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New ESM system goes live tomorrow!

The big day is almost here, FreshService will be live from tomorrow morning (20 November).

By now we hope that everyone is feeling prepared and ready to start managing enquiries via the new ESM system. 

The recap

Our aim has been to launch a new, user-friendly system with all the key features to manage incoming IT support requests.

We’ll be releasing a handful of new features to enhance the tools available to Professional Services staff and improve the customer experience for requestors:

  • Enquiry management: Cutting-edge ticketing capabilities and underpinning routing automations, powered by university affiliation data from CUD.
  • Customer Portal: A single, online place for raising and tracking tickets/incidents, and the ability to present both divisional and departmental service catalogues.
  • Knowledge Base: An initial collection of support articles for common requests that can be presented relative to university-wide, divisional or department-level IT contexts.   
  • Customisable Dashboards: Service agents, supervisors and managers will have the ability to build their own widget-based dashboards to better understand and manage their work. 

Final preparations

Login to FreshService ahead of tomorrow’s launch to get familiar with the layout of the system, the basic ticketing features and your new ‘service groups’ that will replace existing RT queues. 

If you didn’t get a chance to attend one of the tutor-led training courses, fear not – online training is available through the Freshworks Academy:

We recommend some housekeeping of your RT queues by ensuring old requests are closed and read our guide on how to forward active tickets to manage them in Freshservice. 

What to expect next

From tomorrow until Christmas, our plan is to let the new system ‘bed in’, focussing our efforts on supporting Phase 1 pilot group members, and preparing to onboard the Professional Services teams in Phase 2 from January.   

We’re confident that all the important stuff (integrations, email forwarding, underpinning workflows, etc) are now working however we fully expect the need for some finessing over the coming weeks. 

If you spot any issues or things not quite working as they should, the ESM project team will be on hand to help. You can:

In the (hopefully unlikely) event that the routing workflows have incorrectly assigned a ticket to your team, you can reassign the ticket to the correct service group to ensure that the enquiry can be managed by the right people.

Thanks to everyone who’s been involved and helped us to get to this milestone – your support has been invaluable. 

We’ll be in touch again before the end of the year with another short survey to collect your feedback.  

Finally, if other teams in your department are interested in FreshService, encourage them to check out www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/esm-pilot, visit the Next Steps for Your Team page, or contact Matt Dunne directly.

ESM Pilot