Elevate Employee Engagement with IT Service Catalog
“Wifi is down”, is the hip new scare phrase of our time. People have stopped taking natural calamities seriously until they can’t use their phones anymore. From recruiting an employee to applying for an extended leave, everything is online now. And it’s only natural that reaching your IT department should also be a few clicks away. Of course, there is an option to write emails to the IT service looping in your manager but writing an email without knowing what’s available is not efficient.
Self-service catalogs play an important role in interactions that can afford to be transactional rather than relational. It is especially vital for interactions optimized around speed and efficiency. For example, you can now walk into a McDonalds, tap your order on a “Create Your Taste” touch screen, and receive a burger personalized to you. You want pineapple on your burgers too? Why not?
The new-age employees prefer doing their job on their own without depending on exhausting email threads and waiting on approvals.
This new-gen workforce defies doing repetitive tasks and wants to focus more on the core job to bring out the efficiency and avoid dependencies. Hyperconnected employees who work from anywhere and at any time expect reliable, available, and accessible IT support. The service catalog connects the employees to support and services that IT delivers. Millennial workforce focuses on getting the job done quickly without breaks and interruptions, and the IT teams must act on it right away to close the gap and deliver exceptional experiences.
A service catalog is like a self-service e-commerce website with an organized and curated collection of all the business and IT related services.
Consumerize the IT experience
For the IT team
Imagine running a restaurant without a menu card! Customer service management turns into anarchy with your wait staff running around to serve customers in haste. In today’s complex IT world, IT has become a behemoth in the number of services, plug-ins, and add-ons. No IT team can keep track of all the requests, and that’s where the service catalog helps your organization shine. Any organization without a service catalog would fail to attain operational excellence. A web-based service catalog would reduce agent workload with the centralized management of requests. Managing services and fulfilling requests with a standard tool would improve service delivery time. The IT team’s credibility is enhanced with a systematic request fulfillment. The service catalog helps the IT team to exercise clear communication with a single source of truth for all the service offerings.
Service catalog could allow the IT team to gain maximum control allowing traceability of the entire process from application to delivery recording and documenting all the steps. An excellent service catalog reduces the time required to process requests. It lets the most qualified IT staff focus on those tasks that bring value to the organization, reducing the operational costs. Service catalogs make sure the issues are resolved within the given SLAs. Another benefit of the service catalog is, over time, it becomes the knowledge base for your IT team. This intelligence helps closely aligned IT services with business strategy, substantially contributing to the attainment of corporate goals.
How do organizations know that they need more network administrators, system administrators, IT support or other IT related needs? How do businesses streamline and manage IT complexity? The IT service catalog can determine these outcomes by serving as an excellent tool for organizations to know the needs of their businesses.
For employees
Now, look at it from the customer’s perspective. Imagine going to a restaurant, and there is no menu card! In this world of allergies and food sensitivities, having to ask the wait staff is a nuisance, and the entire experience is lost in back-and-forth exchanges about the availability of choices. Manual service requests consume time and efficiency, thereby reducing the operational productivity within an organization.
Employees expect a transparent system and an intuitive user experience to understand available and eligible services. The service catalog is your menu card. Employees can look into it and order their choice of hardware, software, and IT services to streamline their work. It facilitates smooth interactions with the IT team and simplifies processes to request IT services. IT service catalog simplifies access to the services that the employees require to remain productive. Employees are empowered with consumer-like experience to assist themselves with a user-friendly shopping-cart like portal and are presented with defined IT service offerings.
The IT service catalog is Multi-functional!
Human Resources: The Service catalog allows the users to access payroll information, benefits, and all the programs available to you as an employee. New hires can also use the portal to raise requests for training sessions or equipment required to kick-start their efficiency from day one. They can complete their paperwork electronically with a service catalog in place. Refer an eligible candidate for a job opening using the portal and track the entire process from resume overview, interview call to recruitment.
Click here to find the best examples of the customized Service catalogs implemented across industries
Facilities: The service catalog enables you to raise work requests if you need something repaired, installed, moved, or replaced.
IT service desk: Submit your IT related queries and requests on the service portal. The job queue can be browsed and tracked until the task is completed and the ticket is closed.
Finance, payroll, and billing: Maintain your official finances and upload your bills to get them reimbursed. Use the service catalog as a one-stop-shop for everything related to payroll– payslips, tax declarations, and raising queries related to it.
Personalize your IT service catalog to make your employees feel at home
Leverage personalization by customizing your service catalog to deliver a sense of belonging and kinship to your employees. Make your IT service catalog speak your organization’s dialect, get inputs from your employees and IT agents before building it. Create a well-branded design, governance, and maintenance process that focuses on proactive performance improvement.
Here are the customized IT service catalog best practices by Freshservice put together for you to check out, you’re welcome!
Blog cover design by Prasanna Bhupendran
