Alterra Mountain Company's IT Transformation with Freshservice

Alterra Mountain Company is a Denver, Colorado-based company that owns a range of recreation and hospitality businesses across 15 destinations in North America. The company prides itself on reflecting the unique culture and character of every location, with no two ski resorts being the same. From the recreational activities on offer to the cozy decor of the lodging rooms, each resort offers a unique experience to its guests. While this individuality was a unique selling point for the customer-facing side of the business, the IT department at Alterra needed a single uniform service desk to manage its operations across all 15 locations.

Alterra Mountain Company, a hospitality business with 15 ski resorts across North America, faced significant challenges in managing its IT operations. Each resort had its own unique ticketing system and process for IT support, leading to over eleven different processes to raise an IT support ticket. This lack of a unified system resulted in little to no visibility into the status of a ticket, especially for high-priority ones. The situation was particularly stressful during the busy ski season, as resources and time were not being used efficiently. Additionally, each resort had its own Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and processes, creating operational complexities and silos.

Alterra decided to standardize its internal service delivery across all resorts using Freshservice, a cloud-based IT service desk. The implementation involved replacing close to eleven different systems and training employees from each resort on the new solution. Despite the challenges, the implementation was completed successfully within a relatively short period of time, thanks to the responsiveness of the Freshservice onboarding team. Alterra now has over 400 different workflows for all its resorts combined. The IT team remains the primary user of the solution, but other departments such as expense management, accounts payable, and facilities management are gradually being brought onto Freshservice. The company envisions more departments onboarding to Freshservice in the future, moving towards a common core system.

• The implementation of Freshservice has led to a fundamental culture shift within Alterra. The operational silos within which each resort was previously working have been dismantled, enabling smoother inter-departmental collaboration. The IT team now has much more visibility into the work other groups are doing, and resorts are able to maintain their autonomy while simultaneously working closer with headquarters on complex requests. The ultimate measure of Freshservice’s success for Alterra lies in the improvement of the overall guest experience. By resolving customer issues quicker and more efficiently, the team aims to surpass the expectations of their guests.