How to build a Service Catalog

Step II - Select the right team

Setting up the service request fulfillment team is an important task. Clearly assign roles and responsibilities to every team member. Create different groups based on the request type to handle specific service requests. Assign relevant permissions for users to access the Service Catalog. Not all service items are visible to everyone across the organization. Businesses do enterprise service management which means that all departments including IT and non-IT services are maintained in a single catalog. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the service owner for every department.

• Classify your agents into multiple groups based on the service offerings
• Assign relevant permissions to your end users to access only those relevant service items
• Identify approvers for service items and assign relevant scope. Service Catalog admin is responsible for design and configuration of all service items. Therefore, the admin gets the complete privilege

Our questionnaire included the following question, “Who handles these requests and how are they structured?”

“Requests are handled by the Corporate IT team, and as everyone has the same knowledge everyone handles the requests as they come in. This means the load can be properly delegated. No Tier levels are used in our case.”

Step III - Design & roll out in phases

Service Catalog design has a direct impact on the end user experience. Configure service item form to capture all necessary details. This process is usually supported by your service desk solution. Classify service items into different service categories and make it intuitive and visually appealing. Invest time in user experience and minimize the number of clicks and avoid long forms. Add relevant images to resonate well with your end users. Implement for one department and then extend to other departments.

About self-service adoption for raising service requests, one of our customers quoted,

“All of them is through the portal (except few from phone), creating tickets through email is blocked in our design. It doesn’t require any efforts since it’s the only way to the get the service ”

• Configure service item forms with a few fields
• Add visual elements like a shopping cart
• Add a service description - cost, availability, expected date of fulfillment
• Make them accessible via mobile app as well
• Take a phased approach in implementing Service Catalog across departments

Step IV - Automate the Workflow

Understand Service request workflows from the time of request placement until fulfillment. Identify the right teams and assign clear responsibilities. Most businesses follow service request approvals. Therefore, automate these workflows to improve efficiency. Establish a strong communication channel with other teams.

Upon asking some of our customers,

“What are all the other teams that the service request team interacts with?”
“Mainly Accounting but in some cases IT, Operations, and Information Security.”

This customer is using Service Catalog mainly to offer HR services.

“We interact with every team in the company: HR, Finance, Developers, Designers, you name them, and we have dealings with them, especially since we’re the backbone of a smoothly operating company of over 700 users.”

Service request automation use cases include:

• Automatic approval workflow that includes multi-stage approval
• Automatic provisioning or de-provisioning of common requests
• Creation of change requests based on service request type

Step V - Review the current

The current process needs to be reviewed based on end-user feedback. Review process helps in adding new items or updating existing service items. Monitor the performance based on KPIs such as the number of service requests received vs resolved, SLA consistency. Share the performance with management and continuously improve based on user expectation.

Here’s a best practice from our customers on setting up the Service Catalog process,

“Understanding the HR processes, identify the service items with their target audience, agreeing on the configuration related to each service, implement and use analyses for continual improvement.”

“We first came up with the services that we offer internally. Once that was decided, we structured the service catalog accordingly with updates to aid in the design and ease of use, since we will also use Freshservice for another team, we needed to do some customisation to separate both teams service categories/items in order to avoid user confusion. The customization included adding an extra menu item and hiding service categories based on the selected team services and ensuring that the tickets/service requests go to the proper team with automation.
We also conducted an internal study to check what processes can be automated, in order to reduce response time and increase team efficiency, and what services can be closed with a workflow without agent intervention, since the response and process is always the same or the user can just refer to a KB we created and uploaded on Freshservice.”