How Jefferson County Public Schools cuts ticket resolution to days

Jefferson County Public Schools (Jeffco Public Schools) is one of the largest K-12 districts in Colorado, serving roughly 69,000 students with about 14,000 staff across 168 campuses and more than 50 central administrative departments. The district has served its community since 1950.

For years, Jeffco's support teams ran on a patchwork of disconnected tools, including a decade-old Oracle PeopleSoft CRM, shared inboxes, a homegrown knowledge base, and a homegrown chat tool. Agents lacked the contextual data they needed to resolve requests, and tickets often sat unresolved for three weeks or longer.

Jeffco needed a self-sufficient, no-code platform that could serve students, parents, guardians, community members, and employees alike. After evaluating ServiceNow and Cherwell, the district chose Freshservice, later adding Freshchat. "We were looking at solutions such as ServiceNow and Cherwell, but Freshservice was the easiest with its drag-drop automation, and we loved its affordability," says Alyse Howcroft, service delivery analyst at Jeffco Public Schools.

The results followed quickly. A two-person team has since resolved 186,799 tickets in two years, cutting average resolution time from three weeks to three days. More than 300 agents across 30 departments now run their work through the platform.

The company

Jefferson County Public Schools (Jeffco Public Schools) is one of the largest K-12 school districts in Colorado, serving approximately 69,000 students with about 14,000 staff across 168 campuses and more than 50 central administrative departments.

The challenge

For a decade, Jeffco relied on Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM to manage support requests, but the system left agents working blind. When a student submitted a ticket about a broken laptop, agents received none of the supporting details, such as the device, the location, the date.

Layered on top of PeopleSoft were shared inboxes, a homegrown knowledge base, and a homegrown chat tool, none of which talked to each other. That fragmentation created three compounding problems: a lack of data visibility and insight, since no single ITSM solution tied the district's service operations together; long ticket resolution times, as siloed processes and multiple agent tools left tickets unresolved for three weeks or even longer; and repetitive, manual tasks that wasted agent time that automation could have handled.

Jeffco needed a self-sufficient tool its IT team could run without a coding background, one built to handle requests not just from staff, but from students, parents, guardians, and community members across the district.

The solution

When Jeffco began evaluating alternatives to PeopleSoft, the district considered ServiceNow and Cherwell alongside Freshservice. Freshservice stood out for its no-code, drag-and-drop automation, a critical requirement for a lean IT team with no coding background. "We were looking at solutions such as ServiceNow and Cherwell, but Freshservice was the easiest with its drag-drop automation, and we loved its affordability," says Alyse Howcroft, service delivery analyst at Jeffco Public Schools.

Jeffco first went live with Freshservice then layered in Freshchat once the district outgrew its homegrown chat tool. The IT team worked directly with stakeholders across departments like HR, benefits, and transportation to gauge each team's requirements, paving the way for smooth onboarding districtwide.

Today, Freshservice underpins a branded support portal, Jeffco Help, for teachers and staff, covering everything from classroom devices and grading to payroll, transportation, bus routes, and field trips. Parents and students get their own support path for enrollment, school choices, transportation, and assessment questions, all through personalized, dedicated end-user portals.

Impact

The shift from siloed tools to one unified platform paid off quickly. A two-person team has resolved 186,799 tickets over the past two years, with average resolution time dropping from three weeks to three days, thanks to auto-assigned tickets and custom form fields that give agents the context they need upfront. More than 300 agents across 30 departments—including IT, HR, and transportation—now run their work through Freshservice and Freshchat.

"Parents and guardians trust us with their kids," says Howcroft. "Being able to automate some of these systems with Freshservice lets us focus on our students. I'm a mom of two boys, and my kids go to Jeffco. As a parent, just knowing that this support exists is amazing."

Looking ahead, Jeffco plans to add chatbots to deflect repetitive requests like sign-in credential queries, dynamic asset-to-user relationships for device management, and release management to connect its development teams directly to Freshservice.