SaaS teaches the language of service

Does your Help Desk speak customer service fluently? For example, do your customer service representatives know the difference between an incident that is "resolved" and one that is "closed?"

Both terms might sound identical to you or me, but according to Fred Luddy, CEO of Service-now.com of Solano Beach, Calif. they mean different things. When a CSR completes a task, he or she can mark it as resolved, thinking everything is hunky dory. However, it's not until a user or customer agrees that the matter is closed that the incident is truly completed.

You may think Luddy is splitting hairs about words that are virtually synonymous, but he's not. He's relating what Service-now.com has learned by providing SaaS-based IT service management tools to nearly 250 large corporations based on the principles of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL.

"The biggest value of ITIL is that we all have the same vocabulary," he says.

Luddy points out that before ITIL gained momentum in the 1990s most companies had their own unique definition of terms as as basic as "incident." ITIL defined core processes into a common vocabulary, he says, meaning IT could talk about service-related events with precision.

By working with so many companies on service management through a SaaS model, Service-now.com can glean an array best practices across industries. As such Service-now.com has features that let CSRs, who believe they have resolved an incident, give end users multiple paths to close it via Web forms, e-mails and even prompting phone calls until the incident is well and truly closed.

Another best practices trick Service-now.com has learned from working with hundreds of enterprise service teams is around change management. Luddy suggests before IT rolls out an upgrade to an application, advertise those changes to as a broad a user community as possible. He says individuals see risk differently, even creatively, identifying conflicts your team may have overlooked.

"You will get great feedback about risks you might not have thought of," he concludes.

Another bonus is that by listening to your users, the status the IT department can only rise in your company.