Probe CX leverages extensive automation with Freshworks to drive growth

Probe CX is a leading customer experience organization operating across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United States, and India. The company designs and deploys solutions anchored around the delivery of exceptional customer experiences. Powered by over 18,000 employees across five countries, Probe CX is a market leader in digital transformation practices, including process simplification, user experience design, customer journey mapping, workforce optimization, data analytics, customer sentiment analysis, digital deployment, and automation.

We spoke to Lyle Smith, Manager of IT and support at Probe CX, to understand more about the business and how IT plays a pivotal role in driving business results.

The challenge

As a business process outsourcing (BPO) company, Probe CX operates in a dynamic space, and it needs to be extremely proactive, nimble, and agile. With IT being the backbone of the organization, it was critical to always be ahead of what the business needed.

“The IT team is always on the forefront and pushing what we can do internally to deliver the best outcome for our employees," Smith said. "That way, as an organization, we are able to deliver the best outcome for our clients as well."

Catering to IT requests from around 1500 employees, Probe CX, in the early days, was using an internal ticketing system that was built out of the same team that was managing the telephony platform. However, as the business started to scale, Smith and his team realized that they had to evolve their IT setup to be able to effectively support the organization’s growth aspirations. For him, it was imperative that the product met the unique requirements of the BPO business as well as offering the possibility to customize the product to suit their specific use cases.

After evaluating a few platforms in the market, Probe CX chose to go with Freshservice to transform its internal ticketing system. For Smith, the standout feature when they chose Freshservice was the Workflow Automator, along with the UI, which was more intuitive and user-friendly than anything else they had seen in the market..

While Probe has acquired multiple companies, Freshservice remains the constant IT service management platform. The company now has more than 17,500 employees across four countries.

The solution

Probe CX’s objective was to constantly drive business process simplification and complete automation across the organization. Having dealt with many systems that were relatively complicated, Smith was particular about going for a system with as much back-end work being done by automation. That way, whenever users visited the platform, they would know exactly what was needed and could clearly understand where they needed to get it from, regardless of whether it had to do with raising a ticket, accessing a knowledge article, or requesting something new. With the expectations clear, Probe was able to complete the end-to-end initial rollout in under 12 weeks. Lyle believes “Any implementation where you have stood up, tested, built, and have become functional within 12 weeks, is a win”.

Probe’s IT team seamlessly migrated data, such as users, ticket information, and associated attachments, from the legacy system onto Freshservice in under a week. The team was quickly trained and was able to use the tool for their respective use cases. As time progressed, Smith’s team made the most of the Freshworks Academy and the Freshworks Community.

Personalization capabilities

As an organization catering to different industries, Probe grapples with a wide range of client requirements. One of Probe's key priorities is to enable internal employees with exactly what they need to swiftly respond to customers' needs. Role-specific customizations were set up to ensure employees had access to knowledge and support articles relevant to their roles and the industries they catered to.

Limiting the visibility of items based on a department within the internal organization structure had a very significant impact. The objective was to ensure enablement with just what was required for a specific role, rather than having the user spend a lot of time searching for what they want.

“It goes right down to the level where even the optional knowledge articles that are shown on the right-hand side menu are dedicated based on what one can see at an employee level," Smith said. "Having such a granular personalization option has served us greatly.”

Probe’s vision was to ensure that everything that constitutes a part of a ‘business as usual’ process was automated. The BAU processes are typically managed by first and second-level entry teams, and such interventions are usually time-consuming. For instance, with the Microsoft SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) asset engine tied into Freshservice, whenever an employee was allocated a device while being onboarded, the allocated device already had the requisite policies and software pre-configured based on pre-set rule sets. This made the entire onboarding experience zero-touch.

If the employees do require anything else, be it software deployment, which is fully automated, or printer and swipe access, everything is executed through Freshservice as the starting point. This has helped accelerate ticket resolution time for Probe. For instance, with software installations, Probe saves about 5 minutes on average per ticket, per instance, per end user each year. When that gets extrapolated to hundreds of tickets, it translates into over 50 minutes in savings per user.

The probe is on track to implement complete zero touches on and off-boarding through their human capital management (HCM) solution without touching a single ticket all the way down to the new hire, getting an SMS for their first-time password.

“It's about making the experience so frictionless that everyone knows it just works," Smith says.

Improved visibility and service delivery precision

Extending the foundational principles of the transformation, Smith looked to simplify asset management within the company by providing greater visibility to the IT team, while restraining access to critical systems. Today, every asset in the organization gets tracked on Freshservice, with asset management built into every service request concerning the entire asset library. So whenever an asset is logged into by a user, it is instantly registered on the system, and then passed straight through Freshservice.

At a given point, the IT team can look up any device in their fleet and see who has logged into the asset. The visibility has enabled a centralised hierarchy system that enables pinpointing the impact of asset failures and planning the impact of change rollouts. With the Fresh Discovery agent installed on every device, the IT team gets instantly notified when a device isn’t working as expected. If there is a potential security incident, a ticket is created automatically and assigned to the concerned team.

Probe also automated the warranty renewal process by integrating the serial numbers of all assets and with workflows configured to instantly create tickets that are then assigned to the procurement team.

Key Freshservice features

Smith identifies four key Freshservice features that have proved extremely pivotal in transforming the employee experience:

• Workflow Automator: Automation is a big focus for Probe CX, something that Smith wants to mandate across as many business processes as possible. The Workflow Automator has been extremely helpful in simplifying and eliminating the physical mundaneness of managing tickets for agents. By applying clearly defined tags to track status changes, Probe has also benefited immensely from instant updates to the analytics console, making insights easily accessible.

• Orchestration Center: Probe's workflows over time always seemed limited by the need to build webhooks with developers' help. But with the Orchestrator Center, Probe is able to circumvent those dependencies by simplifying and automating them through the UI, which no longer depends on developers with advanced coding experience.

• Self-Service Portal: Despite having just twenty FTEs to serve over seven hundred thousand people across stakeholder groups, Probe has pivoted on effectively using self-service to tackle over eight thousand requests that come in every month. With clear knowledge articles hosted both internally and externally, a simplified service catalog, and built-in automation, over 30% of all tickets raised are deflected to self-service without having to be touched by anyone.

• Alert Management: Probe CX also uses Freshservice Alert Management to monitor and handle critical (P1) incidents. "A service desk team can have full functionality of the alert module without the risk of changing the monitoring tool itself," Smith says.

Probe’s long-term priorities are set on the overarching principles of automation and simplification. While the company looks to drive many big bet projects, the primary focus is to rationalize the experience across the organization by creating a consistent, seamless, and perfect IT experience regardless of whether it is an executive in the office or a first-time agent.

"Freshservice continues to play an integral part in Probe’s IT strategy," Smith says. "From day one, we have looked at ensuring that everything IT starts with Freshservice. We continue to build on that and are slowly extending the service management principles to other departments within the organization."