There is a huge importance in enhancing your IT service desk team’s ability to differentiate between incidents and service requests. Not only does this help in quickly deliberating various service tasks, but it also assists in prioritizing operations in the most efficient manner. If you want to shape customer perceptions, then you should improve the quality of your helpdesks.
By essence, your helpdesk and support personnel are the “Directors of First Impressions.” In other words, your entire company can be judged by people through them. Why should a customer rely on your service if you cannot deliver his request quickly?
There is no doubt that the potential benefits of service request management solutions are clear. However, you want to make sure that the technology is effective enough to maximize return on investment. To help with that, take a look at these tips that can help you find success when implementing such a solution.
#1. Emphasize Incident Management
One of the best things about service request management is being able to significantly improve your entire incident management. Your workers can immediately shift their focus on break or fix issues without the need to filter through less urgent matters.
#2. Focus On Process Bottlenecks
In some cases, there are areas where operations tend to be slow to crawl simply because of problems pertaining to ticket management and prioritization. This is where you need to focus on identifying these bottlenecks on your process before implementing a service request management system. Once you are able to pinpoint them, you can start positioning the solution in a way that it can quickly resolve process issues. Not only will you experience a significant functional gain, but you will also see a considerable value creation over time.
#3. Integrate With Service Provisioning
It holds true that immediate response is essential when users start requesting access to applications and/or services. But if the support team proves to be slow in their responses, the entire operation could end up turning to other solutions. Service request management solution has the ability to accelerate provisioning by making sure that all processes can run smoothly between IT workers and support.
#4. Remember To Involve the Service Catalog
In case you did not know, the solution is capable of paying dividends regardless of whether you are utilizing a service catalog. However, there is a huge benefit to getting the solution involved directly with your own service catalog plans. Basically, by doing so, you are able to give users a more intuitive route towards accessing surfaces. Even more so, they can immediately get all the help they need in order to get their tasks done.
#5. Always Think Holistically
One of the core benefits of a service request management solution is its ability to contribute a positive impact on a handful of areas in your operation. With that said, if you want to maximize the returns you can obtain from this solution, you should use it holistically to impact as many processes as you possibly can.
Remember that support teams typically end up facing a diverse range of processes and tasks, all of which they need to handle and complete. Unfortunately, this diversity can be a make or break, especially since it is difficult to optimize daily operations. Why exactly? That is because users are only going to spend so much time sorting through a variety of ticket types instead of working on time individually. To alleviate this burden, all you need to do is differentiate between your different service request types. Do this and you will see huge returns on your investment.
#6. Prioritize Customers
The idea here is to completely focus all of your energy on the most common and/or high-priority requests. From there, you should start expanding upon your offerings based on customer feedback and usage. As much as possible, provide intuitive service request catalogs to guarantee higher rates of user adoption. You can also implement a centralized and searchable knowledge base, so customers can have access to the most frequently asked questions. When you are able to move request fulfillment much closer to your customers, you can drastically speed up resolutions and reduce overall costs.
#7. Gather Requirements
Before you start adding to the service catalog, you must first document all service request requirements. This is where you need to capture all necessary information from your customers through pre-filled forms and actionable options. If possible, try to give your customers a more meaningful set of choices, such as scheduling services or delivery request. The more you allow customers to be involved in the process, the more you can let them feel more responsible for their requests.
#8. Provide Visibility
Your customers are entitled to status updates throughout your service request cycle. These updates can include the likes of providing confirmation of request receipt, cross-system processes, delivery, or authorization updates. To increase visibility, start by creating dashboards and reports that will help manage the lifecycle of service request offering. Also, doing so can easily identify trends that can lessen the need for specific processes, particularly those that are insufficient or complicated. \
You can also track associated costs, employee tasks, resources used, and quality of delivery, among many others. Your goal is to use authentic metrics and tracking performance in order to establish reliability and optimal functionality.
#9. Manage Expectations
Not only track but be explicit as well when it comes to the delivery timeline, including actual date, estimated date, and expected date of resolution. Also, remember to be straightforward of effort and resources needed in fulfilling requests. Apart from allowing outliers, you should also be keen on requesting exceptions, including breakdowns that could potentially delay your resolutions. Do not just focus on achieving and providing service quality, but also redress all possible failures. And once you close the loop, make sure customers are informed about the request status upon completion. Lastly, do not forget to request for evaluation and honest feedback from them, so you can review which part of the process needs to be improved and dealt with right away.