Kalmar’s journey from IT metrics to experience intelligence

After Kalmar separated from Cargotec, they had a rare opportunity to build all their IT services from the ground up.

In the early days, everything looked smooth on the surface. Services were running smoothly, tickets were being handled, and traditional KPIs appeared healthy.

But the employee experience told a different story.

"Everything looked very rosy in the beginning. But it was not long before we realized that actually everything is not as green as it looks.” — Kimmo Kukkonen, Kalmar.

🎧 Ps. Listen to the full webinar with
Kimmo Kukkonen from Kalmar here!

The limits of traditional IT metrics

Kimmo explained that traditional metrics often fail to capture the real impact on employees.

Tickets can sit on hold while SLA clocks pause. Resolution times may appear acceptable, even when employees have been waiting far too long to return to productive work.

“We are missing the true impact on the user.” — Kimmo Kukkonen

It reflects a broader challenge many IT organizations face today. Dashboards say performance, employees say pain.

Turning employee feedback into action

What changed for Kalmar was the collection and use of experience data to drive decisions.

The team analyzed employee feedback and identified specific locations, processes, and service issues that needed attention.

Rather than making broad changes across the organization, they could focus efforts exactly where employees were struggling the most!

The result was measurable improvement. For example, one location that had previously struggled with employee experience saw a dramatic turnaround after targeted actions based on employee feedback.

“We have been able to allocate our actions correctly and do the corrective and preventive actions as users wanted them to be.” — Kimmo Kukkonen.

Another powerful moment came from a single employee comment. Feedback revealed that quick actions from the support team helped Kalmar avoid major downtime at one of its storage locations. This is clearly something traditional reporting would never have uncovered.

“Due to the rapid actions taken by the agents, we were able to avoid huge downtime at one of our storage locations.” — End-user feedback shared by Kimmo Kukkonen.

That’s the difference between measuring activity and understanding impact.

Lost time changed the conversation

A major turning point in Kalmar’s ITXM journey came when the team started focusing more heavily on lost productivity time.

Instead of looking only at ticket-handling metrics, they began asking a more meaningful question: How much productive time are employees losing because of IT friction?

That shift helped the team better understand business impact and opened new conversations around prioritization and investment decisions.

“That creates a perfect possibility to start evaluating how much we could invest in our services to reduce that lost time.” — Kimmo Kukkonen.

This is where experience intelligence becomes much more than a survey exercise. It becomes a business decision-making tool.

Early warning signals matter

One insight Kimmo highlighted was the value of detecting problems early.

Rather than waiting for issues to grow large enough to appear in operational reporting, experience data helped the team spot dips immediately and investigate them before they escalated further.

For Kalmar, this changed the way IT operates.

Employee feedback became an active management tool instead of a passive reporting exercise.

Experience management is not just technology

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the webinar was that IT Experience Management is ultimately about culture and ways of working, not just tools.

Kimmo described ITXM as something the organization learns step by step. Not a one-time deployment, but an evolving operational mindset focused on understanding how people actually experience IT.

"This is a way of working more than a technology.” — Kimmo Kukkonen

And maybe the clearest summary of the entire session came near the end:

“People, users, our customers — our reason for existence. We need to know how they feel.” — Kimmo Kukkonen

Moving beyond green dashboards

Kalmar’s story highlights a growing shift happening across enterprise IT.

Organizations are realizing that traditional IT metrics alone cannot explain employee experience. SLAs, ticket closures, and technical performance still matter, but they only show part of the picture.

Real improvement can start when IT understands:

• Where frustration lives
• Which employees are losing time, and where
• Which locations or teams are struggling the most
• What actions actually improve experience

A resolved ticket doesn’t always mean it felt resolved, and green dashboards do not always mean employees are happy and succeeding.