1-grid, a South African web hosting company, was facing challenges with its existing helpdesk software, Kayako. As the company expanded, the limitations of their software became more apparent. Incoming customer queries were grouped into a single queue and were not directly assigned to agents. This resulted in bottlenecks and affected customer response times. At its peak, 1-grid was receiving about 12,000 customer queries each month. These queries would come in through the website and remain in a single queue. The existing software did not offer any segmentation or automatic routing features, so managers would have to manually sift through the queries and assign the most appropriate agents for each. 1-grid needed a new platform that would help their team manage incoming queries in a faster and more efficient way.

Brooke, an international equine welfare organization, was facing challenges with its legacy ITSM tool. The management team wanted to evolve towards a more proactive approach, foreseeing and responding to issues rather than waiting for them to unfold. With significant investments in staff and technology services, it was crucial to improve employee productivity and power the next phase of growth. Brooke needed a mechanism to foster this culture, while being able to measure and evaluate the impact of their investment in technology and employees. The Information Services team, consisting of over 50 service agents, was using JIRA for their internal ticketing requirements. To efficiently manage asset tracking, streamline technology workflows for different service requests, and overhaul the existing functionality, Brooke began evaluating solutions based on UI simplicity, ease-of-use, flexibility in features, ITIL framework compliance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

Logisfashion, a multinational logistics operator specializing in intralogistics for the fashion industry and e-commerce, was facing challenges due to its rapid global expansion and growing IT maturity. The company needed a consolidated system that could capture incidents, identify problems, and initiate changes from a single platform. With over 1200 employees worldwide, the IT team was inundated with countless IT requests and support queries. Ensuring timely allocation and resolution of support tickets was a key priority. Additionally, Logisfashion sought to improve process consistencies and end-to-end visibility to enhance user experience and customer satisfaction. They aimed to streamline workflows, speed up incident resolution times, and implement a robust root-cause analysis to meet new business requirements. The company was in search of an IT service desk that offered ease of deployment, a robust ITSM solution, better resolution time, workflow automation, and real-time insights through reports and analytics.

City Property, one of South Africa’s leading residential and commercial property management companies, faced significant challenges in managing its extensive portfolio and customer base. The company's operations were primarily manual, with a lack of automation in customer service processes and workflows. The outbreak of the pandemic further heightened the need for automation to improve the management of ticket enquiries across various channels and enhance the overall customer service experience. The company's most significant portfolio is residential apartment management, with a customer base comprising individuals, families, and businesses. The bulk of enquiries received were from individuals looking for residential or business space. The company had three teams, commercial, retail, and residential, focused on the specifics of each area of leasing. The customer service side served existing customers. The global lockdown during the pandemic outbreak posed a significant challenge as City Property’s operations were highly office-based, and the staff was not equipped to work from home. This situation severely impacted customer service, as the flow of information and agent productivity took a hit. The lack of automation, increase in WhatsApp enquiries, and just three agents handling all customer support tickets led to longer turnaround times and a significant drop in Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Collinson, a global leader in customer benefits and loyalty, was facing challenges with its customer service operations. The company was using a legacy telephony platform for customer communication, which was limited to two channels: email and phone. These channels were siloed, and operations were highly manual, leading to inefficiencies. Collinson wanted to improve the efficiency of customer interactions and bring services to market quicker. The company also wanted to shift from a CapEx-based cost model to a consumption-driven model. In 2020, the company had to accelerate its digital transformation project timelines to quickly equip customer service agents to work from home due to the pandemic. Furthermore, disruption in the travel industry prompted a new business requirement for Collinson to begin offering COVID-19 testing facilities at partner airports, which required customer service support from agents working from home.

Cutter Group, an IT solutions provider, was founded in 2005 with a customer-first approach to service. The company designs, deploys, and supports virtual infrastructure for organizations across various industries. However, Cutter Group faced challenges in maintaining its high standard of customer service due to the increasing volume of customer queries and the complexity of their needs. The company was using an open-source internal helpdesk system, but with the implications of GDPR compliance, it was necessary to invest in a more robust support platform. The company also needed a system that could handle the influx of tickets from larger customers and provide exhaustive monthly reports on support metrics. The COVID-19 pandemic further complicated matters as the company saw a 40% increase in support volumes due to customers shifting to remote work.

Datahut, a data extraction company, faced several challenges in their hiring process. The first challenge was filtering and shortlisting quality candidates from a vast pool of applicants, which was a cumbersome task for the HR department. Each job posting attracted close to 300 applicants, making the process of shortlisting and scheduling interviews a daunting task. The second challenge was managing the hiring process on spreadsheets. Moving candidates across various stages of the interview process, sending custom emails to select and reject candidates, and navigating through multiple excel sheets led to chaos and inefficiency. The third challenge was manually posting jobs to job boards. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, and they needed a solution that would streamline their process and optimize their hiring.

Dineout, one of India's largest restaurant tech platforms, was facing challenges in managing its customer service operations. Initially, the company relied on shared inboxes and a small team to manually handle communications. However, as the organization grew and began processing $800M worth of transactions for its partner restaurants, the need for a more systematic solution became apparent. The team aimed to create customer experiences as memorable as the dining ones. The challenge was to find a solution that could help them interact with customers effectively, provide quick resolutions, and offer a personalized service experience.

ESS, an educational staffing solution provider, was facing challenges in coordinating customer support due to the use of shared inboxes. There was no defined system of assignment, leading to inconsistencies in client responses and a lack of insight into agent performance. The company was struggling to manage the high volume of queries from over 700 school districts and 80,000 educators across 27 states. The shared inbox system was not only inefficient but also time-consuming, as agents had to spend a significant amount of time organizing their personal and group inboxes. The lack of a unified support system was affecting customer satisfaction and the overall efficiency of the support team.

Finsure, a rapidly growing mortgage aggregator in Australia, was facing a significant challenge in managing its broker network. The company relied heavily on email as the primary communication channel with its network of over 1550 brokers. However, the use of multiple shared inboxes to respond to brokers' queries and requests was proving to be inefficient and unmanageable. The sheer volume of incoming queries often caused their email client to crash, negatively impacting employee performance. The Commissions team, responsible for managing broker remuneration, was particularly affected. They were struggling to perform their day-to-day operations efficiently due to the sensitive nature of their conversations and the high volume of queries. The management at Finsure realized that shared inboxes were not a scalable solution and began looking for alternatives.

Fitness Passport, a corporate health and fitness program in Australia, was facing several challenges in its operations. The organization was struggling with inaccurate data and reporting, which hindered their ability to make critical business decisions. The lack of insights was a significant issue as it prevented them from understanding what was working for their members and what wasn't. Additionally, there was a lack of cross-team collaboration, which was affecting their efficiency and productivity. The organization was also dealing with a high volume of routine queries, which was taking up a significant amount of their resources. The legacy Salesforce solution they were using was not providing the reliability and capabilities they needed.

Katz Media Group, the largest media representation company in the United States, faced significant challenges with its IT service management (ITSM), service delivery, and IT support. The company's legacy platform was not user-friendly, leading to knowledge silos and a lack of uniform ITSM processes and service SLAs. The incumbent on-premise ITSM solution was becoming a bottleneck, hindering integration, migration, and standardization of IT service and incident management. This situation was part of a broader technology transformation initiative that Katz was undertaking. The company needed to overhaul its existing functionality and improve scalability, which required a new solution to replace their incumbent on-premise solution.

Koti Puhtaaksi, a dynamic family-run business in Finland, had an ambitious plan to become the largest Finnish cleaning company. However, the company's existing customer support system was becoming a hindrance to this goal. The support system was segmented into three divisions, with customer interactions across all three groups conducted largely through email and phone. As a result, there was no single repository where past conversations could be recorded and accessed. Only the agent who had spoken with the customer would have context into the customer’s problem. With the number of agents and volume of customer queries steadily increasing, this system was no longer effective. Furthermore, with customer queries pouring in from different channels, the support team needed a single solution to streamline the customer journey and increase visibility of the various touchpoints.

Accel, a leading venture capital firm, faced unique HR challenges due to its complex organizational structure and the need to manage a large volume of inbound profiles. The firm's HR administrative tasks were being tracked manually, making the process inefficient and prone to errors. Accel receives around 50-60 inbound profiles daily, including those of senior professionals and industry experts. While these profiles may not always find opportunities within Accel, they could be suitable for Accel's 140+ Indian portfolio companies. However, maintaining these inbound resumes in Excel sheets and Google Drive was chaotic and unmanageable. The firm needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate and share all the information with their portfolio companies. Additionally, aligning the entire team on a single HRMS platform suitable for both internal and external usage was a significant challenge.

AWM Electrical, an Australian Electrical Wholesaler, was facing challenges in managing large volumes of emails across multiple accounts. The company had set up several email addresses for different teams including projects, purchases, sales, and other office branches, each receiving an average of 50-100 emails a day. This led to cluttered inboxes, making it difficult for the support teams to manage end-user requests. As a result, customer requests started slipping through the cracks, eroding the trust between customers and the company. The company was using Outlook to organize and respond to customer requests, but the system was not scalable with the business growth, leading to slow turnaround times and disappointing responses to priority requests.

Campaigntrack, Australia’s largest real estate marketing company, faced several challenges in its customer service department. The company initially relied heavily on individual agents for support, primarily via phone and email. However, as the company grew, this structure proved unsuitable due to the dependency on individual agents, leading to issues when they were unavailable. To address this, Campaigntrack tried creating agent groups to handle issues, but this led to difficulties in coordination, especially when the team was not in the same location, resulting in missed inquiries. Furthermore, there was a lack of transparency regarding the team's activities and workload balance. The company was also receiving a high volume of phone calls, approximately 8000, which needed to be reduced and distributed more evenly across other channels such as email and self-service.

In 2018, three large metropolitan councils based in Adelaide, the Cities of Charles Sturt (CCS), Marion (COM), and Port Adelaide Enfield (PAE), formed a collaborative partnership for the benefit of their communities. The IT teams of these councils were responsible for ensuring all projects planned for the communities were seamlessly executed and delivered in a timely and cost-effective manner. However, the IT infrastructure of all three councils was not closely aligned, which hindered collaboration and knowledge sharing across business functions. The Service Desk setup of the three councils was different and made effective collaboration and cross-team communication a challenge. All three councils had their own Service Desk solutions, so information from one could not easily be shared with the other councils. Two of the councils, PAE and CCS, also had ageing legacy software which needed to be modernised urgently.

Code Engine Studio, a software development firm based in Vietnam, was facing significant challenges in managing time off requests and calculating payroll for its rapidly growing team. The company was using spreadsheets and emails to track and respond to time off requests, which was becoming increasingly difficult as the company grew. The process was time-consuming, with the company spending up to 8 hours each month collating and finalizing time off and payroll data. The system was also prone to errors, with leave requests often being missed or not addressed on time. This led to difficulties in calculating payroll each month, as the HR team had to double-check various spreadsheets, emails, and chat messages to ensure accurate data. The company needed a simple, efficient platform through which employees could submit their time off requests and managers could approve or reject these requests in a timely manner.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK's public health infrastructure and NHS frontline professionals were overwhelmed as patient numbers began to exceed available resources. Doctaly, an innovative Healthtech solution, was faced with the challenge of easing the demand on healthcare workers. The company needed to prioritize high-risk cases while also providing reliable guidance to patients experiencing COVID symptoms. The challenge was twofold: low patient adoption due to app fatigue and maximizing the efficiency of healthcare workers. The company had previously used Intercom and Twilio, but these solutions did not offer the breadth of capabilities needed for the new challenge.

Doozer, a SaaS platform specializing in real estate renovation, faced several challenges in managing their sales process. Their sales team had to handle three different target groups: craftsmen, B2B clients such as private housing companies and public housing schemes, and B2B2C clients that include individuals owning multiple houses that they rent out and need craftsmen regularly for renovation. The company was struggling with organizing data, following up with leads regularly, and managing a large number of leads. They were using Salesforce, but it wasn't flexible enough to meet their requirements. They needed a CRM tool that was flexible, highly customizable, and offered advanced workflow capabilities to manage their fast-growing business.

Edinburgh Trams, an award-winning tram operator based in Scotland, was facing significant challenges in customer service. The company was dealing with low customer satisfaction and inadequate reporting and customer insights. The customer service was initially shared with their sister organization, Lothian Buses, as part of an existing Service Level Agreement. However, as Edinburgh Trams matured as an organization, the decision was made to bring the Customer Services operation in-house. This was to ensure that Customer Relations Officers at Edinburgh Trams could provide personalized advice to customers in a timely and accurate fashion. However, the transition from a shared service to an in-house operation presented its own set of challenges, including managing customer queries across multiple channels such as email, phone, help-center, chat, and social media.

FinAccel, an Indonesian fintech company, was facing challenges with its customer support system. Initially, customers who needed to contact the support team would do so via the support email address or the native phone channel. This support email ran on Gmail and presented several challenges. The most significant of these was the lack of visibility over customer inquiries and resolutions. There was no way to track or measure critical support metrics like response times, and the shared inbox system led to issues with accountability and efficiency. Furthermore, FinAccel was keen to implement live chat to offer their users a familiar conversational experience, especially considering their target base of the Indonesian millennial population. This demographic has shown a preference for popular messaging applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, making it crucial for FinAccel to offer a similar, conversational and continuous customer experience.

Gogoprint, the largest online printing company in South East Asia, faced significant challenges in managing its talent pool and maintaining transparency across the hiring lifecycle. Despite being a printing company, Gogoprint identifies itself as a Tech and Marketing company, necessitating the acquisition of tech-savvy, independent, motivated, and self-driven talent. The company's unique hiring process, involving multiple rounds of screening, interviews, and practical tests, required a platform that could accommodate these steps while enabling collaboration among all stakeholders. Furthermore, as a rapidly growing business, Gogoprint had to fill several positions simultaneously, making it challenging to keep track of all interviews, follow-ups, and decisions.

Happay, a fintech startup specializing in corporate expense management, was facing challenges in managing its customer service operations. The company, which operates on a subscription model, needed to ensure quality customer service to maintain trust and encourage subscription renewals. With over 25,000 customer queries per month across various channels, Happay had outgrown its initial systems which were not interconnected. The company aimed to resolve each ticket within 16 hours, a target that was difficult to achieve with the legacy systems. Additionally, the support team had to collaborate with bank partners to resolve issues like invoice-related queries, technical bugs, and legal contracts. The lack of a unified system across internal teams made information sharing difficult. Happay was in need of a platform that would support their business model, unify their operations, and enable easy collaboration.

Iba Cosmetics, an India-based cosmetics company, faced a significant challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a nationwide lockdown in India. The company, which had initially focused on offline retail, had to quickly shift its strategy to e-commerce. This sudden shift brought about a huge increase in the volume of customer queries, which the company struggled to manage efficiently. The company also wanted to replicate the meaningful human interactions that were a hallmark of their offline retail stores. However, the simple chat tool they initially implemented on their website and their WhatsApp Business account were not sufficient to handle the increasing volume of online queries.

Instantprint, the UK’s largest online printer, experienced rapid growth of 136% over the last five years. However, this growth brought challenges in maintaining their high level of customer service. The team struggled with a lack of visibility, unable to establish a single customer view of all communications across channels. This led to duplicated work for agents when a single customer reached out on multiple channels. They also lacked an organized method of tracking the volume or nature of customer queries, making it difficult to identify and address common customer pain points. Furthermore, without a way to track Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, they had no means to measure the effectiveness of their customer service. Lastly, shared inboxes led to confusion and lack of ownership, as agents had no visibility into who was answering which tickets.

L’Osteria, a renowned restaurant chain with over 120 outlets across 8 European countries, was grappling with an outdated legacy system for managing its IT service delivery. The system's limited capabilities, ongoing maintenance and support issues, and poor user experience were impeding the restaurant chain's growth. The central IT department, which catered to all the restaurants, was inundated with repetitive requests on recurring issues such as WIFI problems and machinery breakages. This resulted in an excessive workload for the IT team and a lack of structure and automation in their operations. The legacy system was unable to support the scale and speed at which L’Osteria was operating, leading to inefficiencies and hindering their ability to provide top-notch service.

The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) is a prestigious drama school and a regulated awarding organization that offers globally recognized qualifications. The examinations department of LAMDA faced significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, LAMDA allowed customers to raise queries through tickets on the website or through phone calls. However, with the enforcement of lockdown and the shift to remote work, phone support had to be discontinued. This led to an exponential increase in the number of tickets coming in through Freshdesk, their customer support platform. Additionally, LAMDA had to transition from offline examination centres to online assessments, which led to a surge in queries about the new examination format and test requirements. The situation was further complicated by a reduction in the size of the customer service team due to the pandemic, resulting in each agent having to handle a significantly larger number of tickets.

Alice, a leading travel tech start-up and Israel’s largest online travel agency, was facing significant challenges in managing its customer service requests. Prior to implementing Freshdesk, Alice used a shared mailbox for all agents to handle customer service requests. This system lacked a logical ticket-tracking mechanism, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in monitoring and following up on tickets. As Alice continued to grow, this mechanism proved inadequate. There were no set service level agreements for ticket resolution, no escalation process for high-priority tickets, and no automations or rules in place to improve efficiency. The lack of these features resulted in agents spending unnecessary time choosing which tickets to address, and a lack of visibility into the overall customer support process.

Mama Money, a rapidly growing tech company specializing in cross-border payments, was facing challenges with their customer support system. They were using Google Sheets to track all customer interactions, which became increasingly cumbersome as the company expanded into new regions and increased their field agent strength to 2500. The company was facing scaling and growth-related issues and needed a solution that could cater to their specific needs. These included identifying new channels for rapid market acquisition, managing the increased volume of customer interactions, and providing a simple and intuitive user interface, especially in markets like West Africa where users were less tech-savvy.