IT service management (ITSM) is a crucial process that ensures the delivery of hardware and software-related IT services to internal or external clients. Freshservice makes this ITSM process efficient and affordable.
Your business’s information technology (IT) implementation strategy depends largely on how you execute, manage, and deliver IT for business needs. You must ensure that the right people, processes, and technology are in place for IT implementation.
This could feel overwhelming, especially for small, medium, and startup businesses. Thus, you need dedicated business software to assist your ITSM executive or team handle the projects. Freshservice is one such app on which you can bank upon.
What Is ITSM?
ITSM is the business process that oversees the delivery of IT as a service to the terminal consumer. The consumer could be your employees, business clients, or end users. The process creates a blueprint to include IT hardware, software, and how an IT representative must assist the customers in IT enablement.
Ordering a Wi-Fi router for the accounts department within a business could be the simplest example of an ITSM process. The department head will submit a request to the procurement team. The procurement team will forward the request to ITSM.
Now, the ITSM executive will research the router configuration, buy it through procurement, and configure it in the accounts department so the team can use Wi-Fi.
Why Do You Need ITSM for Managing IT Services?
You must set up an ITSM team if the business relies on IT a lot. Find below why you would need ITSM:
- Make the IT team efficient and cost-effective by aligning it with the business objectives and metrics
- Bring the development and IT team to one table for DevOps processes
- Let the IT team share its expertise with the rest of the business
- Continuously improve the IT enablement process in the business
- Minimize the cost of IT hardware and software procurement
- Make IT procurement efficient by procuring objectively
- Make the IT team accountable for incoming tasks via tickets and documentation
- Improve the IT services team and make it customer-oriented
- Prevent major incidents that disable IT systems
- The IT technicians become agile in responding to major incidents
Use Cases of ITSM
ITSM creates an organized and streamlined IT services delivery system across the business, either for internal or external customers. Find below its major use cases:
Systematic Service Requests
ITSM helps your business create a documented ticketing system for IT procurements, repairs, installations, etc. Thus, the IT services facilitation team does not miss any service requests. Also, you can measure the performance of the IT team.
Creating an IT Knowledge Base
IT service management process also helps you to develop and manage a knowledge base. IT customer service and internal employee services teams can use this knowledge base to assist customers and employees.
Managing IT Hardware and Software
Being an IT business, you do not just need to procure IT software and hardware. You also need to ensure that your organization is using these well and bringing in profitable revenue.
The ITSM team or executive will ensure proper tracking of all business machines and apps. The team will also oversee the installation, upgrading, troubleshooting, and utilization tracking of such intangible or tangible business assets.
How Freshservice Can Help ITSM
ITSM is essential for modern businesses that utilize IT to make profits. But that does not mean ITSM should be a costly and time-consuming process. Freshservice ensures that your ITSM team or manager stays on top of every IT project and customer service request by utilizing a simple but robust business app.
It has many features to support your ITSM process. I’ll explain those to you in a bit. However, you must take a look at the following ITSM core activities that Freshservice solves instantly:
- Freshservice helps you build an AI-powered knowledge base. The knowledge base updates itself with the help of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, you can focus on enabling ITSM agents to access the knowledge base to resolve client queries quickly and accurately.
- The Freshservice ITSM AI assigns tickets automatically to the agents. Agents do not need to spend time reviewing tasks according to their skills. The AI does it for them.
- Freshservice can help you create an easy and affordable change management process to upgrade your business’s IT hardware and software according to the market dynamics.
- The Freshservice ITSM AI can differentiate between an incident and a service ticket without human intervention. It scans the entire ITSM service database to find similar tickets and learns from them. Thus, your ITSM team can quickly determine if they are responding to an incident or regular service request.
- The ITSM tool of Freshservice helps you to create automated replies to customer queries and assign customers to live agents when necessary.
What Is Freshservice?
Freshservice is an IT help desk and IT service management web app that enables you to process IT operations tickets faster and affordably. You can create a self-service system for IT troubleshooting, a ticketing system, and a knowledge base for ITSM frontline agents.
The cloud app also offers a mobile application for Android and iOS devices. Thus, IT administrators can service requests from anywhere with an internet connection.
Freshservice also provides ITIL-ready software modules that help IT administrators manage IT assets, issues, incidents, updates, change planning, and releases.
The information technology asset management (ITAM) component helps businesses exercise control over their IT software and hardware. All IT assets can be tagged, added, delinked, tracked, etc., to ensure asset awareness and visibility.
Moreover, the ITSM tool offers a gamification function called “Arcade”. This feature enables frontline IT agents to resolve IT tickets like gaming and getting performance scores.
Features of Freshservice
There are ample features for IT help desk and services management on Freshservice. But the followings are the important and must-have functionalities that you must know:
Incident Management
Its automated and AI tools enable technicians to immediately find out incident root causes. The app also brings all the knowledge bases and software tools the technicians might need to address incidents.
Consumer-Centric Service
Freshservice ITSM software helps you to create a value chain in the customer ticket system and make happy customers. Customers can use self-service portals for minor bugs and issues. For major issues, the AI tool automatically assigns a support technician who can resolve the ticket faster than others.
Knowledge Management
It creates a robust knowledge base for your business by integrating internal content management systems, third-party content, public content, and so on. Also, it intelligently shields the confidential knowledge base from the public-facing portals for self-service.
Problem Management
The tool can isolate customer issues and link those to existing or previous incidents. It can also perform root cause analyses of issues with Freshservice’s timeline of events. Finally, detecting issues faster helps you to minimize IT downtimes in the business.
Unified Service Catalog
You can effortlessly deploy extensible and powerful workflows that guarantee speedy service delivery. This includes everything as simple as password recovery to as complex as new technical positions or manager hiring and onboarding.
Change Management
Whenever your business needs to change its operations, DevOps, and other departments, you can rely on Freshservice for affordable and flawless change management. The tool ensures that your ITSM manager has enough tools and workflows to make the transition smooth.
Workload Management
Freshservice’s AI workload analysis and management enables you to utilize the workday of your ITSM team in the best possible way without exhausting the workforce. Its underlying algorithm constantly evaluates the tasks of individual agents, support tiers, and managers. It balances the workload so that the entire team stays energized and happy.
Release Management
You can plan new hardware and software releases effortlessly on Freshservice. Its dedicated Release Management utility offers functionalities like announcements, building documentation, creating a release start date, setting a new release implementation deadline, and more.
Advantages of Freshservice
Find below the benefits of using Freshservice as your organization’s ITSM tool:
- Freshservice eliminates the need for your ITSM team to get busy with many apps and tools to manage IT help desk and service delivery tasks. This all-in-one tool is all you need to manage small to enterprise-level ITSM projects.
- All of its subscriptions come with the mobile app access feature. Thus, ITSM managers and agents can do their work from anywhere.
- You can create different support portals for different industries and control all the platforms from one application in the backend.
- Integrate with Microsoft 365 apps like Teams for businesses that work in a Microsoft 365 environment.
- Fully cloud-based app. No need to install any apps on your business workstations.
- Affordable when compared with Freshservice alternatives.
Alternatives to Freshservice
Look at these Freshservice alternatives if you wish to know about more ITSM tools before getting one:
#1. Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management makes IT service management transparent, visible, and collaborative. You can connect IT help desk issues with other Jira tools and third-party business apps. There is an option to connect DevOps with ITSM to continuously improve IT service delivery.
The tool comes with various service management templates that your business might need. Thus, you can put the app to use and earn revenue from the very first date without wasting time on setup and learning.
#2. Salesforce
The Salesforce Service Cloud is suitable for IT businesses that somehow deal with or need field IT servicing, contact centers, employee/customer self-service platforms, etc. The service management tool can link other contact center tools and services like wireless telephony, wired telephony, chat, and emailing.
Its notable IT help desk and service management toolset includes case management, automation, guided workflow, AI, remote assistance, etc.
Wrapping Up
Choosing an ITSM tool for the IT help desk and IT services management could be overwhelming with all the available software. However, if you want to try competent and potential ITSM software, definitely try out Freshservice. You already know various features from above. You just need to kickstart a sample ITSM project in this app for free using the trial offer.
You may also explore some best IT helpdesk solutions for small to big businesses.
