AG Barr closes around 60% of tickets via bots with Freshservice

About AG Barr:

AG Barr is a UK-based branded multi-beverage manufacturing business focused on growth. Established over 140 years ago in Scotland and now operating across the UK and internationally. At its core is Barr Soft Drinks, brightening people’s lives, with refreshingly different soft drinks. It's also home to some of the UK’s most loved soft drinks brands - from the iconic IRN-BRU to the vibrant fruit-based brand RUBICON and the unique range of BARR flavour, Barr Soft Drinks offers great tasting products and creates exciting innovation

AG Barr has been focusing heavily on the integration of digital technology into all areas of their business. We spoke to Graeme Hendry, the IT Service Delivery Manager, who has been at AG Barr for over 6 years. He told us that when he first joined the company in 2017, the IT Service Delivery team was using a traditional help desk tool. Their main reason for choosing it was that it integrated with their Google Workspace, which was a priority then and helped them log tickets and close them. Other than that, they didn’t find it to be a good fit since it wasn’t lTIL orientated and couldn’t measure and report SLAs. There was no way of showing what they had done as a team and a lack of dashboards and reports to show metrics.

Why AG Barr Chose Freshservice

Graeme wanted to propose a solution that would move AG Barr forward and allow them to cope with the growing needs of their expanding business. He understood the benefits of an ITIL-based solution and started to look for the right choice for AG Barr. They wanted a solution that would integrate easily with Google Workspace, promote self-service, and keep up with the digital reliance and needs of their young audience. That’s why they chose Freshservice.

Some other reasons they liked Freshservice were:

• Simple and quick Single Sign-on integration
• Easy-to-use interface for people of all ages
• Value for money

Moving to Freshservice

AG Barr improved the IT Service Delivery across the organization by choosing Freshservice, and here’s how they did it:

1. Seamless Adoption: AG Barr could easily transition their teams to Freshservice via easy integrations with Google Workspace, and every employee has a Google account. For the newly onboarded employees, Active Directory Integration provides single sign-on and helps in creating new email IDs automatically. The ability to easily integrate with Google Workspace calendars ensures all teams can see the status of change requests, which automatically get logged into their Google Change Calendar.

2. Improved Efficiency and Agility: The powerful workflows on Freshservice helped the team automate repetitive tasks. The Workflow Automator helps categorize tickets based on criticality and assigns them to different agent groups. This has optimized ticket prioritization and resolution while providing status insights on tickets.

3. Powerful Integrations to Power up the Business: AG Barr has been using multiple integrations with Freshservice, which has helped them automate several business processes. Some of the top integrations they’re using today include - Google Sheets integration which shares auto-generated and updated sheets of information with employees not on Freshservice. Teamviewer integration which enables remote access and control to employee devices with the Teamviewer cross-platform solution resolving technical issues faster. Active Directory integration which provides single sign-on and empowers users to rest their own AD passwords via workflow automation.

4. Effective Change Management: The Freshservice Change Management module, with 30 different Change Advisory Board (CAB) teams for different automated approvals, ensures the right change is directed to the right department and simplifies tracking multiple changes.

5. Service Request Management: Having specific categories of the most common service requests in the Service Catalog and a Self-Service Portal direct requests and gives selective access to relevant teams.

6. Asset Management: With Asset Management on Freshservice, AG Barr keeps account of all their main hardware items like desktop PCs and laptops. This gives a comprehensive view to track asset performance over time. They can also easily assign issues to the right asset category, making it simple for IT teams to handle incidents and assets from the same platform.

7. Unleashing the Power of Bots: AG Barr is currently using a Bot within Freshservice, internally branded as BruDog, to provide instant support to employees, saving the end-user and agent time, consequently closing over 2000 tickets a month.