How FIP Group cut resolution times by 350% with Zendesk and SweetHawk

FIP Group is an Australia-based recruitment and workforce solutions provider under the PeopleIN group umbrella. The organisation manages housing, visa applications, payroll, and employee support for over 6,000 international staff placed across more than 150 Australian companies — handling up to 100 staff inquiries at any given time.

With that kind of volume and complexity, their existing email-based system simply couldn't keep up. Inquiries were missed, response times were slow, and there was no clear picture of who was responsible for what. Unwired, a Zendesk implementation partner, worked with FIP Group to fix this — deploying Zendesk and SweetHawk to overhaul their operations.

The challenge

Before the change, FIP Group's HR and support teams were drowning in unstructured communication. Inquiries arrived via email with no triage, no ownership, and no way to track status or escalate appropriately. For a business handling compliance-sensitive processes like visa applications and housing, that lack of structure was a serious risk.

• No visibility into who owned each inquiry or how long it had been open
• Missed inquiries and slow response times frustrating both staff and clients
• High inquiry volume — up to 100 at a time — with no systematic way to manage it
• Compliance requirements demanding detailed records for each interaction

The solution

Unwired mapped FIP Group's 10 high-level service groups and their 25–30 sub-processes, identifying responsible stakeholders at each step. They then built automated workflows in Zendesk backed by SweetHawk apps to enforce those processes at scale.

SweetHawk's apps gave FIP Group the tools to manage structured, multi-step workflows directly inside Zendesk — automating task assignment, tracking approvals, and ensuring nothing fell through the cracks as inquiries moved through the system.

"For the first time, we know exactly What is where with Whom and for How long."

— FIP Group

The results

The impact was measurable and significant. With structured workflows in place, FIP Group's team could actually keep pace with demand — and more importantly, respond before issues escalated.

• 20% reduction in new tickets year-over-year
• 34% of tickets now receive a reply within one hour — a 200% improvement
• Average resolution time dropped to 16 hours — a 350% improvement over baseline
• Reduced stress across HR and dispatch teams

Beyond the numbers, the change gave FIP Group's leadership something they hadn't had before: genuine visibility. For a business managing thousands of international employees across a complex support structure, knowing where every inquiry stands — and who owns it — is transformative.

Read the full story on Unwired's blog.