Better ITSM helps D’Youville keep its good standing
A messy on-premise ITSM risked key accreditations for the university. Freshservice’s cloud-based solution turned things around.
“Freshservice had everything we needed.”
Business challenge
Outdated and inefficient on-premise IT solution
Increased demand for IT support due to remote learning
Business outcome
Improved inventory accuracy and resource planning
Freshworks solutions are built on Freshworks Neo Platform, powered by AWS, providing a strong and scalable foundation for end-to-end cloud operations
D'Youville University is an undergraduate and graduate university founded in 1908 in Buffalo, New York. It has 3,000 students and 500 faculty and staff.
Higher education
North America
When Kristin Benoodt joined D’Youville University, it was January 2020, just weeks out from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns that would change the way people work.
“A super-fun time to start any job,” she says with a grimace.
As director of network services at D'Youville University, Benoodt had been recruited to bring the century-old institution into the modern age. IT support and delivery had been handled by an on-premise solution from SolarWinds so user-unfriendly that most times, students and faculty simply sent emails to any address they could find for IT. Tickets were barely tracked and SLAs were regularly missed. The 16-person IT team lacked the skillset and sufficient bandwidth to properly maintain the costly setup, and reporting was almost impossible.
“We’d be asked by leadership about how many tickets we’d had for certain students, because they needed that information for accreditation,” says Benoodt. “And we had to tell them, ‘There’s no way we can pull that information for you.’”
The problems compounded once the pandemic sent students, faculty, and most staff home. IT needs skyrocketed, and in a remote workplace environment, the university’s on-premise system from SolarWinds wasn’t even accessible by end users, as it required login from within the on-campus network.
In 2023, D’Youville finally migrated to a cloud solution from Freshworks, built on Neo Platform and powered by AWS, that was easy and intuitive for end users, provided a robust ticketing system with analytics, and professionalized asset management that had been chaotic with SolarWinds. SLA adherence improved to 91%, and asset management was now 95% accurate. Automations and self-service helped to free up the team for bigger projects—like supporting the build-out of a new gym, or, more crucially, delivering data needed for federal aid.
The company
D'Youville University, founded in 1908, is located in Buffalo, New York. Its 500 faculty and staff serve 3,000 students with undergraduate and graduate programs in healthcare, business, and the liberal arts.
The challenge
Like all higher education institutions, D’Youville University is required to provide key data about its student body and operations to federal authorities from time to time. But D’Youville’s on-premise IT solution was so clunky, it risked the university’s ability to get funding and maintain its programs’ accreditations.
Remote learning added to the issues, stretching the 15-member IT team thin. The on-premise solution from SolarWinds required IT team members to be on-campus to maintain the server and database infrastructure. What’s more, since the system network was closed, it required users to be on-campus to access it—a near impossibility in the pandemic. The system was so bad that, even when on campus, end users preferred sending emails to the IT team describing their problems.
“We had a hard time getting people to even use that system because it was difficult to access and difficult to understand and use,” says Benoodt.
The problems spread beyond the end-user experience: Inventory management was hampered by inaccurate asset tracking; the reporting process was complex and time-consuming, relying on manual data extraction from SQL databases; and inconsistent ticket categorization resulted in misdirected routing and delayed resolution, further impacting SLA tracking accuracy.
The solution
Benoodt was clear about what the university needed: ease of use and ease of integration with existing platforms such as Active Directory and Casper for data and asset management, and Microsoft Teams so users could create tickets simply via messages.
A competitive search for a scalable, flexible, easy-to-use, cloud-based IT service management system included osTicket, Ivanti, and the cloud-based version of SolarWinds—but Freshservice was the clear winner, says Benoodt. “Freshservice had everything we needed,” she says, pointing to its user-friendly interface, cloud-based architecture, strong integration capabilities, and customization flexibility.
With the help of implementation partner Flycast, D’Youville implemented Freshservice in June 2023.
Once the semester was in full swing, end users were logging in (from anywhere) to a new IT portal to get answers from a knowledge base and bots, and more complex queries were turned into trackable tickets. Since then, automations have streamlined workflows, improved response times, and enhanced service delivery—insights Benoodt has gained from Freshservice’s advanced reporting and analytics.
Impact
Among D’Youville’s IT team, more complex projects are now getting their due. A modern ticketing system along with analytics has made it easier to pull reports needed for accreditation-related requests, necessary for keeping the university on solid footing. Average response and resolution times are both under 24 hours, and SLA compliance is greater than 90%.
Asset management has also improved, thanks to Freshservice’s robust inventory management capabilities. Data on the locations and licenses of hardware like student laptops and classroom projectors, as well as software like online learning licenses, are now tracked and 95% accurate, compared to 45% with SolarWinds, improving procurement and resource planning.
Automations, streamlined workflows, and enhanced reporting have made the IT team more efficient and productive. This means they can provide better service to end-users—students, faculty, and staff—addressing their needs so they can get back to class.
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