09 February 2018

One of the UK’s biggest food companies has brought its IT service management (ITSM) function back in-house.

Premier Foods’ brands include well-known names such as Bird’s, Cadbury, Mr. Kipling, Sharwood’s, amongst others. The company hopes to improve the delivery of IT services across the 15 sites it runs, and has completed the first phase of its in-house service centre implementation using Freshservice, a cloud-based management platform from Freshworks.

A service centre team of 57 agents will use Freshservice to support more than 2,000 end users through a self-service portal for IT requests. The platform will manage service requests, events and tickets, as well as provide a customer-facing catalogue to allow users to track their tickets. It also features API functionality. This allows Premier’s team to integrate the platform with their existing monitoring tools and third-party systems, thus reducing the burden on IT staff significantly, according to Freshworks.

Simon Johnson, the vendor’s UK country manager, says many companies are realising that ITSM is an essential function of their wider IT strategy and are bringing teams back in-house. He claims tools such as Freshservice enable companies to take control over their ITSM and service plans, while also providing “better experiences” for both end-users and service desk agents.

“Implementing automation and self-service strategies can provide employees with more tailored and efficient service, while having greater control over how these services are designed to meet the needs of the business is driving more companies to run their own service desks,” says Johnson.