Real talk at Refresh: Insights that move the needle
Freshworks customers opened the kimono on how they’re getting results with AI, omnichannel, CMDB, and more
For customers and employees, service is getting better. AI and unified platforms are helping companies deliver experiences that are more tailored, timely, and refreshing. At Freshworks’ Refresh Virtual Summit 2025 last month, several Freshworks customers shared their experiences putting these new capabilities to work and the impacts they’re having.
How AI makes ITSM even better
AI, automation, and data intelligence are no longer future promises. In a session focused on cutting through AI hype to deliver actual ITSM value, Dan Brown, senior director of support services at Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, described how AI-powered insights make agents more efficient. By automatically identifying issues—password reset spikes, recurring office-specific issues—they’re solved before they escalate.
"It's really like having another team member constantly watching for patterns in our environment," Brown explained. "When the system spots something, it surfaces the trend automatically." His team now deflects meaningful ticket volumes before they reach agents, while technicians resolve issues faster with instant access to similar previous cases.
Read also: Human-AI partnership on display at Refresh Virtual Summit
Improving CX with a unified platform
Companies that grow through acquisitions often inherit operational chaos. At Refresh, First Legal CTO Bharath Badri shared his company’s experience with six separate business units each running on different systems. A single law firm customer working across multiple units would receive six different customer numbers and six separate invoices—even when all the services related to the same case. Badri walked attendees through how consolidating onto an AI-powered, unified platform dropped response times from over five minutes to around two minutes—critical when 70% of calls are "where's my order" questions.
“We need our clients and our employees to feel like they're the number one focus we have,” said Badri. “It's really important for the ticketing system from one team to the next to be able to see what has happened before so that when you get that person in front of the customer, they're not repeating themselves and they realize that you've done your research in the background.”
Delivering consistent experiences across channels
AI's biggest impact on customer service may be on the back end. In their Refresh session, Maggie Singh, chief product and technology officer at People 2.0, and Pete Petrocelli, vice president of technology at Ashley Furniture, discussed how they're using AI to empower agents. By giving support teams instant access to knowledge bases and curated information, agents can get back to customers more quickly, with more context, providing a more satisfying experience for customers.
"We are really focused on leveraging AI to train and arm our associates to be more knowledgeable so that they don't have to look up information," Singh explained. "They have something right at their fingertips." Petrocelli emphasized the importance of understanding business requirements first—spending time with people in stores and the field to identify actual pain points before jumping to technical solutions. The result: more consistent service across every channel and touchpoint.
Building a single source of truth for IT operations
IT teams have long struggled with maintaining an accurate, real-time inventory of every system, application, and dependency across their infrastructure. Without it, changes become risky, compliance audits turn into scrambles, and understanding the true impact of an outage is guesswork. At Refresh, Allen Hankins, COO at Triumph Financial, discussed how solving this problem transformed IT from a cost center to a strategic advantage at his company.
"At the end of the day, we're in business to make money, and making money also means reducing expenses," Hankins said. By implementing a modern configuration management database (CMDB), his team reduced major incidents by 18% even as IT changes ramped up 37%. Operating in a heavily regulated banking environment, Triumph's unified asset database quantifies vendor performance for contract negotiations, provides real-time visibility that satisfies federal audit requirements across 15,000+ devices, and generates risk models that inform where to invest resources.
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