About Bracknell Forest Council
Bracknell Forest Council is the local authority of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. They serve local authorities across the region for a variety of services including public planning, council taxes, and recycling. Their varied customer base ranges from leisure centers to schools.
Problems with the earlier system
Teams across the council were responsible for handling both IT and non-IT queries from their customer base. Bracknell had previously employed a legacy ticketing system which didn’t enable teams at Bracknell to work at full efficiency. It restricted end-users to traditional channels such as emails and phone calls for reaching out to internal teams. Heavy customizations were required to make the system meet the council’s needs, making it difficult to use for non-IT teams. Bracknell’s current IT environment was plagued with manual processes. The system was also heavily siloed and restricted the flow of information among teams, resulting in longer resolution times.
On the lookout for a modern, user-friendly IT service desk
Bracknell Forest Council was on the lookout for a centralized solution that would enable them to serve their customers better. Requirements from their new solution focussed on:
1. Self-service capabilities to reduce agent workload
2. Visibility across teams to enable cross-functional collaboration 3. An easy learning curve and minimal training for non-technical teams
After extensively searching the market for a solution, the council found Freshservice to be the best fit for their requirements.
Implementing Freshservice at Bracknell Forest council
Bracknell council took a big bang approach to implement Freshservice across the company. Bracknell found value in implementing Freshservice for two use cases within the organization:
1. IT service management for IT teams
2. Enterprise service management for marketing, HR, finance, facilities
A total of 65 agents were onboarded. Bracknell customized and branded the support portal to be called ‘Toto’. A specialized communications team was set up to create awareness about the re-branded IT support model. Email campaigns and educational posters were used to build awareness and increase product adoption amongst end-users. Gradually, employees were encouraged to adopt the service portal instead of relying on traditional channels such as email, phone calls etc.
Impact of Freshservice
Self-service adoption Previously, end users reached out to the IT team primarily via phone calls. The intuitive self-service portal has allowed employees to opt for their required services with ease. This has drastically reduced the number of phone calls for raising requests. Now over 76% of the tickets are raised via the self-service portal. This has allowed the agents to focus on other areas of work.
Improved operational efficiency Bracknell Forest council now meets 91% of SLAs with Freshservice. The ability to auto-assign incoming tickets to the right agent reduced manual intervention and increased overall agent productivity. Additionally, Bracknell’s IT team configured the ability for agents to opt out of the ticket assignment process to further empower agents to streamline and manage agent workload.
Improved asset management The IT team at Bracknell improved the way assets were discovered, tracked, and managed. This has allowed for easier identification of problematic assets and quicker repairs.
Future plans with Freshservice
Seeing the impact of Freshservice, Bracknell Forest Council is planning multiple expansion activities.
These include :
1. Providing live chat as a channel with Freshdesk Messaging
2. Bringing other business & support functions into Freshservice
3. Maintaining a central repository of contracts with the contract management module on
Freshservice
4. Creating a unified help desk across all teams to improve visibility and track end-to-end
processes
“It took us only 6 months from ideation to implementation of Freshservice.”
Beth Rayburn
Service Desk Team Lead
Bracknell Forest Council