About the company
Bensons for Beds is the UK’s leading bed specialist and has nearly 70 years of experience in sourcing the best quality beds, frames, mattresses and bedroom furniture. They have been awarded the prestigious BSI Kitemark Accreditation, which demonstrates the highest possible quality standards and reflects their goal of providing quality products at affordable prices.
Scaling up service delivery to evolving needs
The existing solution to manage service requests (built in-house along with intranet), was not able to scale with the growing demand and needs within the organisation. The IT team struggled with having visibility on incoming issues, while the end-users were frustrated with the lack of status updates on the requests raised by them.
Incoming issues from stores were handled via email and involved multiple users. The team had mailbox groups of up to 20 people, and the lack of collaborative capabilities resulted in a complete breakdown of communication. Escalating urgent issues was not possible with the existing solution. These shortcomings resulted in a poor end-user experience who had no context on who was dealing with their tickets and had difficulty in getting their problems resolved. Over 100 different Office 365 forms were used to track incoming requests from various departments. Managing these requests was proving to be a logistical nightmare.
Deciding on Freshservice:
Bensons for Beds’ IT team started evaluating ITSM solutions that would meet their growing needs. They were looking at a solution that would;
- Centralise service request management
- Provide a good return on investment, and
- Have a smooth implementation process
After evaluating several ITSM vendors in the market, the IT team selected Freshworks ITSM suite – Freshservice as the solution of choice for meeting all of their needs. Freshservice was deemed as the most cost-effective solution that offered the desired functionalities. Freshworks’ local presence in the UK was an added advantage.
Winning with Freshservice:
Improving IT processes
Bensons for Beds started with using Freshservice for its IT team, transitioning from emails, and shared inboxes to a complete ticketing system within Freshservice. Eventually, the team adopted other modules and are currently following the ITIL framework to improve IT processes. End-users are now able to raise tickets via the user portal in addition to emails.
Expanding across the organisation
After seeing success with the IT team, Bensons for Beds decided to expand the solution to other departments. By consolidating over a hundred Office 365 forms with service catalogues in the user portal, end-users could pick and choose their required services at the click of a button. Very much the Amazon-like shopping cart experience. The all-new service request forms also allowed the IT teams to obtain accurate information for each request, providing full context for the agents to work on these requests. Today, 325+ agents leverage Freshservice across different departments within the organisation, up from 10 agents when they began the journey with Freshworks.
Among the many use cases, the HR & Payroll team is leveraging Freshservice to allow employees to apply leaves & update their personal information in the company database. The Finance department is using the portal to enable end-users to raise new supplier requests, expense queries, and status of supplier invoices. The Customer Support team uses the portal to raise customer queries with the concerned departments for faster resolution.
The departments that are currently on the platform include;
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HR & Payroll
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Finance
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Marketing
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Customer Service
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Commercial Department
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Process Support
Providing a delightful user experience
Bensons for Beds has seen a massive improvement in the user experience for both agents and end-users after implementing Freshservice. The user portal has allowed the end-users to raise different types of requests in one place as well as provide complete visibility on the status of their requests.
With full context captured on service requests, the agents are now able to collaborate across multiple locations effectively. Agents now receive instant notifications on urgent requests via text messages, allowing for quicker resolution of business-critical issues.
The robust ticketing workflow has significantly improved the SLA levels at Bensons for Beds. The average ticket resolution time has enhanced by 54%, and FCR increased from 86% to 95%.
“Freshservice has allowed us to improve our service management across the organisation. It has made interacting with end-users easy and allowed us to improve resolution times. We are now proactively able to solve issues and improve process efficiencies. I am delighted with the solution and am confident in our future with it”
Laurence Hendy
Head of Business Application, Bensons for Beds