Scotland's COPFS boosts IT operations with Freshworks' Freshservice

The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), Scotland's key prosecution service, has successfully uplifted its IT support and management services with substantial help from Freshwork's Freshservice platform.

The enhancement in support resolution times, promotion of self-service, automation, and centralising administration are tell-tale signs of Freshworks' input. More specifically, since the COPFS IT staff began using Freshservice's automated workflow design, analytics, and marketplace integration features, a marked improvement in customer satisfaction and resolution times has been observed.

The COPFS IT team, comprised of 70 agents and serving more than 2500 staff, recorded 45,517 incident tickets and 18,202 requests from users in 2023. Prior to enlisting Freshworks' assistance, they faced significant challenges managing tickets, broader IT projects, and workflows. In addition, they had serious concerns about cybersecurity. In their search for a solution, they selected Freshservice to update their IT service management (ITSM) system after examining a range of ITSM tools.

"Freshservice ticked all 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," stated Adam Biggs, head of IT services at the COPFS. He specified how the workflow automation capabilities offered by Freshservice have proven essential.

These allow the COPFS to utilise change, incident, and request management for applying service level agreements (SLAs), categorisation, assignment to appropriate teams, and complete process automation. This has led to an SLA improvement of more than 12% in just the first six months.

Biggs also stated, "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. That's a big bonus for us."

Additionally, COPFS found the Freshservice platform's auto-categorisation workflows beneficial in identifying common problem areas, something previously performed manually by human agents. 200 hours of analyst time have been saved so far, with 600 requests for software being automatically deployed through Freshservice.

Users have readily noted the improved service. 86% of customers have rated the service as "excellent" in the CSAT score, 93% are satisfied with the incident resolution time, and there has been a 12% improvement in service level agreement.

Freshworks' Marketplace has also been invaluable for the COPFS due to its effortless integration with Microsoft Teams and Azure Active Directory. They are also planning to add Microsoft's PowerShell to the system's automation capabilities and aiming to create their own status page using the new Freshservice Major Incident Management module.

John Crossan, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Europe at Freshworks, commented on the transition. "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."

He added, "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."