Freshworks awarded IT service role at National Theatre

The UK’s National Theatre (NT) has deployed Freshservice to manage support and service across the organisation. Using Freshservice, the National Theatre’s IT team has implemented a new, more conversational approach to IT service requests that has improved turn-around times and made staff more efficient.

The National Theatre stages world-class theatre productions, aiming to bring theatre to the widest possible audience in the UK and around the world. For the IT team, this involves responding to service requests and providing assistance to a wide mix of different users. Running this operation was previously difficult for collaboration, had an unfriendly email experience and there were no self-service options.

George Tunnicliffe, Head of IT Operations at the National Theatre, led the selection of Freshservice to provide a new approach to delivering service. “We wanted to implement a new approach to service that would help our users and our internal agents to work together more effectively. Previously, we had very little collaboration support under our old system, there was no portal available for users to select service requests, and there was no ability to review agent performance internally either,” he explained.

“Implementing Freshservice has revolutionised the way we interact across the NT with our user base, providing a friendly customer focussed experience which means we can support people in the way that they choose and suits them best. Whether it be the portal, the self-help or email, bringing the information on what we do, how we do and the way we do has improved our relationship with the rest of the organisation immensely,” continued Tunnicliffe.

As a not-for-profit organisation working across multiple sites and productions, the service environment for the National Theatre was not a standard deployment. Multi-user devices, mobile users and mixed team levels all made support for non-standard ticketing and workflows essential.

Freshworks worked with the National Theatre team to redesign its processes for service delivery and deploy collaboration services that could support the organisation’s complex mix of user requirements. The team implemented a central helpdesk service to manage requests and tickets and introduced both new self-service tools and a request portal. Alongside this, the team now has centralised reporting to demonstrate workloads and efficiency savings. Following the successful project, the department as a whole has improved its reputation internally across the organisation through faster response times, clearer updates and a more conversational approach to service.

Simon Johnson, General Manager UKI at Freshworks commented, “Putting people at the heart of service deployments is essential if you want them to be successful. Delivering better customer experience through IT service and support can make employees more productive, while agents feel like they are more able to make a difference in their roles. Cloud-based service management approaches help deliver these experiences faster and more efficiently.”