How to improve your IT team’s service request management

IT teams are tasked with some of the most important and mission-critical jobs in business today, but they’re also required to handle myriad help requests from users. Whether it’s changing a password, setting up a remote working solution, or updating software applications, IT teams must juggle day-to-day tasks with the big picture initiatives that drive their organizations forward.

How do IT teams focus on what matters most, even while employees’ reliance on technology grows? The key is to automate or eliminate as many service requests as possible while staying on top of those that remain. In other words, it means improving service request management.

What is service request management?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) classifies the many customer requests that IT teams have to deal with as service requests. These include password resets, software updates, and user access permissions, among many others.

Service request management is the process by which IT teams handle these customer requests. The vast majority of service requests are recurring, so IT teams typically follow a repeatable process to handle them.

Why improve service request management?

Even if you think your service request management solution is particularly rigorous, thorough, and efficient, there’s always room for improvement. And there are plenty of benefits when IT teams go the extra mile.

One common goal for IT teams is to create a significant improvement in the customer experience. Whether the end user is a customer or an employee, fulfilling their requests quickly is the best way for your IT team to deliver an exceptional experience while ensuring they have time to deal with all of the other issues they have to address.

Service requests are just one small part of an IT team’s job, after all. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for recurring service requests to overrun the department and eat into time better spent on IT initiatives that directly contribute to the company’s growth. By automating as many of these tasks as possible, the IT team will be free to do the work you hired them to do in the first place.

How can you improve service request management?

Improving your service request management shouldn’t be a daunting process. Here are some ways to get started today.

• Create a knowledge base. An online knowledge base that allows users to search for solutions to issues they’re having can reduce the number of service requests IT teams receive and improve the experience of end users looking for a quick fix.

  Think about prioritizing various topics to cover based on the frequency of service requests you get: the more common the request, the sooner you should add an entry to the knowledge base. Users won’t be able to resolve all of their issues themselves, but this approach will reduce the number of the most basic requests.

• Create standard operating procedures (SOPs). SOPs define the steps IT teams should take to deal with each specific request in order to standardize, systematize, and streamline those procedures. If you document each procedure effectively, even the most junior employees will be able to take care of complex requests, leaving senior IT staff free to focus on big picture initiatives.
• Use a service request management platform. These platforms offer a comprehensive solution for IT teams who want to streamline service request management as much as possible — and have the budget to support that goal.

While these platforms tend to be expensive, they can help IT departments automate even the most complex requests. For instance, IT teams can build automated workflows in these platforms to route requests for software updates or security access from users across the company. These tools can even alert IT teams to issues in their service request management process before they affect end users.

How can Jotform help?

Jotform is another solution for busy IT teams looking for ways to automate the collection and approval of service requests. Jotform’s request and work request forms offer a fast and easy way for users to submit their requests to the IT department, all of which your team can store, sort, and check off in a Jotform table.

IT teams looking to remove as many manual processes as possible can use Jotform’s approval flow templates. With Jotform Approvals, you can build an automated workflow that makes sure your team members have all of the necessary information before they take action on a request and automatically notifies users at every step of the process.

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash