St Edmund Hall achieves 80% FCR and streamlines workflows with Zammad AI
St Edmund Hall is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford, with a long history and a diverse community of around 1,300 students, academics, and staff. Its multi-departmental Helpdesk team handles a wide range of requests, from IT support to building maintenance. IT Manager Andrew Breakspear explains how switching to Zammad transformed their support services, moving from a decentralized team and fragmented systems to a single point of contact.
250
Employees
1,300
Customers
2021
Using Zammad since
25
Agents
Zammad has fundamentally changed how support operates within the College. We now provide a true single point of contact for all support queries.
St Edmund Hall, affectionately known as “Teddy Hall” is one of the University of Oxford's historic constituent colleges. While its heritage stretches back centuries, its operations today are anything but dated. Its help desk covers the full spectrum of support requests from a diverse community of around 1,300 users, including staff, academics, students and visiting guests. This is managed by a relatively small, distributed team of around 25 agents from IT support, maintenance, housekeeping and other departments.
The team handles everything from simple requests, such as “my lightbulb has gone out”, to IT issues, such as multi-factor authentication resets, as well as maintenance, housekeeping, and purchasing requests. “It’s a broad and varied workload, reflecting the day-to-day needs of a busy college environment,” explains Andrew Breakspear, IT Manager at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
Before Zammad, support at St Edmund Hall was fragmented across different teams and systems. This created uncertainty for users regarding where to report issues. Consequently, requests were missed, duplicated or delayed due to the lack of a clear single point of contact.
The college originally introduced Zendesk to centralise support. While this initially improved structure, it soon became clear that the solution could not scale sustainably. As the service expanded to include more departments and agents, costs spiralled. Many essential features were locked behind add-ons, making it difficult to scale sustainably. “What started as a solution became a limiting factor as we grew,” recalls Breakspear.
We needed something that wouldn’t penalise us for growth, in terms of both cost and complexity.
When evaluating alternatives, the team looked for a scalable solution that would not increase technical complexity or financial overheads. “Ease of use was critically important, particularly since some agents are not technical specialists,” notes Breakspear.
As well as being user-friendly, the system also needed to fit into the existing multi-departmental setup. Flexibility and extensibility were therefore key requirements. “The system needed to integrate with existing tools and adapt to different workflows across departments,” he adds. “This was essential to provide a true single point of contact across the entire college.”
“Zammad stood out by delivering exactly that. A wide range of functionality was available out of the box, without the need for costly add-ons. It gave us the flexibility we needed while remaining intuitive for both users and agents,” says Breakspear. “The built-in chat functionality was also a major differentiator, allowing us to provide real-time support across our websites — both public-facing and internal — and resolve many queries before they even became tickets.”
Since implementing Zammad in 2021, the help desk has seen significant improvements in performance and user engagement. Today, the team handles around 20 tickets per day and achieves a first contact resolution rate of roughly 80 %. Users typically receive a response in under an hour, and most requests are resolved within four hours.
In addition to operational improvements, Zammad has delivered clear financial benefits. By eliminating the need for expensive add-ons and enhancing efficiency across teams, St Edmund Hall has achieved annual savings of around £4,000.
For Breakspear, these gains reflect a more efficient workflow and a notable shift in user behaviour. “Because logging tickets is so easy now, we actually see more smaller issues — which is a good thing.” He explains. “It means problems are being addressed before they escalate.”
However, the most significant transformation has been in the strategic use of data. By integrating Grafana dashboards with Zammad, the team gained live visibility of workloads, trends and recurring issues.
Data visibility has been invaluable not just operationally, but strategically, helping us to identify problem areas and justify improvements.
For the first time, the team could present clear metrics to senior management. This data-driven approach directly led to the approval of additional staff roles, ensuring the team can meet demand effectively.
In addition to providing day-to-day support, Zammad has driven significant process improvements at St Edmund Hall College. The team has developed a custom PHP web application that generates recurring tickets for planned maintenance.
“This has transformed how routine work is managed," highlights Breakspear. "Hundreds of scheduled tasks are now tracked centrally, and the ticketing system serves as a comprehensive audit trail for compliance and safety checks. Even routine processes, such as testing emergency lift phones, are now reliably recorded.“
Looking ahead, the team is actively adopting Zammad’s AI-driven features to further improve the quality of its service. For example, the AI agents that automatically rewrite ticket titles have already delivered tangible benefits by converting vague email subjects into clear, actionable tasks, significantly improving triage and reporting.
Our goal is to continue improving service quality while maintaining simplicity for users. Zammad will play a key role in this, particularly as we begin to adopt its newer AI-driven features.
The team also recognises the value of AI writing assistant for agents. „It helps ensure clarity, tone, and consistency in communications, while still allowing our teams to retain control over the final response. As we grow more confident in the reliability of these features, we’re keen to explore further AI-driven automation across our workflows.“
Ultimately, Zammad’s approach to AI gives the college a level of strategic agility that other platforms lack. By supporting multiple AI providers, Zammad ensures that the institution isn't tied to a single vendor. “The fact that we aren't locked into a single ecosystem gives us the reassurance we need,” concludes Breakspear. “It allows us to remain flexible and secure as the technology continues to evolve.”
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Zammad provides the backbone for a structured and reliable customer service. It enables us to uphold our commitment to service quality and customer closeness—even as our operations move further into the digital age.
Zammad has brought a whole new level of flexibility and agility to our daily work. We respond to customer inquiries much faster now – and that difference is both noticeable and measurable.
We see Zammad as a dynamic system that grows with us. Its flexibility allows us to meet a wide variety of needs—which is exactly what makes it a future-proof solution for our team.
Seeing how easily Zammad integrates with all of our channels and tools immediately confirmed that this was the flexibility we were looking for in a help desk solution.
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We wanted a simple, well-thought-out ticketing system that would allow us to handle various issues, be flexible enough to adapt to different structures, and seamlessly integrate into our system landscape at any time. Zammad has met all these requirements.
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