10 best practices for the service request catalog. Number 4

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4. People love UPS tracking! Use it to reduce help calls by 30 - 50%.

The single biggest frustration for your customers is that they don’t know what is going on, when their request is going to be fulfilled, and what needs to happen to get their service.

Deal with this problem and people will think you are a service star (and reduce calls to the help desk by 30-50%). Not being able to predict delivery timeframes and not knowing the status causes frustration and creates direct economic costs in the form of back-and-forth status calls, over-ordering, emergency expenditures and maverick service requests. Without clear dates, commitments, and valid status, end users are forced to wait – impacting their productivity.

Here are some tips for status tracking:

• Provide visibility for all processes. Like UPS, you should provide insight throughout the service request cycle. This means you need visibility to your authorization process, your delivery process, your outsourced processes, and your cross-system processes. This is achievable today by using Service Catalog software with a modern enterprise integration framework.

• Use rich e-mails. People love to be in control. The right e-mail, at the right moment, with the proper information, formatted professionally, let’s them know you are in control, and their request is under control.

• Provide a “receipt” not just a tracking number. A web page for ordering services is not sufficient if the customer has no meaningful record of their request, the services ordered and the dates expected.