RingCentral modernizes ITSM

Because their rigid legacy CRM that demanded extensive development resources for simple changes, RingCentral, a leading cloud communications provider, needed an ITSM solution that could move at the speed of business.

Since implementing Freshservice in 2019, they’ve transformed the platform into a sophisticated orchestration engine that now automates over 40% of IT Service Desk tickets through integrations spanning Active Directory, Okta, GSuite, Jira, Monday.com, DocuSign, and Saviynt. 

By pioneering an innovative integration of Freshservice with their own RingEX platform for CSAT surveys, response rates rocketed from 5.76% to 12.03%—a 109% increase in just six months. Today, the platform supports 275 agents across IT, HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, and Operations, maintaining 96% SLA adherence while continuously innovating with initiatives like a dedicated HR Workspace that will streamline employee experiences across the organization.

The company

RingCentral is a publicly-traded provider of cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses that help lower customer costs by removing the need for on-premises telephone systems. Their products offer features such as multiple extensions, call control & routing, video and web conferencing, and database integration, with locations worldwide.

The challenge 

RingCentral's ITSM solution was previously managed through an internally customized CRM application that created significant operational constraints. "We were operating with an outdated leading Legacy CRM environment," says Fred Chin, AVP IT Infrastructure & End User Services. "Since we had a heavily customized implementation, we weren't able to smoothly update to the latest version."

This approach created a problematic trade-off between customization and agility. Simple changes to the environment required substantial development resources, which backlogged the IT team. "Our previous ticketing system wasn't an ITSM solution," Chin adds. "It provided a lot of in-house customization, which is great, but doesn't allow us to move at the rate we needed to."

The limitations became particularly apparent as the business grew and needed to respond more rapidly to changing conditions. Prior to Freshservice, RingCentral faced inefficiencies in incident resolution, complexities in asset management, elevated ticket volumes, and inconsistent service request processing across different departments. The team needed a solution that could provide immediate improvements while establishing a foundation for long-term ITSM maturity.

The solution

After comparing several industry ITSM solutions, RingCentral selected Freshservice for its intuitive interface and collaborative capabilities.  "Compared to the other solutions, Freshservice was a much easier sell internally; it made collaboration across multiple departments simple and efficient," says Chin.

Since implementing in 2019, has systematically evolved Freshservice, into a powerful orchestration engine that now automates over 40% of monthly IT Service Desk tickets. The platform integrates business-critical systems including but not limited to Workday. Through various scripting and RPA solutions as well as flexible web requests, Freshservice extends to custom applications and legacy environments, creating an agile, interconnected operation.

The service catalog serves as the orchestration center, automating the entire request lifecycle. By defining comprehensive service items, the team collects all necessary information upfront, enabling automated approvals and immediate routing to fulfillment workflows. These workflows leverage underlying integrations to provision and deprovision applications without manual agent intervention, with every ticket pre-filled with accurate categorization for superior reporting.

The team successfully migrated employee onboarding and offboarding from a middleware-based solution to Freshservice's native Employee Journeys module—completed in under a quarter. This enables direct Workday integration, streamlining processes previously dependent on external systems.

To support multi-departmental expansion, RingCentral implemented Freshservice's role-based access control (RBAC). Moving beyond their old IT-centric permission structure, they rebuilt roles to be dynamic and module-dependent, providing flexible, tailored experiences for diverse teams while maintaining enterprise governance.

One of RingCentral's most innovative implementations involved integrating Freshservice with their own RingEX communications platform. Using backend workflows with web requests, the team triggers CSAT surveys directly within RingEX when tickets close, providing real-time status updates and resolution validation—a game-changer for employee engagement.

The platform now supports 275 agents—a 40% increase from 200—across IT, HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Facilities. RingCentral is piloting a dedicated HR Workspace with its own service catalog, knowledge base, and branding to provide employees a streamlined channel for HR policy and service requests while keeping the IT queue focused on technical issues.

Impact

Freshservice has delivered quantifiable improvements across RingCentral's operations:

• Over 40% of support tickets now automated, including employee onboarding, system access, and software deployments

• CSAT survey response rates more than doubled in less than nine months

• Increased first-time ticket resolution through knowledge base integration

• Enhanced asset lifecycle management from ordering through retirement

• Expanded usage from 200 to 275 agents (40% growth) across multiple departments

• And a 96% adherence to ticket resolution SLA

"Freshservice has opened up our eyes to deploying new processes in a new fashion," says Chin. "We're no longer constrained by our legacy ITSM system."