PPS modernizes ITSM and improves support with Freshservice

About PPS

The Professional Provident Society is South Africa’s only mutual financial services company that offers exclusive insurance, investments and healthcare solutions tailor-made for multi-disciplinary graduate professionals. PPS boasts in excess of 200,000 members who enjoy access to a comprehensive suite of financial and healthcare products. Their motto is to enable its members by providing best-in-class financial services.

2023 IT Strategy at PPS

The 2023 IT strategy at PPS had three clear focus areas -

• Move from on-premise legacy system to scalable and cloud-based tools

• Improve system security

• Implement ITIL best practices

Obstacles with the on-premise system

The IT team at PPS was using Microsoft System Center Service Manager, an on-premise solution. The tool was out-dated and hard to manage. It did not align with PPS’s IT strategy and could not scale to meet their growing demands.

Collaboration between the agents and teams was crucial to escalate and resolve tickets. Their existing tool could not provide visibility among teams and escalations were manually done over emails. SLA management was poor with MSCSM. There was a huge backlog of open tickets/requests and were often difficult to trace. There was no reporting in their existing tool which left them with no feedback for performance improvements. PPS was in urgent need of a scalable service desk that was cloud-based and ITIL-aligned.

Winning with Freshservice

Freshservice was a breath of fresh air at PPS. With the award-winning implementation Freshservice team, 150 agents at PPS were onboarded in less than 2 hours. Sonja Visagie, Head of IT service delivery at PPS, mentioned, “We value partnerships at PPS, and Freshworks is a strategic partner to us. The advisory services from their team of experts ensured seamless onboarding from sales to implementation.”

With improved reporting and advanced analytics, PPS turned around the state of IT service delivery at PPS. Gamification of the service desk greatly improved agent productivity and morale. PPS could reduce their level 1 response time to 3 - 30 minutes and level 2 response time to 6 hours. With the help of Freshservice, PPS closes 2000 tickets a month. PPS now meet 98% of SLAs with Freshservice. “Freshservice is highly intuitive, easy to use and perfectly aligns with 2023 IT strategy at PPS,” says Sonja.

Future with Freshservice

As next steps, Sonja is focused on scaling Freshservice to multiple PPS locations, starting with South Africa. PPS is excited to roll out the Freshservice mobile application and consolidate the knowledge base. “The strategy is to deflect 100% level 1 tickets with the knowledge base and self-service portal.”, Sonja mentions. PPS is thrilled to explore Freddy, the smart support bot that instantly responds to the queries customers might have.

PPS plans to run campaigns internally for the next six months reintroducing incident management, request management, release management and other features to improve service desk adoption and rebrand the IT team internally. PPS believes in working with a ‘strategic partner’ and not just a vendor. With Freshservice, they have found just that.