Effort could follow the last escalation rather than the actual distribution of friction across the enterprise.
What the independent record showed
Voxxify was deployed across all of Carbery’s environments — manufacturing, laboratory, and office — reaching employees across regions and roles in a structured, time-bound deployment. Analysis surfaced patterns that existing data could not: where friction was widespread and where it was isolated, which sites were underserved, which services were performing as expected, and which were not.
The record produced 1,700 verbatim comments at a 46% response rate across a workforce distributed across three continents. Regional IT leaders in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific received segmented findings within minutes of the record closing.
Specific issues emerged that ticket data had not surfaced: regions without adequate on-site IT support, video conferencing reliability problems, outdated hardware affecting productivity in operational environments. Alongside them, services performing well were confirmed — allowing the team to avoid unnecessary intervention and direct attention where it would have the greatest impact.
What changed
Priorities shifted from reactive to representative. Resources moved toward the actual distribution of friction across the enterprise rather than the most recent escalation. Regional IT leads used the findings as the basis for their annual planning — with segmented data that gave each region a specific picture of where to focus.
The record also changed the vendor management conversation. Independent operational data — captured from the people using the service, not from the vendor’s own reporting — gave the team a reference point that no service provider could dispute or prepare for. Over two consecutive years of measurement, a pattern emerged about one managed service provider that the metrics had not shown.
“A certain managed service provider scored very poorly in year one. And again in year two. They will not be around for year three.”
— Anthony O’Callaghan, CIO, Carbery
The outcome
Between year one and year two, scores improved significantly in the areas prioritized as a result of the independent record:
- Overall IT experience: +9%
- Meeting rooms: +10%
- Online training: +10%
- Collaboration tools: +6%
The independent record did not replace existing operational data. It gave it context. Metrics that had previously been read as confirmation became readable as a partial picture — and the full picture changed what the team could act on, plan against, and stand over.
