FRESHWORKS: the COMPANY:

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks employs 4,000 employees from 13 global locations. Freshworks became a public company, trading on Nasdaq as FRSH. Their founders Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy aim is to deliver modern, intuitive, and delightful products to customers worldwide, 11 years ago with a small idea for a ‘fresh’ helpdesk. Today they offer a rich and growing of products servicing over 52,000 customers.  For more information visit www.freshworks.com.

Freshworks builds tech that offers a competitive advantage that works for everyone, making it easy for IT, customer service, sales, marketers and HR to do what they do best, and delight their customers. Relationships are key and Freshworks created their name, and considerable fame, by helping their customers and 400 partners. take advantage of the best in Omnichannel hot, Multichannel business workflows, for competitive business advantage. Freshworks offers 1,000+ apps to 50,000+ global customers:

• OfficeMax created 91.7% Customer Satisfaction, First Call Resolution to 88.7% frontline with 97.1% SLA adherence.
• Bridgestone Corporation closed tickets 97% faster, automation saved 35 hours a month with 91% SLA Compliance.
• TaylorMade used Freshservice during a 250% increased ticket volume to improve response and resolution by 50%!
• ViceMedia used Freshservice to automate 80% of their front end ticket service delivery for excellent CX satisfaction.
• Western Sussex Hospitals achieved Customer Satisfaction at 95%, when the system CSAT was less than 60%!

“By 2022, 90% of organizations will invest in an ITSM tool without first factoring in their maturity, and as a result, fail to obtain the ROI.” 

6 Steps to Ensure IT Service Management Tools Drive Business Value (gartner.com)

FRESHSERVICE: the ITSM PRODUCT

Freshworks has a serious vision for a Fresh Service IT Service Management, multichannel Customer Experience. With affordable pricing, modern uncompromised technology and Freshservice is a 3 year award Gartner Magic Quadrant winner in delivering visionary quality solutions.

IT Service Management Solution Requirements generally require:

• Easy Set up Deployment for out of out of the box functionality
• Omnichannel/Multichannel support with integration with email, web, chat
• Low Cost of implementation and ongoing maintenance for best functionality, with reduced ongoing costs.
• Customer Experience /Employee Experience friendly interface accepted by users and agents.

A Forrester Study found that Freshservice delivers a 308% ROI through:

• Improved service agent productivity when compared to the overhead of manually created Service Request tickets. Freshservice offers ticket auto-routing system, organizations can save $595,135 over three years.
• End-user productivity gains of $1,075,097 by leveraging an efficiently designed user interface that makes it easier and faster for end users to create tickets, with savings 4 minutes per ticket, as compared to their legacy systems.

Customer Experience depends on ease of use and fast to deploy technology. Freshworks is making huge business impact by accelerating ease to deploy and speed of use for a rich OmniChannel experience. The fresh approach that is giving them considerable buzz is that they produce and deliver affordable software quick to implement, and designed for the end user with velocity and artificial intelligence in customer engagement across the business lifecycles.

ITSM Full Service Solution offering:

• Incident Management
• Service Request Management
• Problem Management
• Change and Release Management

Incident Management

Expert service features lets Service Desk Analysts categorize and prioritize incidents with easy to use features, enhanced with advanced Artificial Intelligence Engine, that offers advantages of best practices without needing an onboard data scientist.

• Automatic ticket categorization powered by a Freshservice AI engine based on historical ticket data. 
• Powerful workflow automation with automated ticket prioritization taking the heavy lifting out of manual prioritization of impact and urgency.
• Improved ticket Auto-assignment for efficient routing to the correct expert agents or groups, to ensure no ticket gets lost in the shuffle of human error, round-robin or load balancing auto-assignment

Service Request Management

Provide a consumer like end user shopping experience from a modern looking catalog of service items published on the end-user portal. End users can opt for self service or easy service request from searchable end-user portal available on desktop or mobile app solution.

• Easy to create and manage business rules and set up workflow automations with agent assignment, multistage approval workflows, and customizable service item attributes
• Catalog order with Workorder back end helps keep all stakeholders fully informed with timely notifications that manage expectations with automatically triggered communications, based on rules. 
• Prioritize requests and improve service delivery with SLAs that can be customized at a service item level.

Problem Management

The ITSM Fresh Approach to Problem management is to recognize the ServiceDesk as the heart of IT Service Management. A solid strategy to focus on implementing Problem Management to reduce “fire fighting” makes sure you are solving the right problems strategically.

• Easy means to identify problems with simple automation.
• Provide visibility with root cause analyses to understand what happened, and strategize how to reduce repetition, identification and resolution.
• Provide continuous learning and transparency with a known error database.
• Prevent incidents with workarounds and solutions.

Change Management

Change management process main objective is to ensure that communications, managed risk, and planning for change occur under control before implementation. Release management takes care of the actual implementation of planned changes. It is crucial to differentiate the roles & responsibilities of change and release management to avoid any conflict. Successful change leads to new release and change management coordinates with release for build, test and implementation plan.

• Ensuring the change is recorded in a common system of record
• Assessing the change for risk to existing services or business workflows
• Establishing the appropriate level of change approval needed for Standard, Normal, and Emergency Changes
• Validating the success, or understanding the cause of a failed change to improve change practice.
• Reviewing the positives and negatives of the change-management process, so improvements can be made

Request for Change

Request For Change (RFC) is submitted to the change management team for validation and approval. Change requests occur from one of the following sources.

• Change induced by Incident
• Problem induced change
• Business or End user requested for a new change
• Ongoing Maintenance Change Ticket

A Request/Reason for Change template used to record core elements of the change

• Reason for change – Justifies why change is needed along with risk/benefit analysis.  
• Impact & Risk assessment – Potential Impact and risk are calculated and documented including configuration items, CIs.
• Cost benefit analysis – Estimated cost versus potential benefits are compared.
• Implementation planning – Steps for implementing change that includes project members, timelines and methodology.

Change Assessment and Planning

Evaluates the Request for change prioritization and planning activities to minimize risk and impact. This will often identify the change and consider its upstream or downstream implications by checking the Configuration Management Database for who might be alerted or what change calendar events might be reviewed before scheduling an implementation date.

• Prioritization – Determine the type of change and prioritize the requests accordingly.
• Scheduling – Check the Release schedule to get an estimated time frame and fix the planned start date and end date
• Roll out plan – Plan out the implementation activities
• Back out plan – Back out plan in case of unexpected setbacks

Change approvals

Change management handles a change from Request, to planning, implementation, communication, and approvals. Change approval is crucial to eliminate any execution failure and downtime. Approval is based upon risk, and a CAB handles higher risk or business impact approvals where standard change like patch deployment does not require CAB approval and are pre-approved. Change request is approved only if all the CAB members approve it. Upon rejection, reassessment review is done and submitted again for CAB approval.

Release Management

Change implementation is handled by Release management team. When a Change is CAB Approved the implementation deployment planning begins.

Release involves a final check of all the implementation aspects of the Change, technical and nontechnical, being validated and planned to a logical roll out with validation before, during and immediate check out after implementation.

Change Management review happens once the implementation is completed to ensure everything has gone according to the plan. This is delivered by a Post Implementation Review (PIR) check that the implementation team followed their processes planning, testing, and implementation check out.

Release Management in Freshservice

Releases provides a filtered view of all Releases:

        ● New and Your Open Releases
        ● Your Completed Releases
        ● Your Releases
        ● Unassigned Releases
        ● Completed Releases
        ● Incomplete Releases
        ● Emergency Releases
        ● Trash
        ● All Releases

San Francisco Bay Area: linkedin.com/groups/7064063/ itSMF- San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley Chapter)