Industry :
Government
Location :
UK
Challenges:
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Legacy system
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Lack of self-service portal
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Inability to scale the existing solution
About Suffolk County Council
Suffolk County Council is the administrative authority for the county of Suffolk, England. It is run by 75 elected county councillors representing 63 divisions. It is a member of the East of England Local Government Association.
With a total headcount of 5500+ employees spread across an area of 4,106 square kilometres, the IT and Support Services team at Suffolk County Council is tasked with ensuring the on-time availability of technological facilities and services, round the year, across all departments.
The transition from on-premise to cloud
Prior to switching to Freshservice, Suffolk County Council used an on-premise solution for Incident Management. The council’s traditional IT help desk made it difficult for the IT agents to collaborate with employees or for staff to monitor the real-time status of their tickets and was not well suited to support application configurations.
To efficiently manage knowledge repositories, streamline technology workflows for different service requests, and overhaul the existing functionality and scalability, the team began evaluating cloud-based solutions based on the following criteria.
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UI simplicity and ease-of-use
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Flexibility in the breadth and depth of features
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ITIL framework compliance
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Scalability
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Cost-effectiveness
After due diligence, Suffolk County Council selected Freshservice to provide a great service experience to both employees and IT staff.
Business success with Freshservice
Immediately after the implementation, employees within the council’s cross-department offices began using the Freshservice support portal extensively to submit requests. The IT team was able to handle announcements via the help desk portal to a diverse set of stakeholders. “The number of tickets processed through self-service has been increasing. Freshservice is a lot more intuitive and the Knowledge Base is so much easier to see and search,” says Jonathan Allison, Service Desk and Strategic Support Manager at Suffolk County Council. As tickets proceed through the system, Freshservice provides agents and employees alike, with an instant view of the progress. Notifications keep everyone informed of major changes.
The Workflow Automator functionality within Freshservice has helped streamline both the IT and non-IT service requests. The ability to measure and showcase the performance of the IT help desk has been a huge positive for the team. “The analytics and data intelligence has been a massive step forward,” says Michael Jackaman, IT Business Systems and Devices Manager at Suffolk County Council.
“One of the things that we also have particularly benefited from is the immediate customer feedback. Freshservice can get those customer satisfaction ratings quickly and respond to it. We have got a lot more feedback coming in. It has gone up from 150 responses a month, to approximately 1000 a month,” says Claire Sparkes, Head of IT Workforce and Support Services at Suffolk County Council.
What’s Next?
Going forward, the IT team at Suffolk County Council plans to track IT assets by leveraging the integration with Freshservice and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. The IT team at Suffolk County Council soon plans to leverage the Freshworks Bots extensively and also integrate with Microsoft Teams. To increase the breadth of ticket log in channels, integration with cloud telephony and chat system is in the pipeline.
“One of the things that we also have particularly benefited from is the immediate customer feedback. Freshservice can get those customer satisfaction ratings quickly and respond to it. We have got a lot more feedback coming in. It has gone up from 150 responses a month, to approximately 1000 a month.”
