Bangor Savings Bank scales service excellence

Bangor Savings Bank, a Maine-based community bank with deep community roots, modernized its internal IT service operations with Freshservice in 2019, achieving rapid time to value, streamlined workflows, and a 95% SLA resolution rate across 30,000 quarterly tickets. The success was so clear that when its payroll business faced growing customer support demands, Freshdesk was the natural choice.

Freshdesk delivered instant visibility into ticket volumes—71,000 in a single quarter—and pushed SLA resolution to 98% with an average first response time of just two hours. “We saw impact day one,” says Justin Fournier, SVP, Director of Infrastructure and Support. “Information that used to be hard to find was suddenly at our fingertips.”

By extending Freshworks solutions from employee to customer service, Bangor has created a scalable platform that supports both staff and clients with faster responses, richer data, and consistent service across the organization.

The company

Headquartered in Bangor, Maine, in 1852, Bangor Savings Bank offers retail banking, business, and comprehensive commercial banking, payment and corporate services, HR and payroll technologies, and merchant solutions. The bank has 70 branches in Maine and New Hampshire and business and/or loan production offices in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. 

The challenge

By 2019, Bangor Savings Bank’s IT service desk was struggling under an outdated, cumbersome platform. Entering tickets often took longer than resolving the original request, creating backlogs, incomplete data, and low visibility for managers. Administrators spent hours navigating complex settings, while employees dreaded using the system.

“Before Freshservice, I would have a helpdesk associate take a phone call and then dread putting their ticket in because it took longer to put the ticket in than the phone call took,” recalls Justin Fournier, SVP, Director of Infrastructure and Support. “Once we got the demo system from Freshservice, getting it off the ground was really simple.” 

Freshservice transformed internal IT and business team workflows, but in another corner of the bank—Bangor Payroll^®—the customer support team faced similar challenges that IT and business teams had overcome. Nearly 5,000 clients mostly relied on email support for payroll, time and labor management, and HR services. Without a unified ticketing system, agents juggled 50 shared inboxes, which made it hard to prioritize urgent requests, ensure emails were responded to appropriately, track issues, measure performance, or cover for absent colleagues.

“As we grew, the lack of metrics and visibility became a real problem,” says Amanda Cox, AVP, Bangor Payroll^® Implementation Manager. Clients needed fast, accurate answers—sometimes about critical issues like missed paychecks—but the tools made it hard to deliver and manage.

After seeing the results Freshservice delivered internally, the team knew where to turn for a customer-facing solution.

The solution

Bangor Savings Bank chose Freshdesk to bring the same efficiency and visibility to customer support that Freshservice had delivered for internal teams. The bank’s prior success with Freshservice—and Freshworks’ customer-first values—made the decision easy.

“Freshworks cares about our success and treats its customers the way we treat ours,” says Fournier. “That alignment mattered as much as the technology.”

Freshdesk, powered by AWS, centralized all Bangor Payroll^® support into a single system. Instead of 50 inboxes, each with its own address, customers now email one address, and their requests become trackable tickets. Supervisors can view dashboards showing real-time volumes, SLA adherence, and response times. Within six months, the team handled over 105,000 tickets and was on pace for 400,000 in the first full year.

“With our IT team using Freshservice, I’ve been able to use it to coach our payroll team on how we’re going to use Freshdesk,” says Cox. “It was nice to have that example of something already working in the bank.”

Average first response time dropped to two hours, with 91.88% of tickets meeting the four-hour SLA. Resolution SLA climbed to 98%. The system also enabled category-based reporting, helping managers identify seasonal surges, recurring product issues, opportunities to create new resources, and the ability to store procedures within the system. As a result of the increased internal visibility and improved workflow management, the overall customer experience improved.

The rollout was carefully phased: one team and supervisors went live first to smooth out workflows, followed by another team two weeks later, and then a month later the rest of the support teams. “The Freshservice implementation for our IT department took about 20 weeks from start to finish,” says Fournier. “The biggest parts of the implementation were the decisions to make and what to put in place. Once those decisions were made, configuring them in Freshservice was pretty quick.”

“Our team learned a whole new system while guiding clients through a major change,” says Cox. “I’m proud of how they handled it without missing a beat.”

Impact

Across both internal and customer-facing service, Freshworks has helped Bangor Savings Bank achieve measurable gains in speed, accuracy, and scalability.

• Freshservice: 95% SLA resolution, 30,000 quarterly tickets, first response time of 2h 30m, first assignment time of 14m 42s.

• Freshdesk: 98% SLA resolution, 71,000 quarterly tickets, 2-hour average first response, 91.88% SLA compliance for first response.

“We saw impact on day one,” says Fournier. “Dashboards, reports, everything we needed was just there.”

From IT to payroll, Bangor Savings Bank sees the results of a unified platform, scaling service across departments, channels, and the entire customer experience, making banking better for both customers and employees.