Your go-to guide to ITSM integrations

Why do you need an ITSM tool?

2020 has beckoned an era of remote/hybrid work. This shift heralded a series of changes, a prominent of them being providing customer-grade experiences to employees. In addition to that, an ITSM tool has a wide range of functions and benefits. Here are some reasons every organization needs IT service management: 

1. Improves the quality of services: With a technology-enabled process workflow, IT efficiency is increased. What’s more, it reduces downtime, prevents incidents, and minimizes the business impact of critical IT incidents.

2. Reduces IT costs: Effective problem management and knowledge management can reduce recurring issues, speed up resolution time and overall, reduce the impact on business. 

3. Reduce wastage, and save time: IT service management can facilitate the redeployment of underutilized assets. This ensures that there is minimal IT wastage. It also helps with change-related and inconsistency-based wastage. As a whole, this means optimized spending, increased efficiency, and better asset management. 

4. Improve governance: ITSM helps to improve decision-making, whether in the IT department or beyond. 

The ideal IT service management solution will have several ITIL processes embedded within its core functions. Right from incident management to problem management and knowledge management and asset management. They will also have features related to request management, change management, and configuration management. The bottom line is to improve employee experience and deliver seamless IT services. The right assortment of ITSM integrations can help you achieve this.

What are ITSM integrations?

In the past, ITSM was limited to IT teams. However, with more organizations undertaking digital transformation by implementing various IT-related initiatives, ITSM has successfully transformed into a business enabler, extended to the whole organization. All high-performing organizations prioritize employee engagement and experience and have seamless IT services at heart. ITSM integrations use application programming interfaces (APIs), a mechanism of communication using requests and responses. These APIs connect your ITSM solution to other applications (for example, monitoring tools) and enable them to talk to each other. Other than data synchronization, ITSM integrations also enable the end-to-end integration of workflow automation.

Benefits of ITSM integrations: 

ITSM integrations play a key role in connecting IT to other business functions like security, HR, marketing, and customer service. It helps to connect applications and data sources and the business benefits are manifold. With streamlined and automated processes, service delivery will be quicker and more agile. Here are some more benefits of implementing integrations into your IT service management:

1. Eliminates data siloes: When data is spread across different applications, it becomes difficult to access across multiple locations. This can create a frustrating user experience. Moreover, employees may be unaware that certain data even exists and they end up never using it. With a 360-degree integrated IT service desk, say goodbye to siloed data. Integrations allow for all data to be in a centralized location and/or easily accessible across applications.

2. Improves both customer and employee experience: With ITSM integrations, customer issues can be resolved faster and more efficiently. Customer satisfaction is improved when time-to-resolution is reduced. It also enhances employee experience by reducing the time employees spend on repetitive tasks. With all their applications integrated into one place, it becomes easier to access resources, especially important data and information. One of the most important benefits of ITSM integrations is employee onboarding. The onboarding process from providing information, to hardware/software and IDs, and answering queries can be made user-friendly and smooth. With ITSM integrations, the HR, facilities, payroll, and IT teams can work together to improve employee onboarding.

Hence two significant benefits of ITSM integrations are enhancing employee productivity and facilitating customer retention.

3. Improving efficiency through automation: An ITSM tool that is well-integrated and powered by automation helps to streamline tasks. Things like assigning incidents to the right person/team can be automated to avoid errors. It allows for making your service desk a single source of truth and hence preventing and/or reducing possible manual errors.

4. Enables digital transformation for the organization: Post-pandemic, the goal for most organizations has been digital transformation. With end-to-end automation implemented across multiple apps and teams, ITSM integrations allow for a digital transformation initiative across all departments of the organization. AI-powered automation and seamless integrations are an integral part of the digital-first organization of the modern era.

Provides better insights and data: By integrating your service desk with an analytics tool, your organization can get insights and visibility into the performance. It provides detailed reports and visuals to help get a clearer understanding and thus, how can performance can be improved and how to make critical decisions.

Other than just reports, you can also make integrations with employee survey software to get real-time feedback from your employees. These can give actionable insights into the actual employee experience and user satisfaction.

5. Strengthens self-service for employees: One of the hallmarks of the modern ITSM tool is self-service. It is the process by which end-users can access resources and find solutions independently. With various apps connected to an easy point of access, this makes self-service much more simple for employees.

Examples of ITSM integrations:

1. Incident management: Integrate your ITSM tool with your ticketing portal/incident management tool. This allows one to build a workflow for a quick resolution. This helps to link a new incident with corresponding issues which helps build a stronger knowledge base and also helps with faster resolution. This integration also helps to automatically input important information like date, time, name of the user, and a description of the issue. This helps with a systematic ticketing process and minimized the impact of issues on business.

2. CRM and ITSM: Connect your customer relationship management tool with your ITSM to resolve client issues as soon as possible. This helps customer success managers to get better visibility and hence helps clients to resolve their issues faster. Once a case is created, it can be either matched with a current one or a new one can be created. Once the details are entered, the customer success manager resolves the issue as soon as possible. Maintaining records is also an important best practice as it helps keep up transparency. 

3. IT asset management: Improve your ITAM with the help of integrations. Making use of a good ITAM tool helps the organization manage the inventory of hardware and software along with the needs of employees. This helps to save costs and prevent the wastage of resources. It helps to manage SaaS licenses, the money spent as well as the renewal or redeployment of these tools. 

4. Employee onboarding: As highlighted in the section above, integrations go a long way in putting together a smooth onboarding program for new employees. Teams like HR, finance, payroll, facilities and IT can come together on one platform to make the transition for new employees as easy as possible. 

In day-to-day work, having IT service management connected to tools like Slack, Google Calendar, MS Teams, and Microsoft Outlook, can enhance productivity like never before. Features like sending notifications in real-time, automatic setting of Slack status, and more can be a game-changer for employee engagement and efficiency.

Get the edge with Freshservice: 

Are you ready to right-size your IT service management with an intuitive and fast time-to-value ITSM solution? Freshservice is a unified service management tool that bridges siloes, delivers delight, and helps organizations realize greater ROI. 

Freshservice’s orchestration center hosts a number of third-party apps that can be used in your specific workflows. Integrate with 3rd party applications seamlessly with the workflow automator. You can also debug and audit the automations that you have put into place. 

Give Freshservice a try for free for 14 days. No credit card required.