National Rugby League onboards its IT team onto Freshservice within just 1 hour

About Rugby League

Founded in 1908, Rugby League is one of Australia’s most beloved national sports. It is a community-based sport that brings together hundreds of thousands of Australians. The National Rugby League consists of 16 teams and over 100 million ardent fans tune in to watch them play every year. The League has a strong grassroots connection as well with thousands of people volunteering to help boys and girls, teenagers and adults play the sport.

The IT department of Rugby League manages IT services for the administration of Rugby League, which includes the National Rugby League, Queensland Rugby League and NSW Rugby League. In addition, it also provides advice and support to the minor league foundation and over half of the rugby clubs. We spoke to Maurice Veliz, IT Manager at Rugby League to understand how Freshservice provides seamless IT support for over 1200 users across the League.

Moving away from complexity and spiraling costs

Rugby League’s incumbent IT helpdesk solution was clunky and bloated. Over time, the solution proved to be too cost and labor intensive. The team had a dedicated staff member to manage the platform and lay the development groundwork for upgrades and annual major releases. “For every upgrade, we had to do a lot of prep work to ensure that the upgrade wasn’t going to break any tables from the previous version. It wasn’t just a matter of letting the solution update in the background,” explains Maurice. After an internal organizational restructuring, the team decided to remove the position. This meant that NRL had two options: either continue to use ServiceNow but depend on third-party vendors to manage the development work around it or switch to a new solution completely. “Continuing with ServiceNow would just mean more costs. We weren’t even using the full functionalities and it was too expensive every time we wanted to add a new feature. We were certain we did not want to go down this path.”

NRL’s search for a new IT helpdesk solution started and ended with Freshservice. “The simplicity of Freshservice really stood out!” recalls Maurice. “We signed up for a trial and within just a day, we had it working exactly the way we wanted. We could easily create workflows and customize the design of the platform. This was something we had struggled with on the legacy solution.” With Freshservice ticking every box for NRL’s IT department, the team decided to finalize on the solution without exploring any other alternatives. Instead, they focused all their efforts into implementing Freshservice and ensuring a smooth transition.

Ensuring a smooth employee and end-user transition

If there’s one piece of advice that Maurice has for other IT managers planning a similar transition, it’s: “Don’t set Monday as your go-live date!” he jokes. As luck would have it, the targeted go-live date the team had set happened to be a Monday. However, despite the weekday rush, the entire transition was seamless. Maurice wanted the Freshservice portal to look as close as possible to their previous one so users wouldn’t need to get used to a new layout. The project was a success. “None of our end-users even realized we had shifted to a completely different platform!” he says.

The change was just as easy for the IT team as well. “The onboarding training process only took about an hour. The main page already had all the information we needed for our day-to-day work.” This held true not only for existing members of the IT team, but also new employees who had onboarded remotely.

Improving visibility of IT service requests

Within the first few months of using Freshservice, the biggest change that Maurice and his team noticed was the huge amount of flexibility they now had compared to what they had in the past. While the replaced platform relied heavily on coding and team members were vary of making any unintentional changes to the solution, Freshservice offers ample room for experimentation. “What we really love about Freshservice is that it is so user-friendly. Our employees are not afraid to explore the platform on their own and try out new features,” says Maurice.

Some of the stand-out features of Freshservice that the team love include:

• Ticket history: At a single glance, agents can view the entire history of a customer or a ticket. “With ServiceNow, it was a very complex process, and we would have multiple windows open to get this information,” says Maurice. For end-users as well, it has become very simple to see the status of their tickets through the comprehensive dashboard. This has improved the visibility of the entire ticket journey.
• Asset management: The Rugby League’s IT team services multiple clients, for which they need to generate multiple asset reports. These reports tell respective clients what equipment is due for renewal, which employees are using what assets, etc. Freshservice helps the IT team provide these reports with a single click. Clients can see the status of each asset and if an employee is leaving, they can see what items are registered under their name that need to be returned. This has proved to be a tremendously cost-saving feature. “We didn’t have this kind of visibility of our assets before,” remarks Maurice. “A lot of our staff are given equipment like mobile phones and data modems, but we don’t always retrieve them when they leave. So they are essentially walking away with services that we’re still paying for. Now with Freshservice, we know exactly what needs to be returned and can avoid this scenario from cropping up again.”

One feature that NRL plans to use in the near future is purchase order management. The various units that the IT department services often raise requests for new equipment or hardware but aren’t always clear on the specifications required. Maurice envisions a new process with Freshservice, where business unit managers can select a product from an approved list so the IT team can place the order for it. “We want to create a shopping cart experience to streamline the order process. We are also planning to group approved hardware by job functions, so managers can select the most appropriate option.”

Looking ahead

The full impact of Freshservice became apparent during COVID. Since employees could no longer simply walk up to the IT department for requests, portal adoption skyrocketed during this period. Even today as employees slowly get back to work, they continue to submit their requests through Freshservice as they have seen how much more efficient this process is.

Bolstered by the success of Freshservice within IT, Maurice is on a mission to encourage other departments within Rugby League to adopt the solution as well. “Our Digital division, for example, has their own ticketing system, while our HR department uses a shared inbox for their service requests. I see huge potential for these teams adopting Freshservice soon as it will simplify pan-organizational collaboration,” he concludes.