Freshworks’ HR team cuts onboarding time by 80%

As Freshworks scaled globally, HR operations began to feel the weight of complexity. Its original service platform—Lighthouse, a Freshservice instance—worked when the needs were simpler. But as the company grew to more than 5,000 employees, Lighthouse became a patchwork of customizations, devolving into a fragmented, manual environment that slowed onboarding, limited visibility, and strained employee experience.

By reimplementing Freshservice and rethinking HR workflows from the ground up, Freshworks simplified service delivery and unified operations across teams. This transformation followed a deliberate crawl-walk-run approach that started with standardization, building visibility, and ultimately enabling automation and AI-driven insights.

The new Freshservice instance has decreased onboarding time from 5–7 days to under a day. Over 80% of employees are productive on Day 1, and HR leaders operate with real-time insights instead of reactive reporting. What was once a fragmented system is now a scalable, intelligent HR service delivery engine.

“We’ve moved from spending hours building reports to getting insights instantly, so we can focus on making decisions and driving business value,” says Jaya Subramanian, senior director of global HR shared services at Freshworks.

The company

Freshworks builds enterprise-grade software that is powerful yet easy to use, helping organizations deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences while eliminating unnecessary complexity.

The challenge

When you’re building software to simplify work for thousands of companies, your own internal operations can’t afford to be complex.

At Freshworks, HR service delivery was starting to show signs of strain. The original Freshservice instance, Lighthouse, had been in place since 2016. Over time, it became highly customized, fragmented, and increasingly difficult to scale.

What should have been seamless employee lifecycle processes turned into manual coordination across spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected systems. HR and IT operated in parallel rather than in sync, creating delays in onboarding and access provisioning. New hires often waited 5–7 days just to get access to essential systems, losing valuable time before they could even begin contributing.

Behind the scenes, reporting told a similar story. Leaders didn’t lack data, they lacked clarity. Insights were buried in manual reports, slowing decision-making and limiting HR’s ability to operate proactively.

Complexity wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was limiting productivity, slowing decisions, and impacting employee experience at scale.

The solution

Instead of layering more tools onto an already complex system, Freshworks chose a different path: simplify, unify, and rebuild on a stronger foundation. It would reimplement Freshservice from the ground up.

A fresh approach to Freshservice also brought a fresh approach to the way  HR service delivery was designed: Before introducing automation or AI, the team focused on getting the fundamentals right.

The transformation followed a deliberate crawl, walk, run approach for a deliberate redesign of how HR services are delivered across the organization.

In the crawl phase, Freshworks established governance and consistency across HR operations. Service catalogs and request types were rationalized, SLAs were clearly defined, and workflows were redesigned using service management best practices. This eliminated regional inconsistencies and created a standardized foundation for scale.

In the walk phase, the focus shifted to visibility and data readiness. Ticket categorization and automation rules were introduced, ensuring structured data capture across HR requests. Foundational dashboards provided real-time visibility into volumes, SLAs, and trends, enabling consistent measurement and accountability across teams.

Only after this foundation was in place did Freshworks move into the run phase, transforming HR operations through automation, native integrations, and AI-powered intelligence

Freshservice, powered by AWS, provided a scalable and reliable foundation for modern HR service delivery.

Manual dependencies were replaced with native capabilities. The Workday connector eliminated fragile RPA bots, reducing execution time from 75 minutes per day to just minutes while improving reliability and removing ongoing costs. This shift reduced operational risk while improving speed and reliability at scale.

AI-powered capabilities further simplified operations not just by automating tasks, but by proactively surfacing insights where they matter most. InsightMailer, an AI-driven weekly executive email, plays a key role in this transformation—curating and summarizing SLA performance, ticket volumes, trends, and operational hotspots into a concise, actionable format. Instead of manually pulling reports or navigating dashboards, leaders receive timely, data-backed insights directly in their inbox, enabling faster and more informed decision-making.

At the operational level, FreddyCopilot enhanced how HR teams manage and resolve requests day to day. For common employee queries, Copilot provides context-aware suggested responses, enabling agents to resolve requests more quickly while maintaining quality and consistency. 

At the same time, self-service automation empowered employees to independently generate HR documents in minutes instead of days—significantly reducing ticket volume, turnaround time, and manual effort for HR teams. Together, these capabilities shifted operations from reactive support to a more proactive, insight-led model.

The result wasn’t just better tooling. It was a fundamentally simpler way of working, where systems are connected, processes are streamlined, and teams can focus on outcomes instead of coordination.

“From an implementation standpoint, this transformation highlights how deeply integrated, low-code, and AI-driven capabilities can replace fragmented systems at scale,” says Vinil Krishnan Nair, business systems services lead at Freshworks.

Impact

The impact of simplifying HR service delivery was immediate and measurable.

Onboarding time dropped from 5–7 days to under one day, with employees gaining 80% of apps on Day 1. Document requests that took 1–2 days are now completed in under five minutes.

Average first response time dropped from over 12 hours to around five, while resolution time improved from nearly 21 hours to about 5.5 hours—enabling most requests to be completed within the same working day.

At the same time, service became far more predictable. First response SLA increased from ~60% to over 70%, while resolution SLA improved from ~80% to more than 93%, reflecting a shift from inconsistent, reactive support to a structured and reliable operating model.

These operational gains directly translated into the employee experience. Satisfaction scores rose from ~82% to 94%, while negative feedback dropped from over 15% to just above 5%.

HR teams no longer spend time chasing data or building reports. Instead, they operate with real-time visibility, enabling faster, more confident decisions.