9 Real-life Examples in 2025

Help desk software tracks customer questions and feedback to improve customer service. Here are real-life case studies illustrating how help desk software has been beneficial to businesses:

1. Eurail

Eurail is a rail pass company serving travelers throughout 33 European countries on railroads and some shipping lines. 

• Headquarters: Utrecht, Netherlands
• Industry: Transportation
• Number of customer service employees: 50–110 (seasonal)
• Foundation date: 1959

Challenges: Eurail’s customer support representatives were overwhelmed by the rush of requests.

• Complex customer service: Eurail previously banned customers from transferring their rail passes to another mobile device. However, this became an issue when customers lost their smartphones or upgraded to a new one. “We received thousands of requests per week from customers wanting to transfer their pass to a different device,” says Uerail customer service agent –  Sias.
• Manual tasks: Customer service representatives had to manually activate the ticket passes in the backend.

Solutions and outcome: Eurail presented these challenges to a consulting company and worked with partners to implement the necessary technical changes so that customers could transfer their passes themselves.

• Automated ticket transfers: Mireille Verweij-Head of Customer Service at Eurail says they have automated the service operations with the new implementation.
• Reduced number of inquiries: The new product improvements reduced the number of customer support requests, freeing up customer service agents to focus on more pressing issues. 
• Higher customer satisfaction: The company’s customer satisfaction score has risen to ~80%.
• Reduced first response time: First response time decreased to ~3 hrs (95% faster).

To learn more about help desks see our research on:

2. Grove Collaborative

Grove Collaborative sells over 200 cleaning, wellness, and everyday essentials brands to over 1.2 million online customers. 

• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Industry: Retail
• Customers: 1.2M+
• Products: 2K+
• Foundation date: 2012

Challenges:

• Lack of AI features: The Grove team needed AI features like intelligent triage and intelligence in the context panel that automatically detects what a ticket intends.
• Operation efficiency: “The primary reason for help desk AI is to do as much as possible with limited resources to improve our operational efficiency.” explains Ashley Malsbury – Community Happiness Systems Manager at Grove Collaborative
• Unpredictable live chat channels: The live chat channel was unpredictable. For example, a glitch on the company’s website could cause chat volumes to soar. The unpredictable volumes made accurate staffing difficult.

Solutions and outcome: 

• Chatbots: The solution’s chatbot presented help center articles to customers while they waited for an agent to respond. Hence, customers were self-serve if they found the answer to their simple requests, such as return labels or an order update.
• Omni-channel messaging: Messaging across mail, mobile app, web, social, and phone helped to drop chat volumes by more than 80%.
• Conversation history: The new implementation displayed the conversation history. Thus, there was no need to restart the conversation if a chat got disconnected.
• Reduced demand for agents: The transition to messaging from chat reduced the demand for agents.

3. Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc.

Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc.’ is the 18th-largest credit card issuer in the United States.

• Headquarters:  Huntington, West Virginia.
• Industry: Financial services
• Number of employees: 350+
• Foundation date: 1991

Challenges:

• Low IT technician productivity: The company’s customers primarily contacted the IT help desk, causing technicians to spend more time answering calls than resolving support tickets.
• Inefficient help desk system: Without a proper database that details problems and their related solutions, technicians spend a significant amount of time looking for answers to known solutions.

Solutions and outcome:  Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc. unified ticketing, purchase management, and their self-service portal using help desk software.

• Ticketing system: The ticketing system allowed technicians to:
  • track requests in real-time,
  • create templates for common requests,
  • and view the history of each request.
• Centralized IT purchase management: The ‘purchase’ and ‘contracts’ modules allowed the customer service team to manage all purchases and contracts across various locations. 
• Self-service log-ins: Customers logged tickets through a self-service portal, reducing the number of calls to the help desk and allowing technicians to focus on more productive tasks.

4. Brastel

Brastel offers services to both corporations and people, specializing in international calling services and reimbursement services.

• Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
• Industry: Telecommunications
• Number of employees: 150+
• Founded date: 1996

Challenges: 

• Ticket resolution time: It took the agents up to 33 minutes per ticket to resolve a single customer problem.
• High number of tickets: The company received over 100 tickets daily, which was a challenge for the 20-person customer service team.
• Legacy customer support systems: Initially, the company supplied service via a call center, but this was no longer sufficient.  Brastel needed to be quick while responding to all support processes.

Solutions and outcome:

• Live chat: Brastel chose a help desk system with live chat to manage synchronous customer communications.
• Centralized message management: They consolidated all of the social media networks into a centralized platform to allow for real-time message management.
• Decreased resolution times: The support team reduced ticket resolution time from 23 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Decreased response times: The customer service employees decreased the response time from 31 minutes.

5. Lulea University of Technology

Lulea University of Technology is a university that does research with companies like Shell, Scania,  Airbus, and IBM.

• Location:  Sweden
• Industry: Education
• Number of employees: 1,500+
• Foundation date: 1971

Challenges:

• High ticket volumes: It was complex to manage support requests coming in from both the employees and students. 
• Visibility: The university suffered from a lack of visibility on service requests, and an inability to create custom reports.
• Integrations and ITIL support: Lulea needed a help desk tool that supported ITIL support processes. They were looking for a tool, which had integration with other ITIL processes.

Solutions and outcome: Lulea assessed ITIL-ready help desk tools to improve their current IT applications.

• Ticket prioritization: Tickets were automatically prioritized and routed to the appropriate technicians.
• Visibility: End users and technicians have improved the visibility of tickets. The technicians collaborated more effectively, and the tickets were easier to track.
• Ticket history: Technical support teams were able to display customer interactions in a historical timeline.

6. Kern High School District

Kern High School District provides education for its 45,000 students, including high schools, technical institutes, and adult education programs.

• Location: Bakersfield, California
• Industry: Education
• Number of employees: 1,700+
• Foundation date: 1893

Challenges:

• Limited internal collaboration: The organization aimed to improve collaboration and context among internal customer support teams, including customer service, payroll, admin, and IT.
• Analytics and visibility: The service managers are required to monitor agent performance and query trends to inform business decisions.
• Onboarding: Service managers are expected to reduce new hire ramp-up by quickly onboarding and training new agents. 

Solutions and outcome: The new service desk provided a unified platform for internal teams, transforming unpredictability into control.

• Automated routing: Automatically routed queries to the appropriate agent group without manual intervention.
• Onboarding: Streamlined agent onboarding with platform navigation.
• Analytics: Utilized analytics to assess team performance and workload, resulting in informed staffing decisions. Some reporting metrics include:
  • Lost business hours
  • Cost per ticket
  • First call resolution rate
  • Ticket volume trends

7. Keiwit

Kiewit specializes in infrastructure development, mineral processing, and contract solutions for the mining industry.

• Headquarters:  Omaha, Nebraska
• Industry: Engineering and construction
• Number of employees: 28,000+
• Foundation date: 1884

Challenges:

• Service downtime and maintenance costs: Kiewit was required to replace its existing customer support platform due to service downtime and maintenance costs.
• Ticketing management: Kiewit faced with the following ticketing challenges:
  • Growing query volumes and business complexity.
  • Lack of visibility to track query time for hourly billing.
  • High-resolution times due to manual routine tasks.

Solutions and outcome: Keiwit implemented a service desk solution for secure, and continuous customer support. The company launched its new system in 2 weeks, including integrations, and agent training.

• Automated business rules: The customer support team automated ticket routing and prioritization, allowing for scalable support without increasing staffing during peak months.
• Reporting and data visualization: Integrated the help desk system with Power BI and Tableau to provide detailed data reporting for customer invoices.

8. Stuart

Stuart logistics platform that connects small and large businesses with a fleet of localized couriers, operating in more than 100 cities with over 3,500 clients.

• Headquarters:  Paris, France
• Industry: Logistics and supply chain
• Number of employees: 1,000+
• Foundation date: 2015

Challenges:

• Growing user base: Stuart saw a 400% increase in grocery volumes as their clients’ business grew.
• Specialized deliveries needed tailored service: Dangerous goods such as knives must follow the Challenge 25 rule, which required  Stuart to identify any recipient authorization.

Solutions and outcome:  

• Shared inbox: With the new shared inbox integrated with Stuart’s CRM, the team can categorize incoming queries by the phase of the delivery process.
• Case-routing: The team uses assigned rules to customer tickets to specialized agents.
• Resolution time: The support team spent 88 hours less on ticket resolution per week and agents managed up to 90 chats per hour.

9. PacSun

PacSun is a clothing business with 300+ branches.

• Headquarters: Los Angeles, California,
• Industry: Clothing retail
• Number of employees: 8,200+
• Foundation date: 1980

Challenges:

• Ticket consolidation: PacSun provided an omnichannel shopping experience, however, its ticketing system did not allow consolidating multiple contacts from individual customers.
• No standard service: This caused varied, even contradictory, information at each point of contact, depending on how well the service agent performed.
• Ticket duplicates: Duplicate efforts to handle the same problem raised response times and reduced efficiency scores.

Solution and outcome:  PacSun relocated their work-from-home employees and integrated help desk software to meet digital customer demands.

By integrating a help desk software PacSun’s agent could add new customer phone numbers to email or chat transcripts, allowing them to reply to customers across multiple platforms in seconds.

Most common help desk tickets 

1. Password reset requests

There are a few reasons why your help desk receives a password reset request:

• Forgotten password: Password change requests are one of the most common contexts of help desk tickets. 35% of internet users change their passwords around once per month.
• Account security issues: A bank director was deceived by voice cloning seeking financial transfers. Users who are targeted by cyber attack vectors will request a password change.
• Data leakage: Hacker posts 10 billion passwords on crime forum.Several who think their data is stolen might send tickets to help desk agents.

Password reset requests are one of the most common and frequent types of help desk tickets. And, a single password reset can cost up to $70.Organizations can implement help desk software to manage passwords by:

• Enabling self-service password resets
• Leveraging multi-factor authentication (MFA) integration

Real-life example: Vivint Solar, a leading solar energy supplier claims that they reduced password reset requests by ~90%, resulting in over $500,000 in IT savings.

Figure: Password reset notification

2. License and subscription management tickets

Employees toggle between applications approximately 1,200 times per day.Companies with multiple software may have several subscription licenses to manage. Thus, employees in such companies commonly generate support tickets for license & subscription renewals and authorizations.

Example: Customers can send renewal requests for expired CRM subscriptions, however, they will get down while they wait for a response from customer service professionals. Companies can prevent bottlenecks with AI help desk software by automating operations such as renewals, and licensing.

3. Access and permissions requests

40% of business-critical data is trapped in data silos.Employees find it difficult to obtain critical information from coworkers and do their most productive tasks, hence sending access and permission requests to help desk teams.

Companies could solve this problem by implementing shared drives, knowledge bases, and project management software to make information more accessible and shareable among team members. A typical solution to access and permission requests would involve:

Example: A new employee needs access to specific folders on the company’s shared drive. They submit a ticket requesting permission. The IT team:

• Verify if the access request is authorized.
• Adjust the user’s permissions or grant access to the requested resources.
• Confirm that the user can access the needed files or applications.

4. Email-related tickets

The number of email users is set to top ~4.5 billion worldwide in 2024, making it one of the most popular digital communication tools. However, email providers may struggle to implement user education and technical support on a large scale.

This results in a large volume of help requests for issues like:

• Server failures restrict users from sending and receiving emails.
• Difficulty synchronization data from an email account to a new device.
• Failed to log onto an email server. 

Example: A user is unable to send emails and continues to receive the “Mailbox full” error. They file a ticket with the help desk. To remedy the issue, the support team either deletes old emails or increases the mailbox quota.

5. Device onboarding tickets

Device onboarding challenges occur when new users fail to configure their devices. Companies with remote or hybrid work environments commonly face challenges, in which employees spend their first day waiting for tickets to be resolved

Example: HR submits a ticket to the IT department requesting the setup of a new employee’s workstation, including email, access to required systems, and hardware setup.

6. 3rd-party SaaS installation and update errors

Some common problems for software installation and update errors might include:

• An incompatible program on the PC is stopping the upgrade from completing.
• A cleanup procedure from a previous installation attempt is still ongoing, and a system restart is necessary to continue upgrading.
• A file required by the update is likely missing.

Example: Assume a team member has to update a CRM tool for a project. However, They receive an error code while trying to update the software. The team member submits a ticket requesting the new CRM version on their work computer. 

Solution: The IT team can ask the team member to:

• Make sure that their device has enough space.
• Try restarting the computer and then downloading the update again.
• Remove temporary files and cache.
• Restore and repair system files from the common prompt.

7. Hardware issues

Hardware failures occur when a computer’s physical components fail, preventing it from performing the intended functions. This can occur due to:

Hardware issues can have many causes, including:

• Overheating
• Faulty cables
• Hardware conflict
• Outdated drivers

Example: An employee’s laptop overheats and routinely shuts off. They send a ticket outlining the problem. The IT department sets aside time to investigate the laptop, concludes that the cooling fan is faulty, and fixes it.

In hardware instances, the IT help desk team may ask the user to bring the device to the maintenance department. Then the IT team may:

• Verify system errors: Launch “Event Viewer”. This will show a list of system problems to assist in detecting probable hardware failures.
• Monitor for overheating: Use a hardware monitoring tool to monitor the temperatures of your computer’s components. 
• Listen for unusual noises

8. Blue screen

The blue screen is a critical system crash error displayed by Microsoft Windows. Users commonly send tickets to IT teams for the blue screen of death. IT teams can

• Boot the machine in safe mode or,
• Check the hard drive for issues.

9. Data recovery requests

Data management a dministrator typically can recover deleted items from the cloud within a specific time frame after a user empties their trash.

Example: An employee accidentally deletes an important file in Google Drive and submits a ticket for data recovery. The data team retrieves the file from a recent backup and restores it to the employee’s computer.

10. Network connectivity problems

According to an Opengear report from 2023, ~90% of organizations encounter network outages at least once each quarter.Customers will contact help desks if they encounter problems such as slow, unreliable, or limited network connectivity. 

Example: A customer support agent reports that they cannot connect to the company’s VPN from home. The IT team can check:

• VPN server status
• VPN protocol and ports
• Check the firewall blocking
• Ask to restart your VPN app

11. System performance issues

Users commonly contact the customer support team with Complaints about slow or unresponsive computers, lagging applications, or frequent crashes.

Example: An employee’s computer is running unusually slow, causing delays in their work. They submit a ticket reporting the issue. The IT help desk can ask to:

• Make sure you have the latest updates on OS and device drivers
• Restart your PC and open only the apps you need
• Check for low disk space and free up space
• Check for and remove viruses and malware

12. Mobile device complications

Mobile device complications tickets are for issues with phones and computers. These issues can range from basic troubleshooting to asking for assistance from the device’s official vendor. Addressing these tickets frequently includes inspecting the device for any hardware or software faults, offering instructions on how to use the device, and receiving direct help from the vendor.

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