Streamline incident response on a unified platform
“An organization’s incident response has a direct impact on effective service restoration, minimizing revenue loss and improving the user experience…”
– Gartner 2021 Planning Guide for IT Operations and Cloud Management – Published 9 October 2020
Incident response is at the heart of great, or terrible, user experience. However, while tools have evolved, challenges – especially faced by L1 agents – still exist. The solution isn’t about getting more tools. It’s about establishing a unified platform across the IT service desk and the IT Operations teams that empowers L1 agents to collaborate across silos with L2 agents, subject matter experts, and DevOps personnel. And when employees are empowered with the right tools, they power the business and delight customers. Explore two use cases in this post that demonstrate exactly that, by supercharging the IT service desk with native ITOM features, over a unified platform.
Every business is a tech business
IT service requests are not necessarily disconnected from issues ITOps looks into. As the saying goes, all modern businesses are technology businesses. Likewise, for effective IT Operations Management, agents need visibility into IT service requests. Disparate tools used by different IT teams in a single organization are bound to make enterprise wide collaboration difficult. The challenges faced by L1 agents in such a setup can be bucketed into two major categories:
- First: The lack of context. A ticket is just an indicator of an issue. It could be an isolated issue, or one that is the result of another event elsewhere. Operations teams struggle to collaborate across disparate tools and are unable to track an issue across the organization. Collating the associated information takes up valuable time and effort that could be better utilized solving the problem instead.
- Second: The absence of automation forces agents to address repetitive and low value tasks. This also results in inefficiencies in incident resolutions such as longer time being taken to assign an incident, for the incident to be acknowledged by the respective agent, and for stakeholders to be informed and updated.
What teams need is for an incident to act as a central point of reference with all associated events and metrics accessible on a single dashboard, irrespective of where and how that incident was first reported. They need real-time updates and the ability to collaborate over communication channels of their choice minus the chaos and confusion in case of a critical incident. Plus, they need automation to address predictable, repetitive, and low value tasks to be able to focus on problem solving instead.
That’s exactly what Freshservice intends to achieve by unifying IT service management and IT operations management in one easy to use system, as demonstrated through the following two use cases featuring two fictional organizations – Raydar & Acme Inc.
With Freshservice, supercharge your IT service desk with native ITOM features
Raydar is a long-term healthcare provider. They use Freshservice to report and track incidents and disruptions to their healthcare equipment provided to their customers. Daphne, a medical patient, learns that her healthcare device is not working and calls Raydar’s emergency helpline for support. There are no available support agents to answer her call so she leaves a voicemail describing the issue. The voicemail is automatically converted into an incident and associated with Raydar’s after-hours on-call schedule. Watch this demo to see how Freshservice accelerates incident resolution using the On-Call Management module.
In this case, the IT service desk uses the On-Call Management module to resolve a ticket after office hours. The On-Call module ensured that the ticket was escalated to the right person and acknowledged by them fast. This brought down the Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), a vital metric that helps reduce the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). This is how the IT service desk could benefit from a unified platform that houses not just traditional ITSM modules, but also ITOM features.
With Freshservice, manage your digital infrastructure from right within the IT service desk
Acme Inc, a K-12 educational technology provider, uses Freshservice to manage service requests from employees and students. They also use the Freshservice Alert Management module to manage the health of their digital infrastructure. The performance of their online learning platform is supervised by a monitoring tool. On a particular day, the IT Ops team notices that the platform has become slow. In parallel, a number of users report the issue to the IT service desk. Watch this demo to see how Freshservice powers collaborations across teams and simplifies incident resolution.
In this case, the IT Operations team used the intelligent Alert Management module to track the health of their learning platform, automatically create an incident, and used the On-call management module to quickly escalate it to the right agent. That agent worked towards incident resolution using enhanced context provided by Automated Grouping powered by Freddy ML engine. All agents across L1, L2, and DevOps, could easily work together to resolve the issue at the earliest.
With uninterrupted IT, Freshservice ensures businesses remain unstoppable
With an inbuilt incident management platform powered by intelligent automations, collaboration tools, and integration capabilities, Freshservice empowers organizations to collaboratively respond, rather than react, to critical incidents. With incidents being resolved faster, their business impact is also minimized. Plus, agents avoid spending time on service desk issues by fixing infra issues first.
