What Is a Service Request?
A service request may be defined as a formal request that a client or an employee of the client makes, asking a service provider to provide them with something that would be useful in the business’s day-to-day operations. In other words, a service request is typically raised to procure something you didn’t have to begin with.
An Example of a Service Request
There are numerous kinds of service requests a user can raise. These could include simple requests for advice, approval or information. A user might also raise service requests to access printers, reimburse expenses, reset passwords or upgrade to a newer version of software.
Usually, service requests have a high probability of involving standard or pre-approved changes. For instance, a company may have a policy to provide employees with extra storage space when they run out.
In this case, an employee may raise a service request for extra memory, which is a standard, pre-approved change that does not require a long process of perusal and approval.
What Is Service Request Management?
Effective management of service requests is imperative for maintaining team efficiency and ensuring business success. Service request management involves the processes and tools that provide all the departments within an organization (e.g., compliance, IT, marketing, finance and human resources) with a self-service platform to accept, keep track of, respond to and close a variety of service requests from customers, employees and external vendors.
Service request management streamlines the aforementioned processes, especially when it is configured to behave in a manner that aligns with organizational needs. Service request management enables users to submit service requests, assign responsibility for requests and track their status from the time they are submitted to the time they are closed.
What Are the Main Steps in Service Request Management?
Let’s look at the various steps involved in the service request management process:
- A user submits a service request from your service management portal.
- The service request is assigned to a service desk agent from the IT service team.
- The agent assesses the request based on the standard qualification and approval processes. If required, they might forward the service request for business or financial approval.
- The service desk agent either processes the request or sends it across to the relevant team.
- Once the service request is resolved, the agent closes the ticket and follows up with the customer to ensure that they are satisfied with the resolution.
What Is the Difference Between Service Request Management and Incident Management?
Often confused with each other, incident management and service request management are starkly different concepts. While a service request is a user request to procure access to something they need for their day-to-day operations, an incident can be defined as an unplanned or unanticipated error or disruption in IT service delivery or a considerable reduction in the quality of IT service. Examples of incidents include a server outage, laptop not starting or broken printer.
As mentioned previously, service request management consists of the processes and tools required to manage service requests from internal and external users. However, incident management is targeted towards restoring services after an interruption, with minimum downtime. Incident management ensures that there is minimum loss of business efficiency and productivity and quality of service delivery is maintained.
What Is the Purpose of Service Request Management?
The global market for service request management solutions is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate during the forecast period 2021 to 2027. Some key reasons why effective service request management is business-critical include:
- Maintaining business productivity and efficiency at all times
- Ensuring minimum downtime and business interruption
- Alleviating day-to-day workload on IT teams
- Reducing impacts or risks of having malfunctioning or inadequate services and processes
- Improving service delivery and ensuring customer satisfaction
Service Request Management Best Practices
Service request management makes it easy to ask for help with simple self-service, provide answers with knowledge base suggestions and streamline request fulfillment to deliver optimum service. In light of that, there are a few things that IT service teams should be prioritizing.
Service request management helps streamline request processing for delivering optimum service and minimizing downtime. As such, we’ve put together some best practices that will help improve your service request management and make it more efficient. Read on.
- Automating self-service can significantly reduce the workload on your IT team and free up time for your service desk agents to focus on more strategic tasks. For instance, automating follow-up communication with users can help save time that your agents spend in responding to customers, keep customers updated with estimated resolution time and improve customer experience.
- Make sure to automate and standardize the approval process where possible. For example, any service request for a new monitor will be pre-approved and also automatically processed. This will save time on repetitive tasks and unnecessary additional formalities.
- To make self-service more efficient, you must integrate knowledge, provide customers with easy access to the knowledge base and redirect service tickets to easily searchable knowledge base articles. This will help make the self-service experience easier and more fulfilling for your customers.
- Focus on your most popular service request and build from there based on feedback and usage. Create a self-service catalog based on what your users are looking for to provide them with an efficient customer service experience.
Support Service Request Management With Kaseya
Kaseya BMS provides the software you need to run your business more efficiently at a fraction of the cost. With Kaseya BMS, you can easily create, manage and resolve all your service requests and tickets and keep your customers happy.
Seamless integration across Kaseya BMS, Kaseya VSA and IT Glue enables you to optimize your daily IT operations with 30% fewer tickets that are resolved 40% faster, saving you time and money in a way no other solution can.
Want to know more about Kaseya BMS? Contact us now!
