There's a moment that both Ben Porter and Noelle Burton, part of the IT team at Podium, mention when they talk about going live with Console. Podium's CEO saw the tool in pre-launch testing, was bullish, and pushed to accelerate.

"We had a meeting with our CEO and said we're going to launch Console to a limited test group next week," Ben says. "He said: why don't you just do it tomorrow? As an IT person, that's terrifying. You don't want your end users to have a bad experience."

They did it anyway. No issues. No fires. Everything worked.

"We were rolling on Console two weeks earlier than we planned with no regrets," Ben says. 

They expanded the test group just 24 hours later. The experience was the same.

"It was very apparent very quickly that it was going to be a monumental addition to the team," she says. "All those things that had been pulling our time away were replaced by Console."

The need for something truly better

Before Console, Podium’s tools were siloed and slow to adapt to the AI moment. In other words, pretty much what you’d expect from legacy platforms. Podium tried to use the agent-builder in a previous platform that was supposed to handle tickets on its own. But no matter how much the team trained it, it never got to the point where they could just let it run.

"At the end of the day, we need a platform that can move as quickly as we do," Ben Porter, Senior Director of IT Operations at Podium, says. "Having a tool that somebody bolted AI onto the side of and said 'this is an AI tool now' doesn't really work. You need something AI-native. Something that can adapt with us."

What the decision came down to

When Podium started looking for something new, Ben's team did what any thorough IT org does: called up the big names, got demos, compared roadmaps. The decision came down to one thing more than anything else.

"Console truly blew us away by showing us what the future looked like,” Ben says. “And they've been fulfilling those promises since we started."

The Proof of Concept (POC) made it tangible fast. The team created a Playbook for a common access request that had been a persistent drain on everyone's time. Console started resolving tickets instantly. No human intervention required. 

"It felt like what we'd been trying to do for the last six months with the other tool and not being able to achieve," Ben says.

From firefighting to building

Before Console, Ben estimates his help desk employees were spending upwards of 50% of their time on repetitive, low-value tickets. His IT Engineers weren't far behind. The backlog had been growing for three years straight.

Ben's philosophy has always been to give people as much agency as they can handle. But time constraints had made that impossible in practice. Console made Ben’s philosophy a reality.

"I haven’t had any attrition since we started using Console,” Ben says. Everybody's working as much as they were before. They're just doing high-value things. Our IT backlog is going down for the first time in three years."

The shift he describes is non-trivial: his frontline employees, the people who used to spend their days clearing queues, are now builders. They're chasing down root causes, designing new Playbooks based on those root causes, and taking on projects that actually move the business forward.

"We've shifted from 'how do we resolve the ticket' to 'how do we build the thing that resolves all the tickets,'" Ben says.

Assistant changed the pace of building

If the initial POC was the moment the team saw what was possible, using Assistant in Console was the moment the bar was raised.

Ben's team had been publishing Playbooks steadily since go-live. Then Assistant launched in March.

"I've made more Playbooks in the past two weeks with it than I did in the previous two months," he says. "I can grab a ticket, drop it into Assistant, say 'draft me a Playbook' and I'm publishing within an hour."

Noelle saw the same thing on the Revenue Operations service desk team. Her team of four supports Salesforce operations across the entire company: sales deals, contracts, quotes, automations, and more. The requests that come in aren't simple access grants. They're deal-blocking issues that require reviewing an opportunity, identifying the problem, and resolving it correctly.

"When Assistant launched, we were shocked," Noelle says. "We could give Console a ticket that hadn't triggered a Playbook and say 'build something that will.' Within seconds we had a draft that was better than anything we could have put together in an hour. It probably quadrupled the amount of Playbooks we were able to put out."

Console outside of IT

Podium's adoption story isn't limited to the IT team. Engineering, RevOps, and the BizApps team are all running on Console. But one of Ben's favorite examples involves someone who had never used a ticketing system before.

Brandon, who manages facilities, was handling everything himself through a Slack channel with no structure and a steady stream of requests. One person trying to stay on top of (and manage) every ask that came in.

Ben approached him with a proposition: build him a service desk, hook it to Slack, and let Console handle the rest.

"He jumped in, built out a whole bunch of Playbooks himself, and now his channel is basically on rails," Ben says. "There's a Console agent in there talking to people daily. He's freed up a ton of time. And he did it without deep technical experience."

Noelle has watched a version of the same thing happen on her own team. When Console first went live for RevOps, some of the less technical members were hesitant. She walked them through building a Playbook together, then showed them how it handled real tickets.

"As soon as they saw what it could do, you just saw that same excitement in them," she says. "I don't think Console can be an easier experience for anyone, with or without a technical background. And as soon as you see the value, you start thinking about more and more of what it could do."

Measuring what matters

Both IT and RevOps track deflection, but neither treats it as the end goal. For Ben, the north star is how many tickets Console resolves without any human on the IT team touching them. He wants his people doing the things they actually want to do.

For Noelle's team, progress has been fast. When RevOps went live with Console, she was hoping for a 10% deflection rate. They tripled that in the first month, and the rate has kept climbing.

None of that came at the expense of service quality. Podium's IT team had built a 4.95 customer satisfaction rating over the years. That number held steady when Console went live.

What's next

Podium started with two service desks in Console. They are now running ten and are on track to add fifteen more by the end of Q3. The goal: everything in one place, with no reason to be anywhere else.

"We had plans to integrate with our other platform and then realized there really wasn't a reason to," he says. "Console just handles everything natively better."

For Noelle's team, the vision is even bigger. As Console takes on more of the day-to-day Salesforce support load, her team gains capacity to support the new internal platforms being built across the company, freeing engineers to do what they do best: build.

"Console is going to be pivotal in our team being able to do that," she says.

If Ben had to tell himself one thing before starting the Console evaluation process again, it would be brief.

"Just rip off the band-aid. Do it quick."