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We are considering adding another department to our Freshservice portal - Facilities to be exact and I was wondering if anyone else has done this and how is it working?






We think the idea of a central Service Management system for employees to use makes sense from multiple perspectives - one account for users, consistency of process and experience, ability to check open tickets for not just IT but another department, submit multiple tickets. There is also some tickets such as AV, Room setups, employee moves that would work better as one ticket and handing out tasks for various components - of course this would all be automated through rules and using the Service Catalog. 






I think the reporting would be okay and work as well as ticket views to keep everyone focused on their items/department. The home page that shows general stats is nice to have and we monitor and now this will be tougher to keep a close eye on if multiple departments are using it. 






Facilities has high value assets and they make changes and deal with problems so there may be warranted usage/cases for various components.






We find Freshservice is great for Service Management so why not expand it to another department?






Thoughts? Any feedback?





Hi Jeff,

We have used Freshservice for our IT Service Desk, Facilities/Fleet and HR departments. It has worked extremely well. Our staff have taken well to all of the portals and accessibility. We will shortly be introducing a gateway to all of them like the below.








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Let me know if you have any questions in particular.






Luke






Hi Luke,



From what I can tell you have a web page that links to the different department support portals. My thought was to work under one freshservice portal to get benefits of working under the same system sending notes/tasks to others when working on the items that overlap such as new hires, office changes reuiqirng IT and facilities. Additionally it would be nice to have a central place for people to go and see all their tickets and create new ones.



Can you confirm you have separate sites setup or am I misunderstanding?



How does HR and Facilities like working under freshservice? Have they found anything that is really missing or doesn't work well?



My thought is that we are all under service management and have similar processes so it should work well for them.



I appreciate your feedback - it's been quite on this one.

Jeff


Correct - we have separate instances for each department. We went down this route for one reason....The Dashboard features are not up to scratch currently. We didn't want to see any tickets from other departments on our Recent Activity feed, especially as we have the Dashboard set to auto-refresh on a large LCD on the wall - it could lead to confidential information being leaked.

We have been told that this is being worked on, at which time we will look to merge all under one roof.

Both departments are really enjoying working under Freshservice. Being able to look at records quickly using the great search functionality, plus the fact we have gotten rid of spreadsheets has been refreshing for the teams. Additionally, our staff have taken to self-service so much so that we saw an instant increase over email of over 30% of all new incidents going through the portals.






In terms of missing functionality, HR would like to see a sort of...central document store but other than that, we have had no other complaints!














Thanks for the additional feedback. We also do not like the idea of a shared dashboard as we have a large screen setup as well and its helpful to see what is going on with a quick glance. We did setup a custom view that shows tickets for the last 8 hours so we can see stuff rolling in and I am sure we can focus on just our tickets if we moved forward. What helps us compared to your situation is that HR is not going to be apart of this currently so we don't have to worry about sensitive data/information. 






I have been on the fence with the idea of separate portals or a central portal and using departments/views more. There is a lot of function that exists that makes working under one system possible such as separate SLA's, custom views, ability to create custom dispatcher and other rules to escalate tickets and tag tickets etc. Ability to have a service catalog with separate sections for IT and Facilities.






I think Freshservice should see there is a good opportunity for them to add a little bit of functionality to make this a great product for multiple departments to manage services. Separate dashboard and ability to now see other department tickets as needed





Our company does use this for HR requests as well. We would like a separate dashboard for each group as well.





Brian how does it work for HR using freshservice? Does sensitive info get entered/noted by employees and how does that get handled in general?





Hey Jeff -






No sensitive information is relayed over to the HD portal. We use a separate form that is attached to the ticket. Employee information such as salary and demographics are directly entered into our HRM SaaS system by HR during the on-boarding process.






HR uses the services desk for the tracking and management of account creations for the following:






Payroll login



Scheduling System login



Badge creation



Alarm pin creation






IT usually forwards to their queue if meet certain criteria and HR works the ticket from there. I have keywords tagged for HR (dispatcher) that routes to the HR group and auto assigns our HR Manager. We plan on adding more HR and finance users to optimize the on-boarding\separation of employees.






Of course this does require training on the team responsible for sending in information. We typically notify the sender and remove the non compliant form from the ticket then assign to HR. All on-boarding requests must be sent to HR then HR depending on IT or HR will submit a request with the on-boarding form to the portal.






The goal was to keep it simple as we had 3-5 different emails depending on system end users where in an uproar...lol We figured we can control on the back end processes with Fresh-service so easier to hit help desk email then remember 3-4 we had prior.





Brian thanks for the additional feedback. Our facilities team decided to go with another product offering in the "CMMS" space (computerized maintenance management system). Maybe in the future we will have an integrated SKMS system as I can see many benefits requesters and agent side of view.



Wondering if any other customers have used a single instance of Freshservice and implemented for different depts?


One issue we have is that we can't limit agents to view certain areas as an agent, and be treated as requester for other areas. For example, our Facilities team would like to be able to track Service Requests raised for facilities, however  still be able to the log IT tickets like a standard requestor and not see all the IT internal fields etc.

The other issue is that we can only have one Category, whereas we would like to be able to apply different categories for different dept support portals.



We're considering this as well. Brian, I take it when you say multiple instances that you turned on the MSP functionality? Is that what you mean?


That's my inclination, Prithi.pillay, as I don't want either IT or our facilities teams to see how the sausage is made!


Thanks


Andy



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