How to develop great Customer Focussed Catalog Categories

[JStreeter]

Hello, 

First time poster here. Our ServiceNow Catalog Categories are a bit of a mess and we are seeking to redo the lot so they make more sense to our internal customers. Our services cover HR, IT, Business Administration Services, Finance, Facilities and Property Mgt. I've read the ServiceNow guidance document 'ServiceNow Design a world class service catalog' and distilled the key points relevant to our task at hand (see below). I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to approach the naming of categories, layers and grouping of items within categories. Would love to learn from others experience!

Thanks 

• 6 – 10 top level customer driven categories that cover most request
• Identifying the right set of categories at the right level is a big pain point in service catalog design.
• Simple customer focussed language
• Your service catalog request structure must:
• Be easy to navigate
• Use simple, customer-focused language
• Include the information that drives decision-making and builds transparency
• Many organizations create categories based on the different teams, groups, or functions that fulfill or own the service request. This leads to categories that don’t necessarily make sense to the customer and make it harder to scale the catalog.
• Instead, create six to ten top-level categories based on how your customers think of their needs.
• You can expect to have some categories specific to your organization
• You might have specific catalog items called out at the category level based on demand or transaction volume.
• Define a three-step catalog hierarchy After you have the top-level categories defined, define the right depth in each category. Once again, having six to ten subcategories under each top-level category is ideal.
• Aim for no more than a three-step hierarchy: top-level category > subcategory > catalog item.
• Be conservative in the number of categories you use (no more than ten). And ensure you have no more than three steps to an individual catalog item’s hierarchy.
• You can place a catalog item in multiple categories. Your goal is to make it easy for customers to reach the catalog item, and different customers may have different paths to reach the same catalog item.
• For catalog items that don’t logically align with any top-level category, create an “other” category.
• Tailor your terminology to incorporate customer language
• Take a focus group approach to work directly with customers and come up with the right terminology for the categories in your service catalog. Also, identify the different terms that different customers use to refer to a given catalog item or category.

[KimMel Briscoe]

Hello @JStreeter,

The ServiceNow guidance list looks like a good best practice. The high-level categories you mentioned look like a great start. Depending on your organizational culture the categories may require different groupings based on popularity of the requests or based on the support/fulfillment teams.  

The key points of the service catalog structure listed:

• Use simple, customer-focused language
• Aim for no more than a three-step hierarchy: top-level category > subcategory > catalog item.
• You can place a catalog item in multiple categories. Your goal is to make it easy for customers to reach the catalog item, and different customers may have different paths to reach the same catalog item.
• Tailor your terminology to incorporate customer language

The one point I do not necessarily agree with:

• For catalog items that don’t logically align with any top-level category, create an “other” category.

Many catalog items many end up in the 'other' category and will be difficult for the customer to search. 

Good luck with restructuring your self-service catalog!