Hindawi's Transformation of Customer Experience with Freshdesk

Hindawi Limited is one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed open access journals. Founded in 1997, the company has been at the forefront of the open-access publishing movement, aiming to make academic research accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Hindawi deals with a wide customer base, including authors who submit research to the journals it manages, internal and guest editors who handle manuscript management and distribution, external reviewers who ensure the research is up to standard, and readers who consume the published research. The company's mission is to place the researcher at the heart of everything they do, striving for openness and transparency in their customer engagement.

Hindawi Limited, a leading disruptor in the publishing industry, faced significant challenges in managing its customer service. The company dealt with four types of customers: authors, editors, reviewers, and readers, each with unique queries and needs. Initially, Hindawi managed support through Gmail, with each staff member having an individual account and email address. However, as the company grew, this method proved ineffective. There was no oversight or reporting on communications, and the shared inbox setup led to unclear ownership of incoming tickets. Customer queries were being passed from one team to another, leading to delays in responses and resolutions. Furthermore, Hindawi operates with a mix of in-house and outsourced customer service teams, which added another layer of complexity to their customer service management.

To overcome these challenges, Hindawi adopted Freshdesk, a dedicated helpdesk solution. They implemented a 'hidden helpdesk' approach to retain the personal touch of their previous system. While some tickets came in through a common support email ID and were automatically routed to agents, the majority of customer communication was conducted through personal email IDs of Hindawi’s vendor staff. These interactions were also routed through the helpdesk, personalizing the experience for customers. Freshdesk also facilitated collaboration between in-house and outsourced teams, making distance a non-issue. Automated assignment of queries ensured tickets got to the right agent without delay, improving productivity. Hindawi used Freshdesk across several teams, leveraging features like tagging agents and teams, ticket response templates, integration with Jira, ticket status, and reporting and analytics. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Freshdesk's user-friendly and intuitive system made the transition to remote work easier for Hindawi.

• The adoption of Freshdesk brought about significant operational improvements for Hindawi. The 'hidden helpdesk' approach allowed for a more personalized customer experience, making it feel like customers were reaching an individual staff member’s inbox rather than a centralized help desk. Collaboration between in-house and outsourced teams became seamless, with Freshdesk enabling agents to add notes to tickets and pull information from previous tickets to solve issues. The automated assignment of queries ensured quick redirection of customers to the correct contact person. The use of Freshdesk across several teams facilitated efficient handover of tickets, consistent communication in line with the brand’s voice, improved collaboration across teams, faster issue resolution, and advanced visibility into ticket metrics. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Freshdesk's user-friendly system facilitated a smooth transition to remote work, with positive feedback from vendor staff on system notifications and tagging features that improved their productivity.

• Resolution SLA improved to 84%

• First contact resolution rate increased to 80%

• Average first response time reduced to 4 hours