Industry :
Construction
Headquarters:
United States
About HOLT CAT
HOLT CAT is the authorized dealer for Caterpillar® heavy equipment and engines for 118 South, Central, North, and East Texas counties. Established in 1933, HOLT sells, services, and rents CAT equipment, engines, generators, and trucks worldwide for construction, mining, industrial, petroleum, and agricultural applications. The HOLT CAT team is committed to providing rock-solid stability with superior products and services to all its customers.
Need for a scalable ITSM tool
For years the IT team at HOLT had a legacy IT system that adequately handled their business needs, even if they would spend too much time on certain tasks. . For instance, to create a report the system would provide a tabled data output, which they had to create reports from manually. As the organization grew, the need for a scalable holistic service management tool arose. HOLT made the move to Freshservice in October 2022.
“As an admin, making customizations and changes would take a lot of time. Changes which took a day previously would take an hour on Freshservice because of how user-friendly it was.”
With Freshservice, HOLT wanted to enable agents to handle incoming tickets, add value in tracking assets, contracts, and purchase orders, and effectively collate analytics and reports. The company was also experiencing exponential growth in its ticket volume when it decided to implement Freshservice to handle growing business requirements.
Approximately 142 agents across 44 agent groups support employees via Freshservice and have some actionable tasks on the tool. There have been about 9675 tickets in the system since October. Most tickets at HOLT belong to account issues, computer issues, and application issues from employees – account issues comprising 33.92% of the complete ticket volume, followed by computer issues which add up to 19.13%.
The onboarding experience
Interactions with the Freshservice team helped the HOLT team know more about ITIL standards and understand how Freshservice would aid them in following the framework. The HOLT team has now been able to adapt specific business processes to follow the ITIL framework more closely, with the support of the Freshservice onboarding specialist's knowledge and assistance.
“The Freshservice team showed their intelligence of the system, provided access to resources that would aid in anything the HOLT team needed, and even made the calls fun!”
Agents were easily equipped with the foundational knowledge needed to use the tool with the training for agents and administrators. The admin training aided the team in getting a deeper understanding of specific modules well enough to teach them to agents. They also identified the gaps in their business processes and areas that could be tweaked to better adapt to the tool during the Freshservice onboarding.
The success of the User Acceptance Testing phase was the litmus test that sold Freshservice to HOLT. Having the tool handle the many unique changes during UAT, a supportive onboarding specialist, and the Professional Services team reassured HOLT that the Freshservice solution was reliable and stable, even with heavy workloads.
“Whenever hiccups occurred, the team could count on Casey and Armando from Freshservice to provide information, guiding the team through decision-making. They would do more digging to find more information if they couldn't. There was always an active effort from everyone in creating the tool to be what HOLT wanted.”
A seamless transition
“With the amazing UX of FreshService, the ease with which we got people moved over into FreshService was incredible! We saw adoption immediately on day one, which continued and grew.”
The teams at HOLT were quickly able to learn how to use Freshservice. HOLT focused a lot on employee engagement and adoption. Multiple training sessions were held, and all-day open forums for the entire week the project launched. The Freshservice Professional Services team was instrumental in ensuring a seamless transition, with an onboarding process that helped administrators and agents get familiar with the tool quickly. The simple UX of Freshservice enabled a complete rollout of multiple changes affecting different modules seamlessly.
“Our employees love the tool and its ease of use! Previously, our engagement with the user portal on our old tool was very low. Since we rolled out Freshservice, our users often use the portal instead of emailing us.””
Knowledge-base articles were available for everything the team needed help with. Freshservice support assisted in guiding HOLT through different apps and ways in the tool to perform the necessary changes via efficient self-service. This resulted in effective usage, better reporting, quicker deployments, and positive employee feedback. Custom objects, workflow automation, and business rules made it easier to complete the rollout with detailed customization options.
Having the professional services provided by the Freshservice team saved the Product Admin a lot of time learning the program material and getting things set up in the system.
“For some of us, it was our first time rolling out a tool like this to the organization. The Freshservices Professional Services Team was very accessible and helped us understand the best use cases and how to implement them in our environment. They helped us by being partners and offering support and guidance where needed.”
Impact since implementation
Post implementation, the agents now enjoy multiple ticketing features such as forwarding, private and public notes, tagging, merging, and executing scenarios. Agents also enjoy the fact that there are folders for canned responses, which enables them to create personal canned responses, and ones shared with a team or all agents.
The benefits of Freshservice were apparent to the team at HOLT almost immediately. The analytics derived from the reports make an enormous difference in performance. The teams at HOLT are now able to see SLAs, trends, and top issues quickly, all within the tool itself. The average ticket resolution time has been reduced to 4.88 hours since the implementation four months ago, and agents are now focusing on improving the first response time.
