Freshworks transforms IT service management at Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service

Freshworks' Freshservice has transformed the IT service management (ITSM) system at Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) to improve support resolution times, enable self-service, automation and centralize administration. After the COPFS IT team adopted Freshservice’s automated workflow design, analytics, and marketplace integration features, it has seen a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction and resolution times.

The COPFS employs more than 2500 staff and has 70 agents in its IT team, which recorded 45,517 incident tickets and 18,202 requests from users in 2023.

With its previous system in place, the COPFS found it challenging to manage tickets, wider IT projects and workflows, and expressed growing concerns over cybersecurity. Therefore, after analysing a number of different ITSM tools, the COPFS chose Freshservice to overhaul its ITSM system.

“Freshservice ticked all of the right boxes for us; good automation, advanced chatbot features, orchestration APIs, and customisation, including integration with Azure and Microsoft Teams and it’s just so easy to use,” said Adam Biggs, head of IT services at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

The workflow automation capabilities of the Freshservice platform have been vital for the COPFS, which now utilises these for change, incident and request management to apply SLAs (service level agreements), categorise, assign to correct teams and fully automate some processes. It now has 25 workflows set up to route tickets to the right places and have seen an SLA improvement of over 12% in just six months since going live. The COPFS also uses Freshservice as an asset tracker, by utilising the reporting and analytics capabilities to help to drive an internal understanding of the entire IT estate and its use.

The COPFS is also able to identify common problem areas through analytics, something which previously was carried out manually by agents. Freshservice’s auto categorisation workflows, removes manual processes and bottlenecks, improving operations, efficiency and reducing risk of human errors. With Freshservice, the COPFS has already saved 200 hours of analyst time with 600 requests for software now being automatically deployed.

Users are clearly noticing the improved service, with 86% of customers now rating the service as “excellent” in CSAT score and 93% customers claiming they are satisfied with incident resolution time and a 12% service level agreement (SLA) improvement.

“We're getting busier and busier, and it's difficult to get the budget for additional staff, so using AI automation in Freshservice to manage repeatable tasks is freeing-up our staff to focus on more important work,” added Biggs. “That’s a big bonus for us.”

Use of Freshworks’ Marketplace has also been beneficial to the COPFS—allowing for easy integration with Microsoft Teams and Azure Active Directory. Next, the COPFS is looking to add Microsoft’s PowerShell to this list, to extend the system’s automation capabilities, and soon hopes to develop its own status page for using the new Freshservice Major Incident Management module.

“By utilising Freshservice’s automation capabilities, The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has been able to shrug off the burden of repetitive, manual tasks and focus on what really matters, the experience of the end-user,” said John Crossan, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Europe at Freshworks.

 “It’s great to see the instant impact that the Freshservice platform has had on customer service satisfaction and SLA improvement – and we’re excited to keep working with the COPFS.”