Mosanada achieves 40% improvement in first response time with Freshservice

About Mosanada

Mosanada, an established name in Qatar, is renowned for delivering world-class services in facilities management. The company’s service portfolio comprises of hard and soft facilities management services, including consultancy and sustainability services.

Freshservice helps Mosanada deliver improved and faster IT support services to users within the organization by providing an easy to use ticket management system.

Goal (Challenge):

Earlier, the internal IT operations at Mosanada were outsourced to one of their customers. They had a helpdesk system, but it was only accessible to people in IT. When Adam Wood, the Deputy Director of Business Solutions at Mosanada, joined the IT team at the organization, he realized there was no ticket management system in place where the user could login and view the ticket details. Moreover, the tickets were primarily handled on emails. Experimenting initially, he set up a Sharepoint based bespoke solution to address these issues but realized its inadequacy over time. Dwelling on the challenges faced, Adam shares, “I did not want to spend time building a ticket management system. My focus was on delivering better IT support for facilities management and strengthening our core business.”

Transitioning from Sharepoint to Spiceworks, Adam found it useful at the beginning but gradually, he observed a few hiccups in capturing asset data using the automated system. Also, the solution required usage of multiple plugins to deliver the desired experience, and with time, it became a cumbersome task to manage those plugins. The team ended up spending more time in understanding the working of plugins than focusing on their core responsibilities. Moreover, Adam cites that, Spiceworks being an on-premise solution, all the upgrades and maintenance had to be managed by him, adding one more thing to his to-do list.

That’s when Adam decided to look for an intuitive ticket management solution. He evaluated ManageEngine, Zendesk, and Freshservice. Freshservice stood out amongst all suiting the requirements of the technical help desk or Techdesk, as Adam calls it, at Mosanada.

Elaborating more on selecting Freshservice, Adam shares, “Freshservice is like an iPhone of helpdesks, wherein users can just start using the tool and can figure out the usage on their own to achieve the desired results. During the trial process, I could visualize my team and internal users using Freshservice. Its functionality, ease of use and intuitiveness stood out from the rest of the solutions we evaluated.” Furthermore, Adam adds, “The inclusion of hardware collection agent in the probe and customizable licensing plans to suit our requirements proved to be the deal-clincher for selection of Freshservice.”

Solution we provided

Adam uses Freshservice to deliver IT support to 600 users within Mosanada through the Techdesk. Using Freshservice, Adam is able to manage Mosanada’s Techdesk with a lean team of four members including himself.

Adam states, “With Freshservice, we have been getting closer to a structured and formalized approach to dealing with IT support issues. Change management functionality in Freshservice played a huge role in building this formalized approach. It helped reduce the number of surprises, improved the accountability and also transformed how the IT desk supports rest of the business while implementing the changes.”

Using Freshservice, Adam and his team have been able to track historical data and analyze the same to make necessary changes in the processes. He quotes, “We started keeping matrices only after we started using Freshservice.” By tracking the historical data, Adam is able to identify any recurring issues and address them appropriately. All this has contributed hugely towards improvement in accountability and transparency of the IT Techdesk.

Being a responsive and transparent helpdesk platform, Freshservice has helped improve the perception of Techdesk at Mosanada. Users now have increased faith and confidence in the IT support team. They know that once a ticket is raised, it will be attended to promptly and in case it is not, it is escalated automatically. Adam concurs that “We have been successful in getting the users to raise a ticket on our portal before calling us directly.” He has observed a reduction in direct calls from users before they raise a ticket. Furthermore, this formalized structure for ticket management allows Adam and his team to resolve the tickets in an orderly manner. He quotes, “Coming from no structure and no order, having a framework has helped us improve our service delivery.”

Customer feedback is important for Adam and his team. He leverages Freshservice to capture customer feedback which was earlier managed through a survey software. Having customer feedback integrated into ticketing system has made it a lot easier to deliver better support. He quotes, “If we receive a sad or neutral face in response to the service delivered, we quickly get in touch with the user and find out what went wrong. This proactive approach to managing the customer feedback provides an opportunity to the user to share feedback. He adds, “Customer feedback acts as a pressure release valve for our users, providing them with a platform to vent out and register their discontent.” He happily adds, “We have observed a considerable reduction in official complaints and an increase in constructive feedback since we started using Freshservice.”

Adam utilizes features such as solutions management, automation and workflows to deliver better support. Adam started enforcing the assets management feature only recently. Though scanning is done manually, he is glad that once the agent scans an asset and links it to the ticket, it is practically a seamless process.

Adam leverages the built-in reporting functionality extensively. In fact, he uses the reports to measure and monitor the performance of his team throughout the year; not leaving any ambiguities for the end of the year performance review. He has observed considerable improvement in accountability amongst the agents. He adds, “The agents compare themselves with their peers by generating the reports available in Freshservice. This helps the agents to focus on self-improvement and overall performance management.”

Using the service catalogues in Freshservice, Adam has been able to streamline the business and get rid of the paper-based business cases for IT procurement. He adds, “As the approval process is largely automated, using service catalogues is a fluid process without any barriers. It helps us collect upfront information from the user pertaining to the service requested. Having all the information prior to resolving the ticket helps provide a faster and better resolution.”

Expanding the reach of Freshservice within Mosanada, the HR department is keen on exploring the service catalogue feature for training requests. Having experienced the benefits of Freshservice in improving the helpdesk experience for internal users at Mosanada, Adam has received requests to replicate the solution for the end customers.

Successes

Freshservice being a cloud-based solution, all the updates and product maintenance are taken care of by the Freshservice team, resulting in one less thing for Adam to maintain. Speaking about the cloud-based delivery model, he shares, though it was not a criterion at the time of selecting Freshservice three years ago, given an option now, he will stick with a cloud-based solution.

From the end user perspective, Freshservice has increased the transparency of IT support processes at Mosanada. The end users need not chase the support agents for updates and are always kept in the loop with Freshservice. Adam shares that the end users appreciated the single sign-on feature linked to their office 365 which allows them to log in with their existing system credentials.

Freshservice has also played an instrumental role in improving the operational perspective of helpdesk management at Mosanada. Using Freshservice, Adam is able to manage and evaluate the IT support team’s performance without any ambiguities.

In future, Adam is enthusiastic about exploring the graphical workflow automation to achieve improved automation of helpdesk operations.