Freshworks has announced that the Professional Provident Society (PPS) has implemented Freshservice. Founded in 1941 PPS provides insurance services to graduate professionals. It is a mutual that invests its profits in a profit share account for those members above the age of sixty. As part of its drive to modernise its IT systems it focused on three strategic pillars: cloud, security and ITIL best practices. Its legacy IT service desk solution was not fit for purpose. PPS could not deliver SLA information to the business and many processes were broken such as escalation. It collected and processed service desk requests through various channels including mail, phone calls and even excel. To help deliver on its strategy it reviewed the market and looked to replace the legacy solution.
PPS chose Freshservice
It selected Freshservice from Freshworks. This was not just about the software as Sonja Visagie, Senior Manager, IT Service delivery explained: “At PPS we value partnerships, we don’t like to deal with vendors we like to deal with strategic partners. Freshworks is one of those service providers that we have developed a strategic partnership with. From Sales all the way through to implementation was a phenomenal service from the guys.”
Visagie is enthusiastic about the functionality that Freshservice has provided the team at PPS. She complimented the collaboration tool, knowledge base and HR portal especially. Through implementing the solution PPS has eliminated several manual processes and can now report on IT service performance accurately. It has an aim to deliver an SLA compliance of 98% by the end of 2019. Performance has already increased rapidly towards that target. The ITIL aligned features have enabled PPS to improve performance within the IT Service teams with automation replacing broken manual processes for the 200 agents now using Freshservice.
Currently, PPS gets around 2,000 tickets a month. In theory that number may actually decline once they take advantage of all the features that Freshservice delivers, including the chatbots, self-service and knowledge base. Whether that results in any cost savings was not clear from the release but with 200 agents, one assumes in time that there will be some.
Saurabh Prabhuzantye, Regional Head for Middle East & Africa at Freshworks: “An ITSM solution helps teams function with better efficiency and Freshservice helped the IT teams of PPS collaborate better. PPS also setup a well-defined ITIL-aligned escalation process to ensure better resolution times.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a significant win for Freshworks in South Arica. As PPS take advantage of its new solution to its full extent it will be an interesting case study. PPS are already tracking their SLA and should be able to show marked improvements from implementation through the first year. What will then be interesting is whether they take advantage of the other features that Freshservice offers. Notably with its AI driven chatbot Freddy.
