You made a significant investment in a service management solution. You hired the best service management professionals and engineers to make your project successful. You even engaged a partner to accelerate your implementation project. When you subscribed to the service, you planned to leverage several capabilities to realize your business objectives. After the new solution is implemented, how do you know how well your organization is using it?

IT leaders want to align their IT organizations with best practices. They realize that the cloud saves costs. Many have chosen SaaS solutions to fulfill their service management needs. Others either have a project in flight or have one on their roadmap. All of them want to realize value out of their investments in service management cloud solutions. They may have a dashboard that shows them their key performance indicators across the entire service management spectrum. However, service managers, the ones who are measured on achieving service management goals, do not have any means of demonstrating how they are using the service management solution. What they need is a dashboard to show how they perform in various areas of the product.

Another factor that influences choosing SaaS over on-premise is the sheer pace of innovations delivered in SaaS solutions. SaaS products often deliver several major releases a year. The continual stream of value delivered by the service management solution benefits organizations only to the extent to which they leverage the capabilities. Every major release is packed with capabilities that enable organizations to have a superior experience, improve efficiencies, have granular visibility into IT assets, and reduce costs. Yet many organizations are simply unaware of the new capabilities and the value these capabilities can bring to their organizations in fulfilling the very goals for which the solutions were purchased. Adoption of product capabilities is often a limiting factor for IT organizations to get returns out of their investments.

You do not have to leverage every feature set in the product. However, you certainly want to leverage the ones that align with your goals. If service managers could measure their adoption of the various capabilities on a dashboard, they would have the necessary insights to increase the maturity of their service management organizations by adopting relevant capabilities. Of course, the adoption of new features alone does not help in realizing goals; making business process changes is often just as necessary. IT organizations can make adoption of capabilities coupled with the necessary business process changes an integral part of their continual service improvement initiatives. Unfortunately, most service management solutions lack such a dashboard.

BMC Helix Remedyforce is a service management solution designed to address the needs of modern, fast-paced organizations in the mid-market. With Remedyforce, organizations realize value within weeks, rather than wait for months with other solutions. It is deployed on the Salesforce platform, the leading cloud platform for scalability, security, and availability. Remedyforce upgrades are automated and smooth, with no loss of custom configurations and no downtime. In a recent release, Remedyforce Value Adoption Dashboard has been launched. This dashboard allows service managers to measure their adoption of Remedyforce across several areas of the product. This enables them to draw plans to leverage innovations delivered in the product with every release to improve staff productivity, grow self-service adoption, and have quality asset data. As their adoption of capabilities crosses certain thresholds, they are granted badges that signify their expertise in the solution. The badges can be shared on public social networks, giving them an opportunity to earn recognition for their accomplishments.

Mid- and large-sized IT support organizations typically have high volumes of tickets. In order to respond to tickets quickly and efficiently, it is extremely important to assign tickets to the right support personnel. This enables the support organization to meet service level agreements and resolve tickets to the satisfaction of end-users.

Routing tickets to a Service Desk that manually reassigns them to appropriate support teams is a slow, inefficient, and error-prone strategy, yet it is still prevalent in many organizations. Many IT organizations have service desks that work 16-24 hours a day in two to three shifts, including on weekends, for timely response to tickets in the end-user’s time zone.

Delays in assignment to the right personnel lead to delays in resolution. Being contacted by multiple support agents until the team who can actually solve the issue is identified is frustrating for end-users. Once a support team knows that they do not have the necessary skills, they may not have a sense of urgency when reassigning the ticket to a team that does, which delays resolution. In some cases, the ticket may inadvertently be reassigned to the wrong support team, further exacerbating the delay. This approach simply does not scale, and all of these issues are common sources of customer dissatisfaction and missed service targets.

End-users are pleasantly surprised when, within minutes of reporting an issue, a support agent who can quickly understand the issue calls to serve them successfully. Automating ticket routing can make this ‘aha moment’ possible.

Tickets assigned to a team must further be assigned to team members. Typically, team members either manually self-assign tickets, or a “gatekeeper” in the team—often a team lead—must distribute tickets as they are received. Either approach is mundane, and for high-volume environments, inefficient. The cumulative cost of this activity over the course of an entire year can be mind-boggling.

The new approach in digital enterprises is real-time, automated routing. Ticket attributes can be used intelligently to route the ticket to the appropriate support team. Attributes of tickets, such as category and priority, can be used for automatic routing to the team that has the necessary skills. This is where quality of data is of paramount importance. Bad or insufficient data will almost certainly lead to routing to the wrong team.

Round robin assignment can automate the task of automatically assigning the ticket to a team member. This approach works well for teams that have multiple levels of support, with level one support agents being assigned new tickets at random. Such automation relieves the agents of the need to monitor queues for new tickets, allowing them to focus on tickets automatically assigned to them by the ITSM system. This approach is scalable, and can serve IT organizations with increasing ticket volumes and services.

With routing automation implemented, service desk managers spend less time handling escalations and more time improving support processes. Reviewing routing rules from time to time can ensure that they remain consistent with the dynamics of team structures and skills. In the mobile and social era, tickets are increasingly being created through formless means, such as email and Chatter. By educating end-users to follow best practices for creating tickets, service desk managers can make the process much easier for end-users while significantly improving automated ticket categorization and ultimately, accelerating resolution.