For organisations operating at scale, IT support is rarely just an internal function. It directly impacts employees, partners, and critical business operations. When service requests slow down or tickets pile up, the effects are felt across the organisation quickly.
The National Rugby League is a useful ANZ example because the constraint it faced is the one most mid-market IT teams recognise: a capable platform the team could not change without external help. This article covers what the NRL did, what the published record actually supports, and the repeatable steps for teams facing the same problem.
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TL;DR
- The NRL supports around 1,200 staff across 16 clubs with a small IT team, and moved from ServiceNow to Freshservice in 2021.
- The trigger was dependency, not features. A restructure removed the dedicated platform administrator, leaving the team reliant on third parties for workflow changes and upgrades.
- The selection criteria were cost efficiency, in-house manageability and speed to implement. The team had Freshservice working the way they wanted within a day of starting a trial.
- Four structural changes drive backlog reduction in any environment: centralised intake, automated routing, internal configuration control, and asset context on the ticket.
- The published case study reports visibility, control and adoption outcomes rather than backlog percentages. Treat the mechanism as transferable and the specific numbers as unpublished.
The NRL IT Environment Before Freshservice
The National Rugby League provides IT support to approximately 1,200 NRL and Rugby League Administration staff across 16 clubs in Australia and the Asia Pacific, with a small internal team. That ratio is the important context: the operating constraint was never headcount alone, it was how much of the team's capacity went into managing the platform rather than serving the organisation.
The NRL previously ran ServiceNow. According to the Freshworks customer story, the platform required a dedicated staff member to administer it, and the organisation depended on third-party vendors for development work, workflow changes and major release upgrades. When an internal restructure removed that dedicated position, the NRL faced a straightforward choice: continue with ServiceNow and deepen the reliance on external vendors, or move to a platform the existing team could run themselves.
Why the NRL selected Freshservice
According to the Freshworks customer story, IT Manager Maurice Veliz cited simplicity as the deciding factor. The team signed up for a trial and had the platform working the way they wanted within a day, creating workflows and customising the design without external help. That had been a persistent struggle on the legacy platform. Freshservice met the requirements so clearly that the NRL finalised the decision without evaluating other alternatives.
This is a pattern we see repeatedly in ANZ mid-market environments and cover in detail in our article on why enterprise ITSM tools hurt mid-market teams: the platform is not deficient, it is simply built for an operating model with resources the organisation does not have.
The Four Changes That Reduce Backlog in Any Environment
The NRL's move addressed four structural causes of backlog accumulation. These apply regardless of platform or organisation size, and they are the transferable part of the story.
| Change | The backlog cause it removes |
|---|---|
| Centralised intake through one portal | Demand arriving through untracked channels, invisible to the queue |
| Automated routing and ownership | Tickets waiting in general queues for manual triage and assignment |
| Internal configuration control | Process improvements blocked behind external vendor lead times |
| Asset context on the ticket | Agents assembling information before resolution work can begin |
1. Faster Ticket Intake and Visibility
With a centralised service portal, IT requests are captured consistently and made visible to the team from the moment they are submitted. This reduces confusion about what work exists and ensures every request is tracked from the start rather than arriving through informal channels that bypass the queue entirely. You cannot manage a backlog you cannot see, which makes this the prerequisite for everything that follows.
2. Automated Routing and Ownership
Tickets are routed automatically based on request type, ensuring issues reach the right team or agent without manual triage at each step. This eliminates the ownership ambiguity where tickets sit in general queues awaiting assignment, and removes the manual categorisation step that consumes first-line agent time before any resolution work begins. Our 12 ITSM automation recipes covers the specific routing patterns worth building first.
3. Simplified Configuration and Internal Control
This was the NRL's primary driver and it is the most underrated of the four. When routine workflow changes require an external consultant, improvement work accumulates in a queue of its own. Each change carries a lead time and a cost, so small refinements never get made and the configuration drifts further from how the service desk actually operates. A team that can adjust its own workflows improves continuously. A team that cannot is frozen at whatever was configured on day one.
4. Asset Management Integration
Improved asset visibility helps the team understand dependencies between configuration items and respond more effectively to incidents involving specific assets. Asset context arriving automatically with the relevant ticket reduces the lookup time agents spend assembling information before they can begin resolving. For a distributed environment spanning 16 clubs, that visibility also addresses the tracking problem that geographic spread creates.
What the Published Record Does and Does Not Say
The Freshworks customer story and the accompanying announcement report qualitative outcomes: simplicity, rapid implementation, in-house control, improved asset management across locations, and strong team adoption. Veliz describes a team that enjoys using the platform and finds new functionality regularly.
What the published record does not include is specific backlog reduction percentages, ticket volume changes, or resolution time improvements. We have not seen those figures and do not claim them. What the NRL example demonstrates is the mechanism rather than the magnitude: removing external dependency and centralising intake creates the conditions for sustainable backlog reduction. The size of the improvement in any given environment depends on where that environment is starting from.
Large ticket backlogs and slow response times are almost always symptoms rather than root causes. The root cause is manual processes and external dependencies that no longer scale with demand. Thoughtful automation and workflow simplification address the root cause. Processing the same manual volume faster does not.
Repeatable Steps for IT Teams Facing Similar Challenges
The approach translates into a sequence for any ANZ mid-market IT team managing a growing backlog with limited capacity to add headcount.
- Centralise all IT requests through a single portal so every contact is visible and tracked from submission. Automation applied to a fragmented intake process produces fragmented automation.
- Automate routing and ownership assignment early so tickets reach the right team without manual triage.
- Remove external configuration dependencies so the team can adjust workflows without a vendor lead time on every change.
- Review workflows regularly against actual usage data and adjust before problems accumulate.
- Measure visibility and flow rather than volume so the metrics reveal where work is getting stuck rather than how much is being processed.
Our ITSM Platform Optimisation service covers workflow design and automation configuration for ANZ mid-market IT teams on Freshservice. You can also read our articles on ITSM backlog management for the structural approach, and our Freshservice implementation best practices guide for the full implementation context.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the NRL move from ServiceNow to Freshservice?
An internal restructure removed the dedicated staff position that administered the ServiceNow platform. That left two options: continue with ServiceNow and rely on third-party vendors for all development and upgrade work, or move to a platform the existing team could manage in-house. Cost efficiency and ease of implementation were also cited. The decision was driven by the operating model rather than by any feature gap.
How long did the NRL's Freshservice implementation take?
The published case study reports that the team had the platform working the way they wanted within a day of starting a trial, though a trial configuration is not the same as a production go-live and the full implementation duration is not published. For reference, a mid-market ANZ IT team implementing Freshservice with structured automation and workflow design typically goes from project start to stable operation in six to twelve weeks depending on data complexity and integration requirements.
Can a similar approach work for smaller ANZ organisations without the NRL's scale?
Yes. The NRL runs a small IT team supporting around 1,200 people, which puts it closer to most mid-market environments than the brand name suggests. The principles applied, centralising requests, automating routing, enabling internal configuration control, and integrating asset context, are not scale-dependent. For a five-agent team handling 100 tickets a week, the same structural changes produce the same type of outcome, and the implementation is faster because the configuration is simpler.
What is the first step for an IT team looking to reduce its ticket backlog?
Centralise all incoming requests through a single service portal before configuring any automation. Automation applied to a fragmented intake process produces fragmented automation. When every request arrives through the portal, the team gains full visibility into demand patterns, which reveals the specific contact types where automation will produce the highest backlog reduction. Most ANZ mid-market IT teams discover that the majority of backlog volume concentrates in three to five contact types once they have full visibility. Those types are where automation effort should begin.
Is Freshservice the right platform for every ANZ team with a backlog problem?
No, and a disclosure is relevant here: KlickFlow is a Freshworks Premium Partner. Freshservice suits mid-market IT teams that want internal control over configuration without specialist certification, which describes most ANZ organisations of 200 to 2,000 people. Organisations with genuine enterprise governance requirements, complex multi-department workflow orchestration and the resources to staff a platform team properly are often better served by ServiceNow. The NRL's situation was specific: they lost the resource that made the enterprise platform viable. Our ITSM Platform Selection service assesses that fit vendor-neutrally before any commitment.