Freshservice leads IT transformation for research giant Elsevier

Streamlined, cloud-based support platform transformed users’ relationship to IT

67%First line resolution
93%First contact resolution
96%User satisfaction

"The promise of AI/ML capabilities and advanced analytics across multiple modules is an exciting future to be a part of."

Matthew Higgins
Matthew HigginsVP Technology, Infrastructure & Operations

Business challenge

  • Support Elsevier’s strategic investment in AWS

  • Bring ITSM in-house

Business outcome

  • With an intuitive portal, knowledge base, and service catalog, self-service has increased from 38% to 45%

One of the world’s major providers of scientific and medical information, Elsevier publishes over 470,000 articles annually in over 2,500 journals. 

REGION

U.K.

PRODUCTS

Elsevier has been curating, verifying, and producing some of the world’s most crucial scientific, technical, and medical knowledge for 140 years.

The company has also maintained a digital-first IT strategy for years to help organize massive volumes of research. Its IT operation analyzes over 1 billion scientific articles from 2.5 million researchers and uses collaborative filtering to generate over 250 million article recommendations.

Understanding the need to constantly innovate and stay competitive, Elsevier undertook a massive digital transformation initiative, migrating infrastructure services to AWS and giving IT a facelift, both by bringing it in house and changing the way it operated altogether.

The company

One of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information, Elsevier is a key player in information and analytics in global research and health systems. It publishes more than 470,000 articles annually in over 2,500 journals.

Elsevier’s products and services include the entire academic research lifecycle, including software and data management, instruction, and assessment tools.

The challenge

As a digital-first and data-driven business, Elsevier’s IT team is required to operate at unparalleled scale, speed, and efficiency. Its digital transformation initiative aimed to shift the company’s digital operations into the cloud by migrating infrastructure services to AWS, deploying best-of-breed SaaS applications, and modernizing IT services. One important facet of this initiative was bringing IT service management (ITSM) in-house to scale as fast as the business needed it to.

Existing ITSM tools could not support the fast-moving, agile organization or do justice to Elsevier’s strategic investment in AWS cloud infrastructure. Engagement between employees and IT was hindered by legacy processes and tools. For example, employees didn’t have accessible resources with answers to tech questions, driving them to create tickets for even the most basic tasks. 

The solution

As a driver of scientific advances, Elsevier had ambitious goals. Its ideal ITSM platform would: 

  • Handle sufficient scale and speed of operations 

  • Provide flexibility for fast-changing needs

  • Deliver great employee experiences 

  • Operate in the cloud, out of the box

  • Offer an intuitive interface with fast time-to-value

With Freshservice, Elsevier configured a new platform in record time, launching after just eight weeks. Over the next six months, the company rolled out the new ITSM platform for 65 offices and 7,500 employees. Thanks to Freshworks’ intuitive tools, onboarding and training IT agents was easy and fast.

Exceptional end-user support at Elsevier means that we know the voice of our users, their experiences, personas, and desired business outcomes.

Matthew Higgins

VP Technology, Infrastructure & Operations

Impact

IT services made the leap from being reactive to proactive—arming employees with resources to educate them on IT processes and to perform certain tasks on their own. An intuitive portal, knowledge base, and service catalog increased self-service from 38% to 45%. Today, 700 agents use Freshservice to support 9,500 employees, close 15,000 tickets/month, and manage 30,000 assets at Elsevier.