Kent State University’s IT team embraces student-first approach

Kent State University is one of Ohio’s leading public universities, serving 33,000 students across eight campuses. The university distinguishes itself with a student-first environment that delivers quality academic experiences and top-tier support to help students succeed.

The Service Management team at Kent State knows how important it is to make systems and services easy to interact with, both for students, faculty, and staff. The team’s previous IT service management (ITSM) solution required them to engage developers to launch new features, making it difficult to innovate and move quickly. To raise the bar on its support experiences, the university turned to Freshservice.

Today, instead of waiting a day or two for an engineer, the internal team implements simple features in just five minutes. The nimble platform supports a range of ITSM functions with its intuitive helpdesk, curated knowledge base, customizable service catalog, and integrated change management capabilities.

In addition to enabling top-tier IT support for the Kent State community, the Philanthropy and Alumni Relations/Engagement department switched from Salesforce to the more budget-friendly Freshworks solution to manage its donation workflows. Overall, Freshservice is helping the university make sure its student-first mission permeates its operations.

The company

Kent State University is a public research university with a rich history of growth, diversity, and academic excellence. Located in northern Ohio, the university is home to 25,000 Kent Campus undergraduate and graduate students and 8,000 Regional Campus students. More than 4,300 employees proudly make up the university’s workforce.

The challenge

Many factors contribute to a student’s decision of which university to attend. It’s not only about location, degrees offered, and reputation—more subtle influences such as atmosphere, community, and even technology infrastructure are also important. As a result, user experience is now part of the IT department’s lexicon at Kent State.

However, with admission applications and enrollment increasing across its campuses, Kent State struggled to serve the growing IT demands of students and employees. Its legacy ticketing platform required developer resources to implement new features, and workflow automation restrictions created a less-than-optimal experience on both sides of the support equation. Understanding that how systems look, work, and feel can influence a student’s perception of a quality education, the Service Management team knew it needed a change.

 “Before attending orientation, one of the first interactions students have with the university is when they set up their accounts,” says Jay Frye, senior director of service management at Kent State. “If they need help, our software and the way we put ourselves forward online may be one of their first, and lasting, impressions of the university.” 

Frye and Michael Skotko, manager of the Helpdesk, were part of the team that evaluated ITSM platforms to replace the previous system. They knew they wanted a more modern, omnichannel solution with robust routing rules based on user details, location, role, and type of ticket. Ease of use for the department’s 310 service agents, 40% of whom are part-time students, was also a priority. The power of Freshservice, built on Neo Platform and powered by AWS, and the ability to operate and innovate without involving engineering helped it come out on top.

The solution

The university implemented Freshservice with support from the Freshworks Professional Services team. Over time, the relationship between Freshworks and Kent State has grown into a true partnership. In addition to employee service management, the university is taking advantage of the service catalog and integrated knowledge base, which contains more than 1,500 pieces of curated content.

“I’ve launched three or four ticketing or ITSM platforms and this was the smoothest launch by a longshot,” says Frye. “We were ready to launch months ahead of schedule and went from having a ticketing platform with other stuff bolted on to a true service management platform.”

When students move into their dorm rooms, one of the first things they want to do to feel at home is connect their devices to the Internet. If they encounter issues, they can visit a single landing page for all-encompassing support. From there, it's easy to submit a ticket or access support articles. While the Service Management team works hard to make these first days easy, they also have agents who will show up to a student’s dorm room and walk them through the process if needed.

On the agent side, Kent State takes advantage of incident management features to auto-assign tickets based on departments and track incidents submitted through various channels in a single view. Both capabilities help to speed response and resolution times.

The use of Freshservice has extended beyond the IT department to Kent State’s Philanthropy and Alumni Relations/Engagement department. In addition to creating and managing their own services and routing rules tied to their giving form and donations, the team is actively building new services and workflows without IT support.

“Freshservice is built to be approachable, and as a result, more people use it at a deeper level,” says Skotko. “In the past, everything flowed through me. Now we’re seeing multiple people edit knowledge base articles and spin up services. That frees my time to tackle bigger projects.”

Impact

Before implementing Freshservice, the engineering team spent three months creating a custom workflow with multiple approvals for staff to follow if they needed to access certain types of data. When the Freshworks team came on board, they rebuilt the custom workflow in Freshservice and had it working in one afternoon. A service bot now manages the requests, and the approver receives a pop-up message in Microsoft Teams and can approve in seconds. This ability to quickly implement new features is a game changer.

Also notable is the IT department’s ability to resolve student and employee issues. Agents staffing the triage queue handle ticket escalations that don’t have a predefined landing spot. First-response times average less than three hours and resolution times average 14.22 hours, both well below industry benchmarks. The team is also proud of its CSAT rating, which consistently averages in the mid-90s.

The Service Management team is now turning to Freshservice to support its move from change management to change enablement, replacing a homegrown system that would have required extensive recoding. As a result, the team’s less technical helpdesk manager can manage and configure Freshservice rather than requiring a coder to make changes.

“We started looking at Freshservice as a piece of software to solve a problem. What we got was a platform that can grow with us and a true partnership that helps us continue enhancing the experiences we deliver,” says Frye.