Why should public sector CIOs be interested in a ‘fresh’ approach to development? We spoke to a company with an intriguing set of claims to make, Freshworks, to find out more, in a short but useful exchange dialogue with its Head of UK&I Sales, Alex Gordon-Furse.
What is your company’s value proposition, Alex?
Freshworks is a suite of cloud-based software aimed at providing alternatives to traditional business software products, which are often clunky, expensive and difficult to set up and use.
What specific business problem does Freshworks seek to address?
Countless hours are wasted trying to customise old style software solutions, and they often require expensive professional services to get everything to work. In the end, the solution becomes so complex that teams spend more time looking after the software than they do their own customers.
Why might it be better to deploy IT your way?
As well as wasted time and resources, it’s so often a non-positive experiences for customers – your external customers or if you’re the IT team, your internal customers in the wider organisation, and so on. In the long term, this means lost customers and a negative perception of your brand or department.
What is the public sector angle here?
Public sector organisations often face budget challenges, for example cuts to spending leading to a need to make savings elsewhere. This means they need solutions that provide value for money, and don’t have all the hidden costs that come with some software products.
Big projects, like implementing new systems, will also often attract a certain amount of scrutiny from all angles, so they need something that can be implemented quickly and easily. Freshworks products seem to fit well with public sector needs in these regards, as we have such an affordable, transparent pricing model and can get the software they need set up and live very quickly with minimal disruption to their teams.
Can you detail some use cases in the public sector to show how that works in practice?
We’re working with a number of regional councils across the UK. Gloucestershire County Council , for example is using Freshdesk to support residents with queries covering everything from parking tickets to council tax. Incoming queries are converted to tickets and automatically prioritised, categorised and assigned to the correct team: Gloucestershire currently has around 90 agents across 3 teams using Freshdesk. Meanwhile, Colchester Borough Council’s using Freshservice for its IT service management, with around 25 agents supporting 1,400 end users. Previously it was using an outsourced IT service provider, but decided to embrace SaaS and cloud-based infrastructure, bringing ITSM back in-house to assist with knowledge management, problem and change management and self-service processes.
In Central Government, we’re also working with a number of departments, including Department of Health which is using Freshdesk to streamline customer support. We’re also working with a number of NHS Trusts, as well as Citizens Advice in the Third Sector.
Summing up, what is your main message to the Think Digital Partners audience?
We’re committed to helping public sector organisations like yours empower teams with the right technology that’s easy to set up and use and offers competitive, transparent pricing.
We also provide comprehensive consultation, project planning, training and 24/7 support at no extra cost, are listed on G-Cloud, have a proven track record in the sector – and hope you think about checking us out for your next project.
Sounds interesting – thanks for your time, Alex!
If you’d like to find out more about what this approach to business software deployment in the public sector could mean, you might want to download a detailed case study (registration required).
That’s in the shape of Alex and his team’s work at Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, whose IT department is using Freshservice to help manage 300 servers, 5,000 PCs and laptops and support the requirements of nearly 6,500 users.
It’s also a project that won Best Implementation of an ITSM Solution Award at the 2017 SDI IT Service & Support Awards.
