Introduction
Forrester coined the term Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and defines it as “extending IT service management capabilities beyond technology services to address business-centric use cases.”
While ESM may be seen as a successor of ITSM, the key difference is the ability to extend ITSM principles and practices to non-IT functions across the enterprise to include the full range of services from HR and Sales to Marketing, Customer Service, Cyber Security, etc.
The main benefits of ESM include the ability to eliminate internal silos and improve visibility, improve productivity and efficiency, lower costs and enhance customer satisfaction.
Optimizing internal and external customer experience with ESM
ESM borrows from the core principles of ITSM so that non-IT organizations within a company can better manage their service demand and delivery with a tool. For instance, with automated workflows, optimized processes, and notifications, there is no need for manual intervention. The aim is to eliminate interdepartmental communication, reduce email overload, and prevent delays on critical tasks. One example is customer service teams who are deluged with requests. How to prioritize the tickets or defect requests? What if you miss critical fixes and Priority 1s? The answer lies in improving lines of communication and collaborating by integrating ESM with the rest of your value chain.
1. Improved lines of collaboration and communication
Using a truly bidirectional integration tool, organizations can integrate an ESM tool such as Jira Service Management (JSM) to sync entities and exchange information freely between JSM and other tools in the delivery chain like Micro Focus ALM, Azure DevOps, and more. The two-way sync across multiple systems enables real-time communication and visibility so that teams never miss critical issues and prioritize better. This not only leads to shorter response times but also enhances the overall release quality with a ‘right first-time’ approach.
2. Using the best tool for the task
This intuitive information flow improves visibility and offers real-time access to the most important customer issues, without any manual effort or error-prone processes of keeping track Developers and engineers can communicate on the work items from their preferred tools, be it task management, test management, or ESM, and share updates when a customer issue is resolved. Additionally, since the synchronization is automatic, it eliminates some of the common challenges of working in multi-tool environments, such as duplication of effort or missed updates.
Accelerating customer response time and providing value with integration
Customer support engineers or internal service teams using ESM tools need to process critical tickets, bug fixes, and enhancements from both external and internal customers, whereas developers and QA teams use other tools such as OpenText ALM (for QA), Jira (for development), or IBM DOORS (for requirements management). Lack of cross-team visibility between ESM and other tools in the delivery cycle may cause delays, manual and error-prone ways of transferring the information, and poor decision making.
By integrating ESM tools such as ServiceNow with task management software like Jira, businesses can prioritize development or other actions based on the most prominent issues and requests from customers.
Such an integration leads to better, real-time collaboration, resulting in:
- Automated ways of information exchange
- Enhanced collaboration and communication
Facilitating close collaboration between different teams using ESM and workflow management, IT, or QA tools accelerates customer response time significantly and allows stakeholders to make faster and better decisions.
Popular collaboration patterns to optimize your ESM investment
Product Defect collaboration
Synchronization of customer problems from ESM tools to other tools and vice versa empowers developers to work on the most critical fixes and defects, improving the overall cycle times.
Change Request collaboration
Product, development, and business teams gain full visibility into internal and external customer priorities and requests for enhancements. Better prioritization and collaboration improve resolution times, product effectiveness, and productivity, in turn leading to improved customer satisfaction scores.
Visibility into Epic and Story for Portfolio Management and Development teams
Portfolio Management teams, working in tools like Jira Align, Clarity, Rally, and Digital.ai Agility get real-time updates on the progress of epics synchronized to tools like Jira from their system while the development teams get visibility into the priority of the Epic in the ESM’s project and portfolio management from their native system.
Conclusion
Customer delight relies on the ability to understand the customer’s pain points and business objectives to take a proactive approach to resolving issues. ESM provides excellent support and value; and by integrating ESM, you:
- Get a superior experience as a seamless information flow
- Enhance team communication and traceability
- Eliminate the need for manual processes and error-prone ways of tracking (documents and spreadsheets)
- Track in real-time, as the visibility of work, improves between various functions be it customer service, IT, HR, or development.
