What is service request management?

Service request management can be an effective solution for addressing, overseeing, monitoring and executing on requests. As such, it brings with it certain advantages for businesses:

Service request management incorporates clear, employee-friendly service catalogs. These catalogs not only give employees a comprehensive view of what services are available, they can also help manage user employee expectations by including relevant information, such as expected completion times and necessary resources. In these catalogs, every service follows a standardised format, simplifying the service request process.

Between submitting a service request and closing out the ticket, a lot can happen. Tracking capabilities within service request management ensure that everyone involved is fully up to date on the status of every ongoing request. Tracking can also take things further, by helping departments build and manage service targets based on historical data, improving the accuracy of time and cost estimates.

By their nature, service requests cannot exist in a vacuum; to be effectively addressed, they must be joined to the processes and fulfilment teams responsible for seeing them through to completion. Used correctly, service management transparently connects these essential points, to ensure efficient, cost-effective service delivery.

In ITIL, a service request follows a series of steps, including the following:

The service request management process begins when an employee reaches out to submit a service request. This step may be performed using a variety of media. Larger, more established organisations generally employ a service desk, customer and employee portals or mobile-powered apps to help streamline and document the submission process. That said, some companies instead rely on email, telephone or even social media to collect request submissions.

To correctly address a request, the recipient must first understand it. In this step, the relevant team or department assesses the request, determining how urgent it is, what resources or tools will be needed for fulfilment, and whether it requires supervisor approval or verification from IT, HR or the applicable business office. Assessment may require multiple employees or departments to participate.

With the request fully assessed, departments may now move on to fulfilment. Building off of the information and planning from the assessment phase, departments assign responsibilities, gather important contact information and establish estimated completion dates.

Once the request has been successfully fulfilled, the request ticket should be closed and archived. Additionally, organisations may wish to take the opportunity to review and evaluate the performance of the individuals, teams and departments involved in fulfilling the service request.

What constitutes fulfilled on the side of the service provider does not always equate to a fulfilling experience on the side of the service use. To help bring these two points into alignment, many organisations will choose to reach out and solicit feedback from the employee once the ticket has been closed. This can be useful not only in confirming that the request has been resolved, but also in demonstrating ongoing commitment to employee success.

Service request management can be a complex undertaking. Here, we outline the top priorities that service teams may wish to focus on:

Fulfilling on service requests can be a stressful, thankless job; service requests can easily exceed time-and-resource capacity, and unhappy employees may become agitated or combative when they believe that their requests are not being fulfilled promptly.

To offset these issues, make the wellbeing and development of service teams a top priority. Set aside regular times to review and workshop potential problems or concerns, and always be on the lookout for resources, support or training opportunities that may improve and strengthen these teams.

Businesses don’t want service requests coming in from a thousand different directions and employees certainly don’t want to have to deal with a collection of different service request routes specific to different departments or issues. Solve both concerns by centralising the request experience.

A unified, centralised portal, built for ease of use and accessibility, can significantly improve service request processes. Employees will be more satisfied knowing that whatever request they may have can be submitted through a familiar self-service portal. At the same time, fulfilment teams will enjoy the clarity and order of having all requests come from the same system.

The more layers that exist between the employee and the fulfilment team, the longer, more expensive and more complex the service activity becomes. Cut out any go-betweens that can be safely removed, and as much as possible move request fulfilment towards the front line. When employees and fulfilment can work with each other directly, the results are faster ticket resolution, simplified processes and decreased costs.

Self-service portals may be highly effective in bringing employees and fulfilment together. With easily available resources and knowledge-base articles, many issues may be resolved before a employee ever has to make a formal service request. Likewise, gathering relevant information early in the process can eliminate unnecessary steps further down the process.

In most cases, service request management includes many repetitive, low-effort, manual tasks. And while these tasks may be important for the fulfilment of the requests, they may also be time consuming and prone to human error. Automation is the solution, allowing service teams to reduce workloads, improve accuracy and more quickly move service requests towards completion. Use automation liberally throughout the request fulfilment process.