Enterprise Service Management, acronym as ESM, is the extension of IT service management. It helps organizations manage different business areas efficiently, like human resources, legal, security, marketing, and finance. All departments in an organization can leverage the power of ESM to improve performance, efficiency, and service delivery.
In a nutshell, ESM mirrors IT service management (ITSM) capabilities and applies them to the entire enterprise.
Importance of Enterprise Service Management
The software facilitates seamless communication between the customer (usually an employee) and the service desk (IT department) by creating trackable tickets and using an approved set of best practices. ESM aims to empower enterprises with the ability to deliver and manage services for employees.
Here are some benefits of ESM:
- Increase efficiency and reduce operational cost
- Improve ROI on a corporate ITSM solution
- Maximize self-service efficiencies
- Improve communication and coordination across departments
- Improve governance within the organization
- Helps to deliver a better customer experience
- Promote standardization within the organization
Tips To Get Started With Enterprise Service Management
Choose a growing department
You can start by selecting a department that welcomes experimentation and allow you to run the project.
The department managers should be open to take risks and handle uncertainties that are followed with testing new technology and practices. The team should possess the confidence to move ESM forward.
It is practical to apply ESM to one area of the business instead of the whole enterprise. The experience from one department will help others tackle more difficult ESM challenges and utilize the technology to capture competitive opportunities and make the best out of them.
Manage different request fulfillment workflows
HR is one department in an organization that handles multiple requests from both internal and external people. The software, when applied in the department, can help them handle more frequent HR requests. The ESM will instrument a basic chatbot script that looks for answers or submits simple requests.
Other corporate areas to consider are internal catering services, facilities, or any internal support that gets and processes requests from another area of an organization.
The software:
- Logs and tracks a request
- Closes the ticket (after the completion of work)
- Delivers regular reports
It helps you replace hours of manual workflows, having more likelihood of requests being lost, forgotten, or misdirected. With the software in place, you can improve accountability, speed, and customer satisfaction.
Pick projects with the limited risk involved
Don’t hop directly on workflows that directly involve your customers. Start with smaller, internal processes that will help you learn and optimize things as per results.
Customer-facing workflows involve more risks, and a single mistake can even damage your brand reputation. Therefore, it’s better not to experiment with sales and financial departments during the initial projects.
Always remember that your whole organization is learning to see service management as a reliable alternative, and each successful project will build more credibility across the company. Limiting the exposure to risk at an early stage will simplify things.
Launch fast
Initially, don’t pick projects that may take six months or a year to finish. Think in terms of short, quick monotonous work. Something you can complete in a maximum time of 2 months and acquire measurable results. Even if you pick something big, try to break it into phases and ensure that each phase, especially the first one, can be completed quickly
Use of already available tools
Here are some tools that you can use with ESM:
- Ability to predefined models
- Escalation/alerting
- Workflow definition and automation
- Queue management
- Performance reporting
- Service portfolio support
- Service request catalog support
If you have existing ITSM tools, it would be a smart move to use them for ESM.
Do something that you can measure
ESM makes operations within the organization better, faster, and cheaper, and to prove that you must select a project with the metrics. Choose a project that can benefit a business in measurable ways, such as decreased operational costs, increased speed, better efficiency of user self-service, etc.
Remember to collect all the relevant “before” metrics to show the growth later. The metrics will represent how ESM has made something better, agile, and cost-effective. Track the following things:
- Average response time for incoming requests
- Ratings of employee satisfaction
- Average completion time for each service request
- Average daily requests handled per employee
- Service volumes
- Customer feedback and satisfaction scores
Data is the language that can earn the trust of the business.
Parting Thoughts | enterprise service management
Once you have completed a project and get measurable results, you can apply the enterprise asset management across other departments. The software will help teams within the organization gain the power of automation and deliver improved customer satisfaction. This will help the business achieve growth and success in the long run and competitive advantage.
We hope that the article has provided you with enough tips to get started with enterprise service management. So, don’t wait and get started and if any issue occurs, feel free to discuss it in the comments section.
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