Cheetah Digital's Transformation: Enhancing ESM with Freshservice

Cheetah Digital is a leading provider of cross-channel customer engagement solutions for modern marketers. The company's Customer Engagement Suite enables marketers to create personalized experiences, collect zero-party data at scale, power cross-channel messaging, and implement loyalty strategies. All these are underpinned by an engagement data platform that can scale to meet the changing demands of today's consumer. Some of the world’s biggest brands, including American Express, Hilton, Coca-Cola, and Vodafone, trust Cheetah Digital to help them drive revenue, build lasting customer relationships, and deliver a unique value exchange throughout the customer lifecycle.

Cheetah Digital, a cross-channel customer engagement solution provider, faced significant challenges in its IT operations after breaking away from Experian in 2017. The newly formed IT team was understaffed with only four agents, insufficient to meet the volume of demands. The team had previously relied on Experian’s internal tools to manage IT requests and needed a new ticketing system. The company's IT roadmap was to be cloud-first, requiring a solution that could provide continuous maturity and stability. Additionally, the IT department recognized the need for automation to scale with increasing demand. The company also faced challenges in driving user adoption of the new ITSM solution, as most IT requests initially came in through emails or walk-ups.

Cheetah Digital chose Freshservice as their ITSM solution due to the IT manager's positive past experience with the platform. Freshservice's advanced automation features and seamless integrations equipped the IT team to handle the growing volume of IT requests efficiently. The team used automation in four key ways: Service Catalogue for automating complex tasks, Freddy AI for helping agents fill in mandatory fields, an employee onboarding module for gathering key information from new hires, and integration with Slack for immediate ticket notifications. To drive user adoption, the IT team created a 'Walk-up' ticket template to document and track requests that came in through emails or walk-ups. The flexibility of Freshservice allowed the team to customize fields and capture richer data beyond the usual ITSM information. Over time, other departments like Finance and HR also started using Freshservice, further increasing its usage rates.

• The implementation of Freshservice transformed Cheetah Digital's IT operations, improving efficiency and user engagement. The solution's advanced automation features and seamless integrations enabled the IT team to handle the growing volume of IT requests in a smarter way. The Service Catalogue feature took mundane operations off the agents’ plate, while the Freddy AI tool helped agents fill in mandatory fields more quickly. The employee onboarding module streamlined the process of gathering key information from new hires, and the integration with Slack ensured immediate ticket notifications. The 'Walk-up' ticket template helped the IT team accurately track the complexity of the tasks carried out. The flexibility of Freshservice also allowed the team to customize fields and capture richer data. The solution's success is evident in the high user adoption rates and employee satisfaction scores.

• 34% increase in user adoption of portal within 1 year

• 95% Employee satisfaction rate

• 1-hour Ticket response time