What is ITSM? A guide to IT Service Management

What is ITSM?

Implementing IT Service Management (ITSM) is an excellent way to optimize your IT services and ultimately increase your profitability. When your IT services are optimized within your business, you’ll deliver a better experience to your customers. When you have a high customer satisfaction rate, your business will be more successful.

This sounds great, but what is ITSM, exactly? In this article, you’ll learn how next-gen ITSM supports your business, and how to implement it within your company.

What is ITSM? (IT Service Management Defenition)

ITSM stands for IT Service Management, which is a holistic approach to optimizing IT services that impact customers. In other words, ITSM streamlines the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers, emphasizing continual improvements to maximize customer satisfaction.

Think of ITSM as “IT as a service” that encompasses everything, including the services used to manage your IT services. In essence, anything that even remotely impacts your IT services is included in IT Service management.
Ultimately, ITSM aligns an IT service team’s objectives with your overall business objectives to ensure their actions align with your business’s mission.

What does the ITSM framework look like?

A strong ITSM framework begins with sharply defined roles and responsibilities for every position in every department that deals with IT services. When everyone knows exactly what their roles are and what’s expected, productivity naturally increases.

Since IT tasks and systems are spread throughout your entire organization, implementing ITSM company-wide is key. For this, you’ll want to use internal help desk software.

ITSM is best supported by internal help desk software

Managing all of your IT systems manually will present some large challenges. For instance, as your company grows, so will the number of IT systems you need to run your business, therefore the cost to manage your IT systems will perpetually increase over time.

Using an internal help desk system will put a stop to this by drastically reducing the time your team spends managing IT systems and freeing them up for more important tasks.

Here’s how help desk software can help your IT processes:

When employees have IT-related issues and they contact the IT team directly, it’s usually through email. Your IT team is likely being bombarded with emails about tech issues, and it’s not easy to manage support requests this way. Keeping track of email requests is exhausting and time-consuming, and requests will slip through the cracks.

Help desk software rounds up all support requests into one central location that’s accessible by your entire IT team. When a ticket is submitted, it gets routed either to a specific person or lands in the general queue where the first available team member will handle the request.

However, if that person goes on vacation or steps out of the office, anyone else can step in to continue assisting the person who needed help.

So, what kind of support requests would employees make through an internal help desk? One of the most common scenarios is when someone needs a new device, like a laptop or printer. They’ll open a ticket with all the necessary information and the system will route the ticket to the right person. This could be your HR manager or the IT supervisor.

The same type of scenario applies to employees working in your server room. Say a server tech needs some new Ethernet cables. Instead of having them manually fill out a purchase request form, they can submit a ticket through your internal help desk system, which will make the status of their request easier to track. The employee can check in at any time, make updates, or close the request if necessary.

Seven ways ITSM supports your business

 If you haven’t already done so, here’s why you should consider implementing ITSM in your business.

1. ITSM supports customer satisfaction

High customer satisfaction is the key to profitability in any industry. ITSM will help you improve customer satisfaction by streamlining and organizing all of your IT processes that impact your customers. This includes back-end processes as well as front-end processes like customer service.

Customer service plays a central role in determining customer satisfaction. In fact, according to studies, amazing customer service is more important than ever before. About 90% of today’s consumers choose to do business with brands based on how well they focus on their customers’ needs. They want to know they’ll be taken care of in the future beyond their initial purchase.

Great customer service also affects your revenue. According to data sourced by Help Scout, 68% of consumers will pay more for products and services if the brand has a reputation for providing good customer service.

Support your customer service team with an internal help desk

No customer support team is perfect; there is always room for improvement. One of the best ways to strengthen your customer service is to employ ITSM throughout your organization with a focus on supporting your customer service team.

Your customer support team needs support, too. They will run into obstacles, setbacks, and issues that need to be resolved before they can continue providing support to your customers. Implementing ITSM through an internal help desk ticketing system will give them everything they need to stay on top of supporting your customers.

For instance, say a customer service representative runs into a question they can’t answer and nobody else on the team knows the answer. They can submit a ticket through the internal help desk and get help from the right person or department. This process, in turn, will speed up the time it takes for them to help customers. Quickly resolving customer issues is how you create satisfied customers.

2. ITSM lowers costs

When you can get a handle on your IT processes, you’ll lower your costs by improving workflows and derive better ITSM ROI. Automation plays an especially important role in streamlining workflows because it removes the redundancies that typically waste time.

For example, internal help desk software can automatically route new tickets to specific departments based on form field input or keywords within the content. This means your team doesn’t need to manually route all of your tickets, which reduces the number of payroll dollars you’ll spend having your team perform tedious tasks.

Of course, generating a faster response time also plays a role in lowering costs because you can resolve issues before they become a larger problem.

3. ITSM increases productivity

ITSM in the form of internal help desk software has the power to drastically increase productivity throughout your organization. There are two factors that give it this power:

  • Automation routes tickets to the right department, ensuring a timely response from the right person.
  • Integrating knowledge base articles into the automation process provides teams with self-help options that are often faster than waiting for someone to answer a ticket.

When you provide your customer support team with self-service options, you empower them to get answers faster than making them wait for an email reply or a returned phone call. When your support team gets fast answers, everyone benefits and productivity rises because they can help more customers faster.

Although self-service was once considered less-than-friendly, it’s actually king today. Today’s consumers prefer self-help options over talking to live support. In fact, a whopping 69% of consumers troubleshoot issues on their own before reaching out for support and 67% prefer self-service over interacting with a live representative.

If you’re worried about making your support teams find their own answers, don’t worry, because that’s exactly what works best for most people.

4. ITSM improves employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is just as important as customer satisfaction. You need to keep your teams engaged and happy in order to have long-term, loyal employees. Truth be told, employees can become bitter and frustrated when internal systems don’t work, or in the total absence of systems.

When you implement IT Service Management throughout your company, your employees will feel happier simply because things will flow. Their work will become easier, they’ll find quick answers, resolve problems easier, and they won’t be hindered by random, avoidable breakdowns. This touches on the next point…

5. ITSM prevents avoidable breakdowns

When your IT processes are well-managed, you’ll have fewer technical breakdowns that impede your ability to serve your customers.

Part of ensuring your customers receive the best experience requires streamlining all of your business activities that impact your IT services. For example, your IT support team can’t function without a working computer, so you need a smooth process for ensuring their devices stay virus-free and functional.

ITSM processes aren’t always this simple, however. Sometimes, you need ITSM to manage more complex situations like coordinating moving data between servers while keeping your company’s network and website online the entire time.

There are an infinite number of breakdowns that can occur each day, and ITSM can help prevent a large number simply by putting systems into place that resolve issues as they arise.

6. AI-powered ITSM handles mundane tasks

Wasted time is wasted money. Deploying AI-powered ITSM solutions in your organization can save you money by taking over all the mundane tasks that don’t require live human input. For instance, businesses use AI-powered help desk software to complete the following tasks:

  • Password reset requests
  • Granting VPN access
  • Setting up two-factor authentication
  • Onboarding tasks
  • Offboarding tasks
  • Procuring devices, like laptops and printers
  • Handling common security incidents
  • And more

Almost any basic task can be automated by programming your help desk software with conditional triggers. When specific conditions are met, the application will perform set actions.

7. ITSM can predict needs and problems

There is power in predictive intelligence, and you can tap into this power by using internal help desk software powered by artificial intelligence. A help desk is just one form of ITSM, but it happens to be exceptionally powerful.

An AITSM system can actually predict potential problems before anyone becomes aware there’s a problem. For instance, the software can detect anomalous behavior across various IT systems and alert your team before there’s an incident.

Predicting potential incidents, including possible breakdowns, gives you the upper hand in guarding productivity. This is just one of many ways preventable, but catastrophic IT breakdowns are prevented.

Our internal help desk system is an excellent ITSM tool

If you’re ready to implement an ITSM internal help desk ticketing system within your business, we have what you need. Our AI-powered digital help desk solution is perfect for businesses that need to manage and streamline internal support requests from employees.

Help desk software has been around for decades, and both AI and automation have only made it better. If you haven’t implemented an internal help desk solution for your teams, it’s time to consider making the move. IT systems are becoming more complex and as long as they exist across multiple departments, you need to get a handle on managing those systems.

The Aisera AISM service management platform is exactly what you need to support your team in creating satisfied customers, a positive brand reputation, and higher revenue. See Aisera in action by scheduling a free demo today!

Additional Resources