Right-sizing ITSM for 5,500 employees and 22 million customers

Australia's Village Roadshow Limited (VRL) is a powerhouse in the global entertainment industry. With business units spanning film distribution and production, movie theaters, and theme park operation, VRL is dedicated to crafting unforgettable experiences. But it's not just about the guests: VRL holds itself to the same high standards when it comes to employee experience, too.

Before embarking on its digital transformation journey, Village Roadshow grappled with significant IT bloat that led to increased costs and complexity. The company also struggled with its legacy IT service management (ITSM) tool, ServiceNow, which made it difficult for the IT team to resolve over 2,000 IT tickets from employees each month.

Replacing ServiceNow with Freshservice, VRL now has the ITSM capabilities it needs to better support its 5,500 employees. Partnering with Freshworks, VRL has been able to future-proof its IT infrastructure and keep employees productive so they can focus on what they do best: delivering memorable experiences to more than 22 million customers annually.

The company

Starting in 1954 as a drive-in cinema in Melbourne, Australia, Village Roadshow has grown into Australia's leading entertainment brand. It now maintains a diverse portfolio of assets in film distribution and production, movie theaters, and theme parks, operating well-known venues like Topgolf and SeaWorld.

The challenge

With a small team supporting the IT needs of thousands of employees in 37 locations, Village Roadshow faced many obstacles. “Bloated IT costs strained our resources, and handling a large volume of IT support requests was overwhelming,” says Arul Arogyanathan, CIO of Village Roadshow. “Managing contracts was a nightmare, involving multiple departments and manual processes, and onboarding new employees was a slow, two-week ordeal. We needed a change.” 

While VRL had an existing ITSM solution, ServiceNow, the platform was overly complex, prone to frequent breakdowns, and came with high operating costs. VRL’s IT team struggled to efficiently monitor and resolve over 2,000 employee IT tickets per month.

Arogyanathan needed an ITSM solution that not only aligned with Village Roadshow’s IT architecture principles—including its cloud-first strategy and security-first approach—but supported its workforce's varying needs. 

“Our business is incredibly diverse. We’ve got our corporate office in Melbourne with legal, financial, and business executives. Then we have cinema and theme park sites with a continual turnover of hundreds of young, casual workers,” he says. “We needed an ITSM solution that met our stringent IT requirements but was intuitive and easy to use for our entire employee base.”

“Similar to how you wouldn’t buy different spare parts to assemble a car, we were searching for an IT service offering that could meet all of our needs out of the box,” says Arogyanathan. “That’s when we found Freshservice.”

The solution

Three main benefits prompted Village Roadshow to replace ServiceNow with Freshservice:

• Lower maintenance costs: VRL wanted to right-size its ITSM, finding an affordable solution to deliver a best-in-class IT service experience

• Reduced overhead and hands-on administration: Busy team leaders craved an ITSM fix that required less time and resources to maintain

• Improved ease of use: IT team members and employees needed a tool that was intuitive and easy to use, right out of the box

VRL replaced its legacy ITSM solution in just weeks, a feat attributed to Freshworks’ simplicity and low-code framework. “It was easy to roll out Freshservice with minimal disruption to normal business operations,” says Benjamin Parker, VRL’s IT operations manager. “Within six weeks, we had transformed our incident management, change management, and contract management processes—as well as implemented a robust knowledge base and self-service portal.”

With Freshservice, managers gained the ability to set up new automation rules to handle incoming workflows and IT-related tasks more efficiently. They also benefited from a knowledge base and self-service portal that eliminated the need to involve IT specialists for simple requests. These changes made a big impact—Freshservice helped the team reduce new employee onboarding tasks from two weeks to just five minutes.

Impact

By right-sizing its ITSM with Freshservice, Village Roadshow reduced its IT costs by 60%, or about $500,000 per year. VRL also saw a 25% improvement in average ticket resolution time and 25% higher employee satisfaction scores.

Freshservice has improved IT productivity, reducing the volume of phone calls to the IT helpdesk. “I don't need to have a team member sitting there and receiving phone calls at all hours—we can now attend to these tickets from anywhere, any time,” says Arogyanathan. “With the rich knowledge base, we've also seen a significant reduction in recurrent tickets.”

VRL also uses Freshservice’s knowledge management and contract management databases to streamline supplier operations. “Managing contracts used to be a big headache,” says Arogyanathan. “We were manually uploading new suppliers and contracts to our database, with involvement from legal, procurement, and IT. Now it’s an automated process that takes just minutes, without intervention from anyone.”

“Freshworks has helped us scale while making IT easy for everybody within the organization,” adds Parker. “Our ability to deliver an exceptional employee experience through Freshservice’s automation and self-service tools means our employees can focus on their core responsibilities—without being constrained by IT.”