Village Roadshow has changed its IT service management platform, leading to a boost in employee experience and a reduction in the number of IT incident ticketing requests.
The entertainment company, which operates cinemas and theme parks such as Warner Bros Movie World, switched to an ITSM platform made by Freshworks.
Village Roadshow Group’s technology general manager Arul Arogyanathan told iTnews the partnership “is not just about transforming IT service management”.
“It’s become a driving force for us behind my commitment and my team’s commitment to delivering an exceptional employee experience, and it’s been a seamless and user-friendly interface, which has empowered both IT and business teams.”
He said “being in the entertainment industry, it’s very dynamic and fast paced” with the company accountable for around 37 locations.
“When the technology element does not work, that means you’re directly impacting your revenue line, you’re directly impacting your brand perception, you’re directly impacting your customer experience.
“The seamless experience, fast-paced connectivity between your corporate staff or the frontline staff in terms of the technology and how quickly your IT can get on to that and resolve that – that is the key element here.
“What this partnership has allowed us to do is provide a lean, simple and automated platform which is user-friendly for not only for our IT staff to manage and control and govern, but also our frontline staff, our corporate staff to adapt and communicate seamlessly with both sides.”
He said the cinemas and theme parks operator has been in partnership with Freshworks for around 18 months with work taking “six weeks for us to migrate from our legacy platform” to the new service.
With the business responsible for roughly 5000 employees, Arogyanathan said Village Roadshow looked to create “experiences seamless between those employees and the technology”.
“If you look at it, ITSM is the most recurrent and the first touchpoint between the business and the technology team,” he said.
“We use FreshWorks for end-to-end ITSM capabilities that include incident management, service management, change management and problem management.
“On top of that, we leverage FreshWorks for two additional capabilities, which are very critical for us to businesses: one is knowledge management and the second one is the contract management.”
The company has now been operational on its new platform for more than 14 months according to Arogyanathan, after going live around August last year.
Since implementation, Village Roadshow reported seeing a 25 percent increase in staff satisfaction.
Arogyanathan said when staff encounter IT issues requiring troubleshooting resolutions “they have multiple channels” to reach the IT team or access its knowledge management database and locate a suitable fix.
He added employee onboarding has also been simplified under the changes with the ITSM tool able to streamline the induction process.
He said the ITSM solution has become its “gateway between the business community and the technology community” with the new platform underpinning the IT support layer across the company.
Arogyanathan added one reason for the changes was the “escalating operating cost” of its former system.
“It was getting expensive for us to maintain and manage that particular system. That was number one. Second is that particular [legacy] system required a lot of love and attention on a day-to-day basis.
“The third reason is it required specialist skills to maintain that particular platform and as a result of all this combined, the adoption rate of that particular platform was falling.
“For us as a technology team, we were not able to get the value out of that particular platform.
“That’s when we were looking for a particular system, which is cloud native, which is simple to use, which is dynamic and which can not only feel easier for us to use but also for the end user community, which is our employees to use as well.”
Arogyanathan said the platform change has allowed the company to “foster the culture of efficiency, collaboration and continuous improvement within my IT team”.
“It has bridged the relationship gap between us and the business team as well as a part of this particular rollout,” he said.
He said the project also fits into Village Roadshow’s four company pillars of “modernising and securing the technology, enabling business innovation, pursuing operational excellence and last but not least simplifying the IT landscape.”
Arogyanathan flagged future plans to explore Freshworks’ artificial intelligence solution called Freddy AI.
“We are very optimistic about what Freddy can bring in terms of further improving the efficiency for Village Roadshow,” he said.
The capability can be introduced into various communicate channel to help automate support and has recently integrated generative AI.
“The channel could be email, telephone or directly into Freshworks to raise the ticket. We are looking at integrating that with our collaboration suite which is Microsoft Teams … where people could raise the ticket using Microsoft Teams as an additional channel as well,” Arogyanathan said,.