AI-powered ITSM: Par for the course for TaylorMade

With manufacturing, distribution, sales, and support teams spread out over 12 time zones, TaylorMade’s IT department needed a better way to serve its employees and partners around the globe.

Enter Caddy, TaylorMade’s support chatbot, powered by Freshworks’ Freddy AI. Its intelligent automation features allowed support teams and end users to interact and resolve issues with minimal involvement of support.

“First-call resolution is a goal of many people in my world,” says Ali Chitsaz, senior manager of global digital workplace at TaylorMade. With Caddy up and running, “you have a much higher chance of getting fulfillment without any human interaction at all.”

Employee support at TaylorMade in prior years was not nearly as frictionless. One of the largest U.S. manufacturers of golf clubs, bags, and accessories, TaylorMade was on a tear with an expanding e-commerce business during the pandemic, when stay-at-home orders drove increases in online shopping.

With cloud migration and a massive shift to remote work colliding in 2020, the IT team faced a significant spike in workload and service orders. To keep ticket volume manageable and resolution times tolerable, the IT team recognized an urgent need to update and automate manual support workflows such as password resets and software installs.

TaylorMade turned to Freshworks’ ITSM solution to centralize all IT processes and automate critical workflows. That helped IT staffers respond to more service requests in less time, slashing operational costs and improving customer experience.

By adding Caddy to the mix, Chitsaz feels he has also improved IT support within the company. “To treat our employees like we treat our customers, where we treat their issue with the utmost importance, and then escalate that to a live person if needed?” he says. “It’s hugely valuable.”

The company

TaylorMade is a leading American golf equipment manufacturer, producing golf clubs, balls, clothing, and accessories. The company has 3,000 employees and a history of creating innovative, industry-leading products and has an unrivaled athlete portfolio that includes Tiger Woods, Rory Mcllroy, Scottie Scheffler, and many more.

The challenge

To better scale its business for an expanding e-commerce platform, TaylorMade transitioned IT operations to the cloud. This move encouraged the team to update and integrate many previously neglected processes; that, in turn, revealed major weaknesses in the company's internal ticketing operations.

With employees logging in to new cloud tools and using them for the first time while working remotely, the IT team saw a dramatic uptick in the average number of monthly service tickets. Requests ranged from small tasks like password resets to larger ones such as issue resolution for major incidents. The team quickly recognized the need for greater automation to manage the increase in requests.

“The IT department’s mission has always been to minimize downtime and maximize availability,” says Chitsaz. “Automation was one of the driving factors in the selection of Freshservice.”

The solution

TaylorMade’s IT department had two main goals in considering an ITSM solution: minimize system downtime caused by IT outages or incidents and maximize workflow automation to reduce the load on IT teams. For a new solution to meet these goals, TaylorMade sought out these capabilities:

• A unified platform to bring all IT processes into one place and increase visibility into tickets, allowing multiple agents to update details, change the status and priority, and alert appropriate stakeholders

• Automated workflows to auto-assign tickets, helping agents to better handle spikes in volume

• Analytics and reporting to gain better insight into IT performance

Freshservice offered the level of automation and consolidation that TaylorMade was looking for, providing the company with a comprehensive IT solution to route service requests more efficiently. Now with the integration of the Freddy AI-powered Caddy into Microsoft Teams, employees are able to create service requests easier than ever and have them automatically routed to the right party.

Impact

By adopting Freshservice, TaylorMade automated 100% of mission-critical workflows, including password resets and redirecting simple queries to a self-service portal. IT leaders also cut the average response and resolution time per service ticket in half despite a 250% spike in the number of tickets received.

As Caddy has gained traction in IT operations, it has helped TaylorMade maintain their 90% SLAs without increasing headcount.