How Jefferson County Public Schools reduced average ticket resolution time to three days

Jefferson County Public Schools (Jeffco Public Schools) is among the largest K-12 school districts in Colorado. It has about 69,000 students, 14,000 staff, and 168 campuses. Additionally, the district has more than 50 central administrative departments. 

Jeffco Public Schools has provided educational excellence since 1950, building strong generational ties throughout the community.

The challenge

The support teams at Jeffco were using a combination of disconnected solutions, shared inboxes, a homegrown Knowledge base, and a homegrown chat tool. This led to - 

• Lack of data visibility and insights because of a lack of a one-stop ITSM solution that works seamlessly.

• Long ticket resolution times because of siloed processes and multiple agent tools resulted in tickets sitting unresolved for three weeks or even longer

• Repetitive, manual tasks due to lack of automation wasted time

The solution

Jeffco had used Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM for 10 years but realized they needed more. Agents wouldn’t have contextual information on the support ticket, and they were missing many data points that they needed to resolve a ticket efficiently. When a student submitted a ticket regarding a broken laptop, the agent wouldn’t receive any supporting details on the student, laptop, date, or location.

Jeffco was looking for a self-sufficient tool that they could use without coding and could handle students, parents, guardians, community members, and employees across the organization. During this, they were considering some other solutions like ServiceNow and Cherwell. Jeffco chose Freshservice as their solution and began using Freshservice in 2020. They also integrated Freshchat with it since they had outgrown their existing homegrown chat.

"We were looking at solutions such as ServiceNow and Cherwell, but Freshservice was the easiest with its drag-drop automation, and we loved its affordability," said Alyse Howcroft, service delivery analyst at Jeffco Public Schools.

Impact

Before they got onboarded on Freshservice, the IT team was worried that they were a small team with no coding background and were anxious about how they would handle the tool. But once the onboarding process began, all that changed.  

The IT Team internally worked with different stakeholders from departments like HR, benefits, transportation, and others that would be using Freshservice. This helped gauge the requirements of these teams, which led to seamless onboarding. Some departments are still getting onboarded, and the process has been smooth and uncomplicated.

Jeffco has over 300 agents across 30 teams, like IT, HR, and transportation. Alyse’s team, part of the IT department, mainly focuses on providing equitable learning solutions to their students by promptly enabling agents with the support they need. All this is unified and streamlined through Freshservice.

They have branded their Freshservice support portal for teachers and staff as Jeffco Help, which supports concerns like providing a device for a classroom, grading, payroll issues, transportation, bus route information, and field trips. For parents and students, they help with information on enrollment, field trips, school choices, transportation, and assessment information.

Improved CX and EX for students and staff

• Integrated Freshchat with Freshservice to provide instant and effective support to internal teams. Jeffco also uses Freshchat on the platform to provide quick support during busy seasons for students and parents

• Successfully resolved 186,799 tickets in the last two years. A two-person team handled these tickets with an average resolution time of 3 days

• Easy support via one unified solution. Personalized dedicated end-user portals for students, parents, teachers, and staff to offer instant support and a delightful end-user experience

• Streamlined processes across their 30 departments, such as IT, HR and payroll, assessments, and communications that are using the tool

• Auto-assignment of tickets, along with using custom form fields for gathering critical information, helped them provide contextual support and reduce resolution time from three weeks to three days

"Parents and guardians trust us with their kids," Howcroft said. "Being able to automate some of these systems with Freshservice lets us focus on our students. I'm a mom of two boys, and my kids go to Jeffco. As a parent, just knowing that this support exists is amazing."

Jeffco is now looking at using chatbots to help with ticket deflection. They want to automate a lot of the more repetitive questions like sign-in credential queries, giving agents more time to focus on actually connecting via personalized support to students and parents. They plan on implementing dynamic relationships between assets and users using asset management. They also want to use release management to link their development teams to Freshservice and features like workload management to seamlessly tie it together.