Modern businesses rely on a host of apps and software platforms to optimize operations, streamline workflows, and wow customers. IT is responsible for developing or procuring that software, then securing and managing it, along with the fleet of laptops and mobile devices that run it. IT Service Management (or ITSM) refers to all the processes and activities involved in designing these services and delivering them to end users. 

Using an ITSM framework, your tech team can combine separately managed processes—including incident management, change management, problem management, service level management, and asset management—into a unified, holistic program. This alone can yield many ITSM benefits, but to really modernize operations, your IT department can leverage ITSM software (like Freshservice ), which organizes the end-to-end delivery of IT services—and automates many of them—all from a single platform. 

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Benefits of IT Service Management

 

What are the benefits of ITSM?

The short answer: With the right ITSM framework and tools in place, your business can break down organizational silos, optimize workflows, and modernize IT. This helps your tech team minimize downtime, improve service quality, save money, and better align IT service delivery with business goals.  

The long answer: There are many benefits of an ITSM tool, including:

Standardization and Prioritization

ITSM optimizes IT operations by: 

Using an ITSM framework, your IT team creates a formal documented process for how to handle each type of service request they might receive. This data goes into your ITSM solution, along with a service catalog listing all of the services that IT provides to your employees.

The system then uses this information to maintain a ticketing system, prioritize requests, and automate service delivery whenever possible. When an employee submits a request to your IT help desk, the system determines whether it can handle the ticket without human intervention, either via automation or by sending the employee detailed instructions for how to solve the problem themselves. If not, it prioritizes the ticket, delivers it to the agent most suited to handle the request, and shows the agent the documented procedure for how to resolve it.

This way, everyone in the company gets the support they need when they need it most—regardless of which department they’re in or who answers the phone at the service desk. 

Meanwhile, IT managers can track exactly what activities are being prioritized at any given time and ensure agents have the resources they need to work efficiently. They can also capture data from the standardized process and measure its effectiveness, enabling them to continually improve IT processes and minimize downtime on essential tech.

Improved Agent Productivity

Modern ITSM tools do the heavy lifting on the management part of IT Service Management, so your tech teams can focus on the service part. They don’t have to worry about processing and prioritizing requests, because those workflows are now automated. Nor do they waste time-solving pressing problems with simple solutions, because AI-enhanced ITSM tools can handle many of these basic tech support without agent intervention.

For example, Freshservice’s Freddy AI can turn your ITSM knowledge base into a virtual agent/ customer service chatbot that answers basic questions and walks employees through how to perform simple IT tasks on their own—from resetting passwords to updating software, to troubleshooting their own connectivity issues.

"IT teams are eager for easy-to-configure automated workflows in order to gain efficiencies, especially with basic day-to-day queries, which can add up quickly and divert resources from more mission-critical work,” says Jiten Rajani, Freshservice Product Marketing Manager at Freshworks.

AI enhancements like Freddy can also provide human agents with intelligent recommendations, pointing them to the information they need to provide each service—helping tech teams work smarter and faster. With bot assistance, agents can manage and resolve tickets 57% faster and provide first responses roughly 48% faster, according to the Freshservice 2023 Benchmark Report. 

"Improving agent productivity is a major goal and benefit of ITSM software,” says Rajani. “With higher productivity, a company improves the quality of service, reduces costs, and achieves better outcomes, faster. ITSM software enables agents to improve the employee experiences, fostering a happier workforce.”

Reduced IT Turnover

In the wake of the Great Resignation, employee experience has become just as important as customer experience.

Your IT team spends their days helping to ensure that every other department has access to best-in-class technology so they can work as efficiently and effectively as possible. They want the same user experience for themselves. They want the benefits of ITSM. This includes automation and streamlined operations, AI assistance that provides the information they need in one click, and the chance to avoid doing the same basic, simple tasks over and over each day.

“When agents have the proper tools and support, there's the added benefit of improving retention of your support workers,” Rajani explains. “This has been highlighted by Harvard Business Review research, indicating that 77% of agents surveyed would consider a job change if they were not equipped with the right tools and technology."

Enhanced ROI

Time is money, and ITSM solutions can save your IT department a lot of time. IT agents work more efficiently and resolve incidents more quickly, resulting in less downtime—all of which boosts employee productivity, for your IT team and IT users. Instead of spending most of their time “putting out fires,” IT engineers can focus on building an IT infrastructure that meets the business’s needs—now and in the future. 

Modern ITSM solutions are more than just service desk software. They support—and combine—all IT processes, including asset management and project management. Using a single platform, IT can manage, maintain, and secure all your IT investments throughout their lifecycle, ensuring your company gets the most value from its expenditures. They can also use the same solution for project management and agile development, helping them rapidly develop new apps and capabilities and build an ever-evolving tech stack that will stand the test of time for your organization.

Reduced Wasteful Spending

There are many financial benefits of ITSM software. It doesn’t just save your business time; it can lead to process improvements that save money, as well. It can also help your IT team curb wasteful spending—for example, on redundant business software. The average company uses 130 apps, according to Vendr, but many of those apps provide functionality that the business doesn’t need or is already paying for with another app.

When different teams purchase their own software in departmental silos, there can be functionality overlap. This translates into redundant tools for IT to manage and redundant business expenses to cover.  

ITSM software streamlines all the software that the company uses, so management can easily see which apps are worth the investment, which aren’t pulling their weight, and which provide functionality that users could get from a different app that’s already in your tech stack. The Freshservice Benchmark Report found that 40 percent of IT pros had recently streamlined redundant apps, freeing up funds and IT resources that could be spent on new tech capabilities the organization doesn’t already have.

Visualization

The ability to quickly and easily visualize process workflows is one of the key benefits of implementing ITSM. Managers can identify bottlenecks and pinpoint where a process needs to be simplified—by rearranging steps, eliminating repetitive ones, and/or automating them.

Then they can run cost-benefit analyses to determine if a procedural change will actually save time and money. This information helps them further streamline IT service delivery and spot gaps in functionality, so they know how to budget for evolving technology needs. 

ITSM tools also let managers visualize agent performance metrics, including average response time, process compliance, success rates, and customer satisfaction scores—all in one place. This way, they can easily identify (and reward) high achievers and determine which agents need additional support and training, thus improving the overall quality of IT customer service. 

Better Customer Service Experience

While most of your organization focuses on providing the best possible customer experience, your IT organization is responsible for ensuring they have the technology they need to do it. IT's customers are internal, and they’re a demanding bunch. After all, when their technology isn’t working, neither can they. They don’t know (or care) about all the other tickets and tasks that your tech team needs to handle; they just know they need their tools to work ASAP.

One of the many employee-facing ITSM benefits is transparency. Users have access to the IT service catalog, so they know what types of services they can request and how to request them. They can see where their ticket is in the service queue and, thanks to automated workflows, get an estimate of their wait time.

Because agent productivity is one of the chief benefits of ITSM, that wait time is shorter than ever. This is especially true if their need is urgent because ITSM ticketing systems prioritize the most mission-critical requests. And if their need is easy to resolve, they don’t have to wait at all, because an AI chatbot can walk them through the steps they need to take to solve the problem themselves.

All this automation improves IT customer satisfaction, which in turn improves IT agent satisfaction. Instead of being frustrated with IT because they’re not solving problems fast enough, employees gain a better understanding of just how much the IT department is responsible for and they get their problems solved faster than ever. All of this helps to position IT as the MVPs that management already knows they are.

Clear Communication Channels

ITSM solutions improve collaboration between IT and other business functions. IT users can easily request services through the incident reporting (ticketing) system, and all their feedback on products and services gets captured in one place so IT leaders can keep improving service delivery.

Yet, while all requests go through one platform, employees can access that platform—and IT services—in a variety of ways, via the channel of their choice. This increasingly includes live chat, which is not only the preferred channel for many IT users but is often the most efficient way to receive services. In recent years, the annual Freshservice Benchmark Report has consistently noted that when IT users submit service requests via live chat, their issues get resolved twice as fast. 

Even better, they can chat via the same collaboration tools that they use to communicate with everyone else on their teams. They don’t have to learn a new system or even open a new browser tab. They can instead just start a new chat in an app they’re already using. For example, Freshservice includes native integrations with popular apps such as Microsoft Team, Slack, and WhatsApp, and enables easy API integration with other apps.

Less Risky IT Changes

Change management is an important part of ITSM frameworks and solutions. That’s because change is key to innovation, but it can also be risky. Unless changes are well planned, thoroughly tested, and effectively communicated to stakeholders, they can cause more harm than good, resulting in significant business or service interruptions.

ITSM tools enable tech teams to visualize (and thus avoid) the risks associated with any change, formalize low-risk processes to implement the change, and clearly communicate the change to everyone involved.

As Freshworks CIO Prasad Ramakrishnan puts it, "Having tools that allow rapid deployment of process changes is equally important for IT and the business to realize value faster." 

ITSM Benefits Beyond IT

Your IT department isn’t the only team that can experience the benefits of ITSM. Other employee-facing departments—such as HR, legal, finance, and facilities management—also provide services to internal customers. They, too, need a way to manage those services, streamline communications, and automate workflows. 

With some tweaks, leading ITSM solutions can be used as Enterprise Service Management (ESM) for other departments that serve internal customers. They can create their own service catalogs and knowledge bases. In addition, they can maintain their own intelligent ticketing systems, gain visibility into their processes, and automate some of their workflows.

If your solutions provider offers both ITSM and ESM capabilities, all these different teams can use the same platform as your IT department. This simplifies customer service because employees can use one system to request all the support they need from different departments. It makes things easier for IT because they only have one service management tool to maintain. And it reduces costs for your business because you only have to pay one vendor for the benefits of implementing ITSM  across multiple departments. 

High-level ITSM benefits

Change management is a process, but unless everyone is focused on its important principles, there is considerable risk change management will add overhead, but provide no value to an organization’s business outcomes.

                                                 

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How to Introduce ITSM Processes

The more organized an enterprise is, the better its IT department can function. This is one of the most important ITSM benefits: the ability to organize and optimize IT processes.

ITSM processes are the elements of an ITSM framework and can be divided into the following categories:

Organizing these processes with an ITSM platform helps streamline day-to-day operations and derive all the previously discussed benefits of ITSM. Introducing these processes into your IT operations involves several key steps:

Importance of ITSM

ITSM restructures and optimizes IT operations by automating workflows, enabling self-service, and delivering intelligent insights. This minimizes the time IT spends “putting out fires”—i.e., providing day-to-day tech support—and frees up time and money that could be used to future-proof your business.

For example, instead of updating software and configuring devices, they could be focused on building well-integrated tech stacks with the latest and greatest apps that your employees need to work at their full potential. 

IT services get provided faster, improving both the customer experience and the IT agent experience. Data silos get broken down, leading to process improvements and cost savings. Simply put, ITSM lets your team work faster and smarter, not harder, and those ITSM benefits translate into customer satisfaction and a significant competitive advantage. 

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