10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 3

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.

3. Help the customer help you!

End users don’t usually complain that they have to fill out service request forms in the first place – but they certainly don’t like having their request returned/rejected, or the service not delivered because the form wasn’t filled out correctly. The second biggest gripe is that they need to fill out too many forms with the same information to request what they view as one service.

Look at it from their perspective and you will see that they think in “whole experiences”, very much like ordering a “#1” at McDonald’s. Here are some key suggestions for making request forms easy-to-use:

• Use “English” in your form. Service request forms are hard to understand because they use technical language with which the user is not familiar. Design forms that ask simple questions in common business and consumer-oriented language.

• Design intelligent, interactive forms. Use look-ups and pick lists, with integration into existing systems to minimize entry errors and user frustration. If you can look up live data to pre-fill the form fields, it’s even better.

• Re-use common elements. Don’t ask the user to fill out the same information multiple times. Create a common dictionary and content system. While this is an obvious practice in large-scale software development, service request forms often don’t have common elements in a library that can be re-used.