Healthcare IT: Thousands of devices and 40% staff turnover

Healthcare IT is tough on service delivery. Staff churn is high, devices move constantly, and support tickets multiply across different systems. On a recent success call with a provider running Zendesk for mobility support and a customer on Freshservice, the challenges came into sharp focus.

“About 40 percent turnover year on year. With 4,500 to 5,000 staff, getting these processes in place and automated is critical.”

That kind of churn means thousands of new starters and leavers every year, each needing equipment, access, and support. Without integration, tickets pile up, assets go missing, and teams drown in manual updates.

Challenge 1: turnover without automation

Every joiner, mover, or leaver triggers a ripple of changes across IT. In healthcare, where 40% of staff may turn over annually, keeping up with those requests manually isn’t just inefficient - it’s risky. Important steps get missed, knowledge leaks away, and SLAs slip.

Challenge 2: assets without visibility

“You’re connecting 1,000 mobile handsets and 1,000 laptops a year and you’ve got no idea where they are. You just keep churning and burning.”

Thousands of devices are provisioned each year, yet without linking tickets to an asset register, the context disappears. That makes it hard to know what’s in use, who owns it, or when it needs to be replaced. Asset churn becomes asset chaos.

Challenge 3: portals without clarity

“Long term, you don’t want to be logging into a customer ServiceNow. The team is logging into three or four portals. That’s the problem we’re solving.”

Service desks should be able to work from their platform of choice. Instead, they’re hopping between Zendesk, Freshservice, and ServiceNow instances, or relying on one-way email ingestion. The more portals, the more chance of missed tickets and double-handling.

What good looks like

The call focused on a simple but powerful outcome:

• Two-way ticket sync between Zendesk and Freshservice

• Lifecycle updates mirrored across systems - statuses, comments, attachments

• Onboarding and offboarding handled through workflows, not spreadsheets

• Asset context flowing with tickets, so devices are tracked alongside people

• Work in your own platform - no extra logins, no portal overload

The path forward

We agreed on a staged, low-risk plan:

1. Prepare connectors in our sandbox and run a one-sided demo with Zendesk live.

2. Map the fields and workflows that matter most for mobility tickets.

3. Invite the customer to connect their Freshservice instance directly, keeping credentials secure.

4. Pilot the flow, then expand to networking and other queues.

Allowing for the realities of healthcare this would live in under two weeks, but the first POC is up and running in a day.

Why it matters

Healthcare IT shows the extremes - high turnover, high asset churn, and high service complexity. But the lessons apply everywhere. Without integration, each problem amplifies the others. With integration, tickets, assets, and SLAs move smoothly between systems, while teams keep working in the tools they know.

That’s why we built Support Fusion: to connect Zendesk, Freshservice, ServiceNow, Autotask, and beyond so providers and customers can focus on outcomes, not swivelling between systems.