Manchester Metropolitan University unifies service delivery across 90 teams

At Manchester Metropolitan University, getting help meant decoding the org chart. A student with a question about enrollment might email one team, get redirected to another, and start the whole process over if neither was the right fit. Across a community of 45,000 students and staff, that kind of friction wasn't just inconvenient — it was a structural problem.

MMU's answer was to stop asking people to navigate the institution and start designing service around them. The University rolled out Freshservice across nearly 90 professional service teams spanning seven departments — one portal, one place to go, with the right team picking up the request on the other side.

The result: consistent metrics across every team, live performance visibility replacing static monthly reports, and a collaborative service culture that proved its value during a major student records system go-live. "It's almost like compound interest," says Jack Christopher, Assistant Director for Service Management. "It starts feeding on itself."

The company

Manchester Metropolitan University is one of the UK's largest universities, serving a community of approximately 45,000 students and staff across multiple buildings in Manchester.

The challenge

For years, getting help at Manchester Metropolitan University meant knowing exactly who to ask — and hoping you'd guessed right. The University's service operations had grown increasingly digitized, but that digitization had happened in silos. IT ran its own service desk. HR had its own processes. Professional Services teams all operated independently. None of these systems talked to each other, and none were designed around the people they were supposed to serve. "We had put ourselves at the center," says Jack. "We had not necessarily put the customer at the center."

The pain was sharpest where processes crossed departmental lines. A single request might require action from three teams using three different systems — and if a ticket stalled in one team's inbox, no one else knew it was stuck. The result was failure demand: students chasing updates, staff duplicating work, and teams solving problems they didn't know had already been solved elsewhere. "There was a real tangible cost to that for us," Jack says.

What Manchester Met needed was a way to work more holistically and collaboratively across departments — without forcing every team into IT's mold. The platform had to be flexible enough to respect how each department actually worked, while giving students and staff one place to go for help regardless of who needed to pick up the request on the other side.

The solution

Manchester Met chose Freshservice because it would unify service delivery without flattening every department into a single way of working. The rollout was incremental and deliberate. Rather than launching across all seven departments at once, the team started with high-volume, student-facing teams where the benefit would be most immediate, then brought on departments with less obvious use cases early enough to prove the model could flex.

“Freshservice's intuitive design made it easy to roll out across 45,000 users—the learning curve has been minimal,” says Martina Holubcova, Assistant Director of Service Management.

The approach was as much about people as platform. Departments like HR and Education Services — teams that understood service delivery instinctively, even without ITIL terminology — became advocates who translated the vision for skeptical colleagues. "They could put things in a different way," Jack says. "They could show different use cases that weren't necessarily IT use cases."

Freshservice, powered by AWS, gave Manchester Met a scalable, cloud-based foundation to deploy a single platform across nearly 90 teams. Each department operates within its own workspace, with control over its own SLAs, ticket fields, and agent groups. But all teams share a baseline of common metrics: response times, resolution rates, first contact resolution, and customer satisfaction. Students and staff now have just one portal to turn to, with only one request needed, while the right team picks it up on the other side.

“Freshservice gave us one front door for the entire University,” says Christopher. “Students and staff don't need to know which team handles their request.”

The impact

Nearly 90 teams across seven University departments now operate on a single platform, serving 45,000 users. The implementation, led in partnership with Freshworks Professional Services, was delivered on time and on budget and rated 10 out of 10 by University leadership.

The real validation came during a recent go-live of a new student records system — a massive technical and process change that touched teams across the University. Because every team was already working in Freshservice with consistent workflows and shared metrics, they could pass tickets seamlessly, identify repeat issues through live reporting, and update knowledge articles in real time. "Previously, producing the report was the outcome," Jack says. "Now the report is there and it's live. You can actually have those conversations and drill into it."

"This isn't just a technical change — it's a step forward in how we work, engage, and provide help across the University," says Holubcova. "More importantly, it sets the foundation for ongoing innovation and service improvement."