OfS decreases its average resolution time by 67% with Freshservice’s Virtual Agent

About The Office for Students

The Office for Students is an independent regulator of higher education in England. The organization aims to ensure that all students, irrespective of their backgrounds, have a fulfilling higher education experience that enriches their lives and careers. The remit of their work covers students of all kinds: undergraduate, postgraduate, home or international, young or mature, full-time or part-time, studying on campus or by distance learning.

Transforming student experience by enabling the institution to be it's productive best

The Office for Students (the OfS) is an arm’s length government organization, whereby they are connected to the government, but aren’t run by them. The OfS is a regulator for higher education in England that governs Universities and other education providers that offer degrees. The organization’s mission is to offer every student a fulfilling experience of higher education that enriches their lives and careers.

We spoke to Heather Stockwell, IT Training Manager, and Karen Spray, IT Service Support Manager, to understand more about the Office for Students, their priorities, and how IT plays a pivotal role in supporting their colleagues to maximize the use of their systems and in transforming the employee experience.

With over 400 employees in the company, a strong 38-member IT team played a significant role in enabling the organization to fulfill its business objectives. With the organization adopting a hybrid working model with two days in the office, the IT team ensured their availability at the office to ensure uninterrupted work. In addition to that, the team supported business continuity with the introduction of new systems, ensuring they are in place efficiently, and equipping employees to make the best use of them. The Office for Students’ IT team has been an extensive user of Freshservice to enable this across the company.

Exponentially scaling service management adoption with Virtual Agent

To streamline IT service delivery, the OfS IT team rolled out Freshservice to their entire organization. Within a short period of going live with Freshservice, over 40% of the tickets were raised through the portal, but close to 60% of issues were still reported by email. While the adoption of Freshservice was growing steadily, they wanted to rapidly scale adoption to a point where they could minimize the use of email as a support channel.  Therefore, the OfS team wanted to introduce Servicebot which would help rapidly improve the overall adoption of the service management tool by using Microsoft Teams as a channel and improve service delivery standards by collecting all the requisite information in one go.

With the organization embracing a hybrid working model, all employees spend time in Microsoft Teams. Hence, the OfS wanted to leverage Servicebot’s Virtual Agent for MS Teams to make it more convenient for employees to report issues through Freshservice and eventually get them habituated.  

Piloting Servicebot’s Virtual Agent to a controlled group to understand query patterns.

The OfS team had enough insights to conclude that introducing Servicebot’s Virtual Agent would have a significant impact on the service management tool adoption within the organization. The team adopted a phased approach to get to a certain level of accuracy. As a first step, the solution articles as well as the forms were reviewed, while closely partnering with Freshservice product teams to propel the accuracy rate.

The second step was to pilot the Virtual agent across a few groups within the organization and get them to use it. This was then extended to the Team’s Champions, which comprises employees from across the organization as well as the Admin Team.

The approach significantly helped improve the accuracy, giving the team enough confidence to progress even further. Next, the team picked the top 100+ most popular articles and ensured that their searches would yield the right results. The IT team collaborated with Freshworks’ customer success and product teams and improved accuracy to approximately 93% before planning a broader roll-out within the organization.

Internal evangelization, feedback loop, and planning the rollout.

The entire process of adopting the virtual agent was broken down into 3 phases:

Internal evangelism by highlighting advantages to employees.

The OfS prioritized conducting briefing sessions for everybody who would be using the tool which included leadership and the staff. These sessions were also recorded for employees to access at their convenience. Partnering with the Team’s champions played a pivotal role in swiftly relaying the message to the entire organization by highlighting the implications and advantages of using the Virtual Agent during their meetings. 

The OfS also refrained from doing away with email as a channel, a trend that certain businesses resort to driving service desk adoption. Instead, the team believed in selling the value and the quality of service offered via Servicebot’s Virtual Agent by helping its stakeholders understand the ease of solving issues with the new approach as against the conventional one. This approach helped considerably improve the adoption rate within the OfS. Tickets logged in via email automatically saw a 45% decrease in a year. The momentum picked up quickly from early adopters to the other employees with a 75% increase in tickets logged in via the portal and a 30% increase in tickets via the Virtual Agent in a year.

 

Tickets logged via Channels

 

 

 

Feedback loop to improve accuracy.

This also set up a very comprehensive feedback loop from across the organization, which in turn helped understand what folks typically search for when they encounter specific challenges. The surprising discovery in the whole process was understanding how different a non-technical audience would search which helped in improving the accuracy of the Virtual agent.

In their pursuit of driving better search accuracy, the next step was to go beyond the initial set of 100 articles. In addition, the team looked at expanding this to the larger group to get a better understanding of the search terms used. The collaboration with the Freshworks product team also meant that there were insights constantly shared on search terms the employees were using and what articles they were associating with such search terms. Further, the team analyzed the phrases that were used and incorporated them into relevant service articles. With this approach, if such search queries are typed again, the requestor will be guided to the right article. The OfS was very clear that they didn't want to rush the launch. Hence, the objective was to ensure that the tool was really good to the point where it surprised the internal customers and got them excited about using it.

Organization-wide rollout plan

The virtual agent was demo-ed to the senior leaders of the IT team, thereby getting their buy-in and support for organization-wide evangelization and adoption. The internal promotions too were very well thought through, and the OfS team had a multi-channel outreach plan in place. The team set up an intranet hub that had articles, along with dedicated sections on weekly organization communications on the Virtual agent adoption and its benefits. The message was also conveyed through the weekly director’s briefing that a vast majority of the organization attended. In addition, a standalone MS Teams meeting was also streamed live focusing on how the virtual agent can be enabled by employees, how they could go about using it, and what are the benefits that come with it gave the opportunity for the user base to ask questions about it.

With the accuracy improving considerably, the OfS extended the virtual agent to many more teams beyond IT and proceeded with a broader rollout. The tool was open for employees to try it out, with adoption guides made easily accessible.

 

Virtual agent helpfulness achieved

 

 

 

 

 

Faster service, better results, and happier employees

The adoption and usage rate of the Virtual agent has been going up since its implementation. There has been a 77% decrease in the Average First Response Time on tickets and a 67% decrease in the average resolution time on tickets. With the IT teams experiencing these significant benefits with Freshservice, the OfS is looking at rolling out Freshservice to business teams such as the HR team and the Governance team while also exploring the introduction of virtual agents for these departments. From an HR standpoint onboarding and offboarding are some of the primary use cases that are being explored. The team is also looking at integrating third-party applications such as Workday to unify the experience for employees.