Engel & Völkers moves 1,200 stuck tickets by breaking down IT silos

Engel & Völkers is one of the world's most recognized names in luxury real estate, with more than 16,700 people operating across 1,000-plus locations in 35 countries. A 27-person service desk in Hamburg serves as the single point of contact for IT support across that entire operation.

The team handled routine requests well, processing around 67,000 tickets a year. But the moment a complex ticket required the company's internal software development team, it entered a void — the service desk passed it on and considered its job done, while development found the handoffs too vague to act on. Around 1,200 tickets sat in limbo, some for months, with users left waiting and no one accountable.

André Haacks, lead service desk at Engel & Völkers, recognized the problem wasn't volume or tooling — it was organizational silo thinking. To solve this, he built a transformation program around Freshservice, using the platform's reporting and workflow capabilities as the operational backbone while tackling the cultural breakdown between the two teams directly.

The results were concrete: vanishing handoffs gave way to direct communication loops, resolution paths that once dead-ended now closed, and 80% of the service desk team report meaningful progress in how the two teams work together.

The company

Engel & Völkers is a Hamburg-based global real estate brokerage founded in 1977, operating in over 35 countries across more than 1,000 locations. More than 16,700 people work under the brand worldwide, including both salaried employees and independent license partners — real estate agents who pay for access to the Engel & Völkers brand and platform to run their own businesses.

The challenge

For a service desk supporting two such different audiences, the stakes of getting IT support right are high. Salaried employees expect responsive IT; license partners, who generate their own revenue and answer to no one's clock but their own, have even less patience for delays. With 27 agents handling around 67,000 tickets and 8,400 calls per year, Engel & Völkers' service desk was the single point of contact for all of it.

The team managed routine requests capably, with Freshservice. But when a ticket required input from the company's internal software development team—the group responsible for building and maintaining Engel & Völkers' own IT solutions—the process broke down. The service desk forwarded the ticket and considered its responsibility fulfilled. But the dev team, receiving tickets it found insufficiently detailed to act on, pushed back or stalled. Neither team had a shared standard for ownership. "The service desk would say, 'We forwarded it to development, we're done,'" says Haacks. "Development would say, 'The ticket wasn't pre-qualified well enough.' And the customer was stuck in the middle."

Freshservice's reporting made the scale of the problem impossible to dismiss: around 1,200 tickets sat unresolved, some for more than three months. But as Haacks recognized, the data was a symptom, not the diagnosis. The real problem was a cultural one—siloed thinking that automation alone couldn't fix. What the team needed was a shift, as Haacks puts it, from administration to accountability.

The solution

Rather than treating the issue as a technology problem, Haacks developed a program around what organizational theorist John Kotter calls the dual operating system: one side of the department kept daily operations running without interruption, while the other became a deliberate space for experimentation. Freshservice, powered by AWS, provided the compliance, efficiency, and reporting infrastructure the operational side required. "The reporting is easy to access, which is wonderful, and it's quite unflinching," says Haacks. "You can see exactly where the issues are."

The experimental layer began not with new features but with conversations. Haacks interviewed every member of the team, asking what wasn't working and why, rather than issuing top-down directives. One outcome was a pilot replacing email chains on complex tickets with short video calls. For tickets with intricate technical issues that generated dozens of emails before resolution, a focused video call proved dramatically faster and produced significantly higher acceptance from the users involved. What worked in the pilot was then integrated into standard Freshservice workflows.

Impact

Haacks expects the changes to take a few years to become fully entrenched, but the early results are substantive. Eighty percent of the service desk team report that the gap between the two teams has meaningfully narrowed, a finding drawn from internal surveys Haacks conducted as part of the program evaluation. The 1,200 tickets that once sat in limbo are no longer piling up; direct communication loops between the service desk and development have replaced the handoff breakdowns that caused them.

The shift has also freed the team for higher-value work. "We now have far more time in our department to empathize with user needs and develop ideas for doing things differently," says Haacks, "instead of sending the tenth or thirtieth email about the same ticket."

Encouraged by those results, Engel & Völkers is now turning its attention to silos elsewhere in the organization, using Freshservice's enterprise service management capabilities to bring the same structured approach to HR, Finance, Marketing, and other business functions.