From tickets to touchdowns: How Freshworks powers game day at Texas A&M

Texas A&M is a top-ranked public university with world-class business, agriculture, and engineering programs. Beyond its academic reputation, Texas A&M’s NCAA football program draws 150,000 visitors on game days, making it one of the top destinations in collegiate athletics.

With a goal of modernizing and automating IT processes to better accommodate over 600 incoming tickets per day, Texas A&M turned to Freshservice. After its initial success using Freshservice for its internal IT helpdesk, the university scaled its deployment to enterprise service management (ESM) to help support its huge volume of football fans during the season.

Texas A&M’s Transportation Services department uses Freshservice to manage complex game-day logistics, including parking plans, transit inquiries, and emergency response planning. Freshservice’s intelligent workflows and automations enable transit staff to support anyone—student, parent, or football fanatic—who visits campus.

While the initial focus was on improving IT service management (ITSM), Freshservice has now become the central pillar supporting all of the institution's IT and game-day operations.

The company

Texas A&M University is a public research university in College Station. Ranked as one of the top collegiate sports universities in the nation, Texas A&M is home to unforgettable game-day experiences and the fourth-largest college football stadium in the United States.

The challenge

Digital transformation is a top priority for many higher education institutions today. Budget restrictions are a common challenge in the higher ed sector, and limited resources often limit campus leaders’ ability to make crucial business technology investments.

Texas A&M’s Transportation Services department lacked scalable support options to serve students, faculty, and staff. With one of the largest student bodies in the country at over 70,000, the team needed an affordable ITSM platform that would allow the department to quickly and efficiently resolve the university community’s IT-related issues.

University IT staff found that its legacy platform, Jitbit, was unfit as a sustainable internal IT helpdesk, as it lacked capacity for growth—a critical requirement at a university where enrollment grew by 4% in the last year alone.

“The old tool was basically an email consolidation platform with zero tracking,” says James Williams, senior systems administrator at Texas A&M and longtime leader in the Aggie community. “We constantly had issues with email chains going in circles with no resolution. We lacked control, customization, and a high-level view of the business.”

As staff wrestled with automation and efficiency challenges, the university evaluated several ITSM platforms—including Freshservice, ServiceNow, and TeamDynamix—but Freshservice quickly rose to the top of the list for its ease of use and affordability.

The solution

Implementing Freshservice to manage IT tickets, the university’s Transportation Services department leverages critical features like Freshservice’s APIs and integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams to boost efficiency. “We implemented Freshservice and saw a tremendous increase in our productivity and ability to know what's going on at all times with ticket resolution,” says Williams.

While Texas A&M’s Freshservice implementation began with ITSM, the university soon scaled to ESM to extend the same success beyond essential IT functions. The university now uses Freshservice to support transit-related inquiries from students, faculty, and staff—and the influx of inquiries it receives during football season. 

Williams’ team has since split their Freshservice deployment into two core use cases:

• Internally, transportation staff use Freshservice for general questions, IT ticketing, and customer service training for representatives handling inbound inquiries. In this category, tickets encompass standard IT requests like software or application access, account resets, and HR onboarding requests.

• Externally, the department services end users (students, faculty, and staff) with transit and parking questions, especially on game days. In this category, incoming tickets relate to parking lot or space changes, vehicle or motorcycle updates, bike registrations, or bus driver tracking and training. Freshservice allows staff to provide these users with expanded articles, helpdesk solutions, and easier ticket submission experiences.

Texas A&M also uses Freshservice for IT asset management (ITAM) to track, oversee, and support over 1,000 IT assets. This number encompasses hundreds of devices in addition to non-physical software, servers, databases, and university websites. Each component plays an integral role in managing the 150,000 attendees who come to Texas A&M’s stadium every game.

Impact

As Williams describes the IT challenge at Texas A&M, “a Texas-sized operation necessitates a Texas-sized solution.” His assessment is spot-on: Few college campuses across the country draw as many visitors and fans as Texas A&M. The transportation department’s ridership equates to 6 million people annually, putting its operations on par with a small city.

By moving away from an outdated email response platform, Williams’ department has reduced ticket resolution time by 30%. Expanded transparency in Freshservice means that they receive and process over 600 tickets daily and typically resolve new requests within just 12 hours. Workflow automation reduces overhead costs and allows users to self-source the transport help they need.

Freshservice is also adaptable to the changing needs of a dynamic campus population, including student employees who work as agents in Williams’ department—and whose statuses change every semester. Thanks to flexible licensing, adding and removing Freshservice agents without breaking stride in the improved IT service model is easy. Automatic ticket routing to the right agents accelerates ticket resolution, improves the quality of end-user support, and even enhances the security of sensitive student data.