In today's rapidly growing digital world, the reliance of organizations on their IT departments or IT services is supreme. No one can ever think of expanding or functioning without seeking help from IT services. For an organization's success, the IT department must always be on its toes to fulfill the demands of the internal teams and customers.

But do you think all this can be possible manually or individually? No. Hence, many businesses have started adopting the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) tool to improve their IT services. ITSM is a structured framework that improves and streamlines IT operations and processes. It provides a multitude of benefits that we will discuss in the coming sections. Before that, let's understand what ITSM really is and why do businesses consider it crucial?

What is IT Service Management (ITSM)?

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a tool that focuses on the smooth IT service delivery to the end customers, ultimately increasing client satisfaction. It manages all the processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT services.

For instance, when a customer requires a new laptop, they raise a request specifying their requirements through the Support Portal. Once the ticket is created, it triggers a workflow (if applied), and assigns it to the relevant technician based on its priority. The technician then works on the ticket and provides a resolution within defined timelines.

Why Do Businesses Need ITSM?

Who does not want to augment their performance and customer service? Obviously, all businesses want to do so and implementing an ITSM tool is the key to it. ITSM significantly improves the quality and efficiency of IT services, subsequently boosting organizational customer satisfaction.

Additionally, ITSM centralizes and optimizes various business processes, empowering IT administrators to perform specific operations across multiple machines from a single interface. It allows the end customers to refer to the knowledge base through self-service portals, resolving basic queries independently, while also automating the key processes.

Thus, for organizations providing IT services to customers, the requirement of an ITSM tool is paramount.

Top 10 Benefits of ITSM

1. Boosts Efficiency and Productivity

ITSM enables the automation of various processes through workflows, AI-enabled features, and automatic assignments. It helps the IT people to focus more on critical tasks rather than basic requests, thus saving them time and effort, and resulting in increased efficiency and productivity.

2. Enhances Service Delivery

ITSM helps in standardizing the service delivery across departments. With the ITSM framework, your organization can create a documented process for handling the incoming tickets. This data is then entered into the ITSM solution, which the system uses to assign tickets based on priority, maintain the ticketing system, and automate service delivery whenever possible. This way, the team can resolve the ticket as soon as it is assigned, thereby minimizing the customer waiting time and enhancing service delivery.

3. Streamlines Workflows and Processes

Many organizations face an issue when their workflows and processes become outdated and fail to meet new requirements. ITSM helps organizations streamline processes by introducing standardized practices, optimizing resource utilization, improving service quality, and promoting a constant enhancement culture. Thus, the organizations can produce well-organized, dependable, high-quality IT services aligned with the business objectives.

4. Effective Change Management

Change is unavoidable. And, with the speed with which the technological world is moving ahead, IT changes for sure. So, are you ready to accept this change and be in the race for progress? If yes, the ITSM tool is there for you to take care of and maintain all the change requests efficiently. ITSM provides change management that ensures a smooth change management process. Changes can be authorized quickly by the CAB members or the Change manager before any change activity. The approval process set based on the nature of the change helps the IT members manage change effectively.

5. Enhances Service Desk Functionality

ITSM enables businesses to manage their requests centrally and efficiently. It acts as a primary touchpoint for all the users to create incidents and service requests, seek knowledge articles, or perform self-service tasks like resetting passwords.

6. Monitoring and Reporting

With ITSM, you can monitor the requests being resolved and create reports. It gives you a clear visibility of how the IT services are delivered to the customers. The IT managers can review the reports, verify whether the policies and procedures are being complied with, and accordingly take action. These features help the IT team get an eagle-eye view of how procedures are followed and fulfilled within the organization.

7. Improves End-User Experience

The ultimate goal of every organization is to enhance end-user experience in every way. ITSM, with its service management features, helps businesses to achieve this goal. It provides self-service portals, chatbots, and knowledge bases, allowing the customer to get the required information easily and resolve their simple requirements. Thus, it reduces the customer waiting time to a great extent. Moreover, the technicians can start working immediately as the ticket is resolved and float it to the end-users, thus increasing the happy customers list.

8. Cost Management and Efficiency

Managing costs is one of the supreme concerns for all organizations, irrespective of their size. And it will continue to remain forever. One of the main perks that ITSM provides is cost management. It provides many automated features using which certain repetitive and common tasks can be performed automatically at the trigger of an event. Thus, the requirement for additional workforce to perform such repetitive tasks is reduced. Also, it provides other features like Task Management, Change Management, Patch Management, and Asset management all in one solution. This fulfills the requirement of multiple features in just one tool. This results in reducing expenses and improving the efficiency of the employees.

9. Defines Roles and Responsibilities

Roles and responsibilities define what a user can do. ITSM provides this facility to define roles and responsibilities for the users based on which they can perform tasks. For example, a requester can only create tickets, while the technicians can only view and work on the tickets assigned to themselves. This enables restricting the users from performing any unsolicited task and focusing only on the assigned ones.

10. Increases Return on Investment (ROI)

The foremost question of every organization is: 'How much return on investment will I get?' Also, they would like to know how to enhance their return and keep multiplying. The answer to all this is the best ITSM solution that takes care of most business processes to support enhanced IT infrastructure. ITSM embraces the best practices for managing critical IT services and builds procedures to ensure they are followed. Thus, the efficient utilization of ITSM results in a considerable increase in ROI.

How Can ITSM Reduce Your Business's Workload?

Most of the time, organizations keep on shouting about the increased workload. And the solution to this is the ITSM tool that provides automation features. With ITSM, you can automatically assign tickets based on priority, change the status or perform certain actions based on triggers, apply workflows, schedules, self-service portals, etc.

All these enable the technicians to work on important tasks rather than common tasks. Users can refer to the knowledge articles through the self-service portal and perform certain tasks self-sufficiently instead of waiting for the technicians. This reduces the workload of the technicians to a great extent.

I hope this article made it clear about what ITSM is, why businesses need it, and its benefits. All these will help you to understand how ITSM can elevate your business to high altitudes. So, what are you waiting for? Choose a robust ITSM tool now and take your business to the next level.