Service Catalog provides a great opportunity to improve employee experience and efficiency in service provisioning. But when you’re trying to deliver a consumer-grade experience, it can be hard to design the most efficient workflows to resolve requests. And the definition of the “perfect” catalog experience can keep shifting, as employee expectations and business needs evolve.
Our research has found four pitfalls that are common when designing your service catalog – along with, best-practice solutions to get to both efficiency and a great employee experience.
Pitfall 1: When the design process is unstructured — Design is critical to a great service catalog, but many organizations underinvest in creating a structured process for service catalog design and maintenance decisions. As a result, the service catalog quickly fails to meet its intended objectives.
Solution: Create a design team that focuses on understanding user needs and expectations, define measures of success for your service catalog that align with the strategic objectives of your ServiceNow implementation, and plan your approach to apply and scale the new design.
Pitfall 2: When the service catalog structure is too complex and deep—Many organizations have catalogs with either too many categories—often as many as 100—or too many hierarchy levels that employees have to navigate to find what they need. And without simple, intuitive terms that employees understand, search and navigation filters can ineffective in helping employees find what they need.
Solution: Aim for no more than 10 top-level categories and a 3-step hierarchy (top‑level category > subcategory > catalog item). Include information that is written in ‘employee voice’ and focused on helping users make informed decisions.
Pitfall 3: When you have multiple, complex workflows to fulfill individual requests—To meet go‑live deadlines, organizations often don’t re‑engineer or simplify their existing fulfillment processes before implementing them on ServiceNow. Some define new workflows for each catalog item, resulting in too much complexity. Because of this, they can struggle to maintain their catalog or diagnose breakpoints in request management processes.
Solution: Design standard workflows for catalog items with similar fulfillment processes. To do this, you need to remove redundancies in your current processes, automate manual steps, and enforce good process design discipline with your fulfillers.
Pitfall 4: When you lack a clear catalog maintenance process—Many organizations don’t have a service catalog maintenance process in place for making timely updates. They frequently call on the catalog manager to make ad hoc changes without a clear mechanism to identify, prioritize, or prevent issues.
Solution: Create a process to allow selected individuals (such as service owners) to make incremental, minor fixes at the catalog item-level on an ongoing basis (use catalog editor role and item designer functionality on the Now Platform). You should track metrics (such as # of stagnant items, # of approvals with 100% approval rates) that help diagnose opportunities to proactively make design changes at the catalog level.
Download our Success Playbook, design a world-class service catalog available on the Customer Success Center, or listen to our webinar to put these solutions into practice.
Pooja Gupta, Research Manager, Best Practices Center of Excellence – Customers Success at ServiceNow
