Suffolk County Council resolves tickets faster with Freshservice

Suffolk County Council is the administrative authority for the county of Suffolk, England. It is run by 75 elected county councilors representing 63 divisions.

With more than 5,500 employees spread across more than 4,100 square kilometers, the IT and support services team at Suffolk County Council is tasked with ensuring the on-time availability of technological facilities and services throughout the year across all departments.

The challenge

Prior to switching to Freshservice, Suffolk County Council used an on-premise solution for incident management. The council’s traditional IT help desk made it difficult for the IT agents to collaborate with employees or for staff to monitor the real-time status of their tickets and was not well suited to support application configurations.

To efficiently manage knowledge repositories, streamline technology workflows for different service requests, and overhaul the existing functionality and scalability, the team began evaluating cloud-based solutions based on the following criteria.

• UI simplicity and ease of use

• Breadth and depth of features

• ITIL framework compliance

• Scalability 

• Cost-effectiveness

After due diligence, Suffolk County Council selected Freshservice to provide a great service experience to both employees and IT staff. 

The solution and impact

Immediately after the implementation, employees within the council’s cross-department offices began using the Freshservice support portal extensively to submit requests. The IT team was able to handle announcements via the help desk portal to a diverse set of stakeholders.

“The number of tickets processed through self-service has been increasing," said Jonathan Allison, service desk and strategic support manager at Suffolk County Council. "Freshservice is a lot more intuitive and the Knowledge Base is so much easier to see and search."

As tickets proceed through the system, Freshservice provides agents and employees alike, with an instant view of the progress. Notifications keep everyone informed of major changes. 

The Workflow Automator functionality within Freshservice has helped streamline both the IT and non-IT service requests. The ability to measure and showcase the performance of the IT help desk has been a huge positive for the team.

“The analytics and data intelligence has been a massive step forward,” says Michael Jackaman, IT business systems and devices manager at Suffolk County Council. 

“One of the things that we also have particularly benefited from is the immediate customer feedback," said Claire Sparkes, head of IT workforce and support services at Suffolk County Council. "Freshservice can get those customer satisfaction ratings quickly and respond. We have got a lot more feedback coming in."

Future

Going forward, the Suffolk County Council IT team plans to track IT assets by leveraging the integration with Freshservice and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. The team also plans to leverage the Freshworks Bots extensively and integrate with Microsoft Teams. To increase the breadth of ticket log-in channels, integration with cloud telephony and a chat system is in the pipeline.