10 best practices for the service request catalog. Number 2

For the next two weeks, we are going to publish our 10 best practices for the service catalog request portal every single day.  Then they'll disappear for a two months (why?  because our book publisher is not entirely comfortable with giving away valuable articles.)  My recommendation?  Subscribe to this blog  with this icon   and you won't miss a thing.

2. Merchandise, sell and cross sell!

Your users are all familiar with e-commerce shopping sites: use that to your advantage. Market your services. Whether for installing a PC, granting access to a server, adding a report to an application, or setting up a new employee, all of these items should be in your Service Catalog.

Here are some recommendations for marketing these services:

• Use merchandise “bundling” to remove complexity. For example, a “New Engineer Setup” should include all the sub-services a new engineer needs to work, while “Move an Employee” will require coordination across a variety of different tasks in the right order.

• Don’t skimp on content. Explain the service and educate your consumer on exactly what they are getting. No one uses Amazon.com because of their part number system. It’s their integrated content experience with reviews, comments, and graphics that provide a context to help people order. This also improves ordering, reduces returns (complaints), and eliminates rework.

• Cross-sell. Using the Dell.com model for PC configuration, let them configure their service and submit a request with the options and service levels that they are entitled to – based on well-defined standardized service components. While it may sound counter-intuitive, cross-selling and promotion techniques ensure more complete requests that decrease the need for clarification call-backs. By helping the user understand his or her choices and all the optional elements the first time, you can reduce the need for additional approvals and multiple dispatches.

• IT services aren’t free. Define how your IT services are billed or allocated, and include that information in the Service Catalog. Let your users know that services come at a ‘price’, even if you don’t use chargebacks. By simply assigning a price to the request, you can regulate the consumption of expensive IT services.