Village Roadshow reaps rewards from IT service management

Iconic Australian cinema and theme park operator Village Roadshow Group has achieved a 25% increase in customer satisfaction while cutting IT costs by 60% after adopting Freshworks’ IT service management solution, Freshservice.

The group, established nearly 80 years ago, has undergone a major digital transformation project with Freshworks, futureproofing its IT infrastructure across 37 locations in Australia to more efficiently support its 5500 employees who serve over 22 million customers every year.

Arul Arogyanathan, Village Roadshow Group General Manager — Technology, attributes the considerable improvements in customer satisfaction and cost savings to the simplicity and versatility of Freshservice, which helps the company’s employees focus on helping their customers rather than wrangling with the internal IT team.

“Our business is incredibly diverse,” Arogyanathan said.

“On one hand, we’ve got our corporate head office in Melbourne with legal, financial and business executives, while on the other hand, we’ve got cinema and theme park sites with a continual turnover of hundreds of young casual workers. Implementing an IT system that works for everybody is a significant challenge, but one we’ve managed to overcome with Freshworks.

“Before Freshworks, we used to take two weeks to onboard a new employee. Now that whole process takes five minutes. That’s huge for us — we want to create the right impression for new employees right from the start,” Arogyanathan said.

Before using Freshworks, Village Roadshow Group struggled with its existing ITSM tool, which was prone to complexity, breakdowns and extremely high operating and maintenance costs, making it difficult for the business to keep up with the 2000 IT tickets requiring resolution every month.

With Freshworks, Village Roadshow Group achieved a return on investment in one year, with a 25% improvement to average ticket resolution time, and vast ongoing improvements to productivity across the business. It was also able to take advantage of Freshservice’s knowledge management database and contract management database to streamline supplier operations.

“Managing contracts used to be a nightmare for us. We were manually uploading new suppliers and contracts to our database, with involvement from legal, procurement and IT. Now with Freshworks, it’s an automated process end to end that takes just minutes, without any intervention from anyone,” Arogyanathan said.

The full Freshservice implementation took just six weeks, with minimal disruption to Village Roadshow Group’s business operations.

“One of the major differentiators of using Freshworks is our ability to help organisations scale while making IT as easy as possible for anybody within the organisation to get to grips with,” said Ben Pluznyk, Freshworks’ director of sales for ANZ.

“Our ability to deliver an exceptional employee experience through automation and self-service tools means our customers’ employees can focus on what they do best — serving their customers — without being constrained by IT.”

Image credit: iStock.com/andresr