Transforming the National Deaf Children’s Society’s helpline with Freshservice

Founded in 1944, the National Deaf Children’s Society is a UK charity for deaf children with any level of hearing loss. Headquartered in London, it employs between 300 and 350 staff across the UK and operates as a fully remote organisation with a lean and agile working culture. The charity delivers a broad range of services including helpline support, education guidance, community programmes, and national campaigning and advocacy.

The National Deaf Children’s Society is the charity for deaf children with any level of hearing loss. Through their free Helpline and one-to-one support, they help families make the choices that work best for them and their child.

With a busy 16-strong Care team handling around 2,000 emails a month, efficient service management is crucial. As demand for the charity’s support services continued to grow, the National Deaf Children’s Society recognised the need to evolve and modernise the way it dealt with incoming requests.

Before implementing Freshservice, the National Deaf Children’s Society relied heavily on Outlook inboxes and manual processes to manage helpline queries and support requests. While the Supporter Care team had already been benefiting from Freshdesk for eight years, the Helpline team was still relying on these manual processes, a gap that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Emails were difficult to track and prioritise, visibility across workloads was limited, and collaboration between team members was not always seamless. Important information could be spread across multiple emails, making it harder to maintain clear histories of issues and interactions.

The lack of structured workflows also meant reporting was limited, making it harder to understand trends, demonstrate performance, or plan improvements. For a mission-driven charity like the National Deaf Children’s Society, these inefficiencies risked slowing response times and placing unnecessary strain on the care team.

For us specifically on the Helpline, it was very difficult to keep track of incoming messages. Also, in terms of reporting, keeping track of the number of emails the team is sending, and what’s coming in, it was quite an antiquated way.

Claire Sheppard, Helpline Lead, National Deaf Children’s Society

The National Deaf Children’s Society partnered with Pink Elephant to implement Freshservice as a modern, centralised service management platform. From the outset, we worked closely with the team to understand their specific needs, challenges, and ways of working. Rather than delivering a generic system setup, the approach focused on designing processes that reflected the realities of a busy charity environment.

Together, Pink Elephant and the Helpline team:

• Implemented Freshservice as a single point of contact for incoming queries.
• Created structured workflows to manage communications.
• Supported staff training and adoption across the organisation.

The new system prevents tickets and emails from being missed, while letting the team prioritise and customise their views. Ownership of tickets is also clear: the team can reassign tickets or add a watcher, ensuring nothing is overlooked.

We had a system where we were using folders, subfolders, and subfolders within subfolders, and it just got quite tricky when you have quite a few staff dealing with individual queries.

Claire Sheppard, Helpline Lead, National Deaf Children’s Society

With over 40 years of experience and a global presence, Pink Elephant has long-standing expertise in ITSM and a highly regarded reputation for forming strong, hands-on client relationships. The National Deaf Children’s Society chose Pink Elephant as its implementation partner because of our world-renowned expertise in service management, coupled with a people-focused approach. Throughout the project, we provided clear guidance grounded in best practice, a collaborative and flexible implementation style, and ongoing support to ensure successful adoption.

Since implementing Freshservice, the National Deaf Children’s Society has seen significant improvements in how its services are managed and delivered. The Helpline and Supporter Care team now benefits from:

• Clear visibility of all requests in one central system.
• Improved collaboration and handover between team members.
• Better tracking of workloads and priorities.
• Access to meaningful data and reporting.

It’s really aided teamwork and it’s had an impact on time management as well. We are now a lean and agile organisation where we are streamlining our processes and our core delivery services.

Sherrie Farnsworth, Supporter Care Operations Lead, National Deaf Children’s Society