The University of Aberdeen
From Anecdotes to Analytics to Action

About University of Aberdeen

Founded in 1495, the University of Aberdeen is a public research university in Aberdeen, Scotland. They are consistently ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and within the top 30 in the United Kingdom. The University has close to 18,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, and academic and administrative staff working on and off-campus. The University’s IT team, with 180 members across four divisions, is tasked with making sure their wired and wireless networks, server infrastructure, IT classrooms, audio-visual media services, and software and hardware assets are always up and running, properly managed and supported on-time.

Using a legacy IT support tool implemented in 2009 meant that many processes involving incident management were manual which increased their average resolution times and posed a challenge to their service delivery aspirations.

Challenges with a legacy system

The University of Aberdeen’s (UoA) IT team receives more than 50,000 tickets from its students and staff annually. With the legacy tool, triage was difficult because new tickets, updates, high priority tickets and normal tickets all appeared in the same inbox. The limited automated workflows required expert understanding to have them coded into the system and was inflexible . Once the agents picked up tickets, they needed to manually append each update into the main thread for future context. This manual effort significantly increased the team’s average response times and productivity.

Reporting on the service desk performance wasn’t straightforward either. The team needed to build SQL queries for each report with data exported to a 3rd party software. With no way to create scheduled and ad-hoc reports, the team was severely limited in how they were able to effectively use data to affect real change and improvements in IT processes. 

Modernizing and streamlining IT with the cloud

In a bid to overhaul their end-user experiences, the team sought to be Service Desk Institute (SDI) certified to identify inefficiencies and then implement a new service desk tool to drive continual improvement.

The SDI certified the University of Aberdeen’s IT service operations as 'Proactive' on their rating scale. The team wanted to supplement this certification with a service desk tool that was modern, flexible and enable them to become pioneers in higher education IT service management. The tendering process was comprehensive, and Freshservice came on top overall, in terms of functionality and customer engagement. Iain Cameron, User Services Manager, who manages the IT Service Desk said: “Freshservice seriously interested us from the get-go. We felt fully supported and wanted by Freshworks, who really went out of their way to deal with us.”

The IT team spun up and went live with Freshservice in a couple of months. The core Incident/Request management was their first phase of implementation.  Adding to the built-in “Views”, an additional 30+ views were created for 30+ groups with separate views for incident triaging to help agents get to critical tickets faster. The team immediately understood the benefit and potential of using Freshservice’s simple drag-and-drop workflow automation and launched with about 10 workflows on day one. By continually identifying new workflow possibilities, within a couple of months they had automated almost 100 workflows. They note that on an almost daily basis they can add, remove or refine workflows. As the team got familiar with the tool, they intelligently used scenario automation to deal with current and future issues. Iain Cameron added: “We were also very much taken with the codeless automator as you can create workflows with drag and drop.  You do not need to be a coder to make magic happen” 

This helped Iain and team rapidly put together 100+ automation and 84 canned responses, resulting in their average response and resolution times dropped significantly. Over time, the team is using Scenario Automations more and more to resolve or respond to incoming tickets within minutes.

Freshworks Analytics, a game changer

With analytics available right within the product, the team now had the ability to make decisions based on data as opposed to anecdotal reports.. The intuitive UI of Analytics, powered by Freshworks Neo, allowed team members to create reports based on easily understandable terms like category names, ticket numbers, agent names and more. The ability to create ad hoc reports has provided immense value, particularly in understanding the areas where most IT service tickets were being raised, for instance - ID or credential issue requests

The IT team  is now empowered to explore data relevant to them without having to create queries in SQL. 320 agents -  colleagues from 6 other non-IT business areas of the University are now also using Freshservice for enquiry management. Spread out over fifty teams, regular reports are now a reality due to the report scheduling abilities, in addition to ad-hoc report created by staff - A feat that was impossible with the legacy system formerly in place. 

Transforming Service Delivery with Freshservice

Moving from an outdated legacy system to an ITIL-aligned, cloud-based, device-agnostic service desk was a breath of fresh air for UoA. The Service Desk Manager, Iain Cameron, primarily uses Freshservice on a Windows 10 laptop  as well as on a Chromebook, an iPad and an Android smartphone. Students and staff can raise tickets and access the portal across multiple channels. They have rebranded the Portal using a UoA brand palette and iconography. By pairing the portal with solution articles articles already in the UoA’s award-winning Toolkit, the IT team has started on its path to grow its portal usage and promote self-service. 

 

 

 

With over 3000 new students joining the university every year, the IT Services team has their work cut out for them. Every student is provided with a digital identity, computer & network credentials, email addresses and access to a whole host of resources to enable learning. This invariably leads to tickets raised to recover passwords, email access and more. With proper tagging, categorization and scenario automation, the team is able to streamline the experience of ID and Access management for students.

To further reduce time spent on unnecessary tickets, Freddy, the Freshservice AI, works in the background and effectively recognizes multiple 'Thank You' variations from end-users. This has helped deflect close to 10,200 tickets till date. Agents take about 1-2 mins on average to process every (nice, but unnecessary) response to a 'Thank You' note. Automating these responses saves the equivalent of a full-time person's  efforts for 7 working weeks.

The UoA can also track individual and team workloads and report on performance improvements, without any manual effort, using Freshwork’s powerful analytics. “With Freshservice, there has been a huge change in agent behavior for the frontline service team. From reactive, we’ve now become a proactive team,” says Iain.

 

Metrics that matter 

• Compared to its legacy tool, the UoA has saved a estimated 405 working days since launch just by using the auto-appending of 243,119 customer replies tickets to date (April 5, 2022). With an average team member working 250 days per calendar year, this saving is almost two full years’ of working days.

• 84 canned responses were templated within the first couple of months of use to be quickly inserted into preformatted messages to reduce the workload. 

• 10,200 tickets have now deflected with Freshservice’s robust “Thank you” detector – Freddy, saving a estimated 35 working days’ effort.

• Average resolution time has come down by 81% after launching Freshservice.

• Agents handle upto 2000 tickets per week with Freshservice.

 

A unified platform for Incident, Problem, and Change Management

Shortly after implementation, UoA’s IT team went live with Problem Management and then migrated its Change Management into Freshservice. They were previously using SharePoint but they struggled with basic actions such as adding a stand-in change manager when the usual change manager was on leave.  All those approvals had to wait until the change manager could come back or the stand-in change manager had to approve or reject changes with limited context resulting in high-risk change implementation. They needed an agile change management module, which they were able to get with Freshservice. 

They went through their existing process internally to come up with necessary change workflows. With Freshservice they were able to set up multiple Change Advisory Boards (CABs for various types of changes. They could assign several staff members to advisory boards, who would need to all approve a change request before it can be implemented.

Within Change Management the CAB has been very helpful to the team. it allows them to add key decision-makers to the IT services approval workflow. For Change Managers, and people on the board, the UI is clearly indicative of the number of change requests pending approval, along with the context necessary for each change request. Change Managers get to see who is raising the change request, what they require, and why this request is being filed.

Moreover, Freshservice enables them to link Incidents, Changes, and Problems together, and they have benefited from having all their ITIL processes in one place. The IT team can see the impact of a change on various users and customers, which helps them assess and manage incidents, and problems which are being raised as a result of a particular change. They can resolve multiple incident and problem requests by associating related tickets to a single change request and resolving them altogether. For instance, if a ticket is submitted by a customer about not being able to access certain resources, this gets tracked by the network team. Since these issues can be tracked to a particular user group on campus who is unable to access resources because of a network issue in the campus, the timeframe when the tickets are being raised allows the network team to pinpoint the incidents being raised to a particular change that had gone up on the Change Calendar, which is causing the network issues. This can then be addressed using a follow-up change request which can help resolve all related incidents and problems raised for this issue.

 

Better visibility and tracking via Asset Management

During the COVID pandemic, many employees needed to take home things like monitors from the office. UoA lacked information on, and the ability to track these devices and they recognized they had to do much better and be tighter in terms of tracking assets. Now with Freshservice Asset Management, every asset goes into Freshservice before it's deployed to an employee. To better identify assets impacted during an incident, problem, or change, the team has also logged <20,000+> end-user device assets to manage and track them through their lifecycle from acquisition to expiration

Freshservice enables the IT Team to keep account of end-user assets, like desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, SIM card, software, and their respective contracts. They can easily assign issues to the right asset category along with the vendor data. This gives a comprehensive view to track assets' performance over time. It has become simple for IT teams to handle both incidents and assets from the same platform. For eg., if someone reaches out to the IT team due to their laptop running slow, the service agent can easily see details such as what device and software they’re using, when the device was purchased, etc. This information adds more clarity to the raised concern and helps reduce resolution time.

 

Future With Freshservice

The University of Aberdeen IT team is continually improving its incident management process by adding an automation workflow almost every day. Shortly after implementation, the team went live with Problem Management and then migrated its Change Management into Freshservice; this enables the team to link Incidents, Changes and Problems together. To better identify assets impacted during an incident, problem or change, the team has also integrated 20,000+ end-user device assets to manage and track them through their lifecycle from acquisition to expiration.

Work on improving processes around Identity Management will continue to provide students and staff an optimal service experience since these form a large part of the service requests.

Data and analytics obtained from the Freshworks Neo platform will be a key driver of how project releases are managed, to help IT teams provide the best service experience for the University of Aberdeen community of students and staff.

Watch Iain Cameron speak at Refresh 2021

 

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