Starting Enterprise Service Management in your organization

You’ve probably heard of the many benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) before. But how do you start ESM in your organization? Use one of our three routes to travel to planet ESM and reap the benefits of working together across service departments.

Starting Enterprise Service Management

Starting a new project is a challenge in all organizations and across all departments. Enterprise Service Management (ESM) sounds especially daunting. Total collaboration? Right. Easy!

Let me reveal a secret: ESM isn’t about following an all or nothing approach. Yes, ESM is often seen as a complete package, but who says you have to stick to that? You don’t need a complete overhaul of your department to get started with ESM: you can get excellent results with a few small changes.

We share three different routes that help you start your ESM journey. Just pick one that suits you and your organization best and go with it.

Before take-off

Before you start traveling, you have to make some preparations. The first and most important step towards ESM is making first contact and learning to speak each other’s language.

Let’s be honest: you can’t just merge a bunch of departments tomorrow and expect everybody to be on board and ready for take-off. The reality is different departments have different ways of working. Calls go through different processes, and even terms like ‘incident’ don’t mean the same to IT, FM, and HR. If you don’t even speak the same language, how will you work together on calls and projects?

So how do you make first contact?

Start simple: get together. Find out who’s who and discuss how you work. How do your different departments perceive each other? What problems do you run into when communicating?

If you’re not sure how to set up a meeting like this, use a practical example. How can you improve your collaboration for a specific process, like getting a new employee up and running? Come up with solutions for the problems you run into. Make a plan, stick to it, and get together again after some time to see if your collaboration is improving.

Once you’ve established first contact, you’re ready for take-off!

Route 1: move into the same space

Which direction do you take to planet ESM? One possible course is to try sitting together with multiple departments. While it’s a slightly larger investment (you’d have to at least find a space and move some desks), moving your departments to a shared space has a huge hidden benefit.

Moving workstations conveniently requires the expertise of different departments. You’ll need FM to find a suitable space and set everything up for the actual move. IT is usually responsible for making sure all workstations have the right equipment. Finance might have something to say about costs, and perhaps even HR will weigh in on the right conditions to work in after your move. It’s a great opportunity to see how your different departments work together.

Want to take another step towards ESM once you’re seated together? Try aligning specific processes across your departments to improve your customer experience.

ESM isn’t about doing it all or doing nothing. You don’t have to make huge changes to reap the benefits of ESM – small steps count too.

Route 2: start mapping a shared customer journey

Maybe sitting together isn’t the best option for your organization right now. Or perhaps you sit together already and want to move on to the next step.

What else can you do?

Take a look at one of your shared customer journeys. Map how your customers traverse space and time when they use a service you provide. When your customers need service from different departments, do they get a smooth ride or is there a lot of turbulence? That’s what a customer journey map will tell you.

Pick a relevant journey that involves multiple departments and interview customers who have experience with that particular journey. From the moment they first contacted the service desk, what was their experience like, and how can you make it better together? Was it easy for them to contact the right department? What happened after they submitted their request?

Perhaps the biggest question when you’re working towards ESM is: what happens when a call changes departments? Do you see a drop in customer satisfaction? An increase in wait time? A customer journey map will show you the quickest and most pressing improvements to your collaboration.

Route 3: invest in digital collaboration

Have you started working together and are you ready to process calls even more efficiently? Or did your customer journey map show that sending calls to another department causes delays?

There is another way to work together more closely besides physically sitting in the same space: sharing a digital space. Chances are each department has a tool to keep track of their work. While this is useful for individual departments, it can be a hassle to share calls and information for processes that involve multiple departments. This is why a single point of contact is essential for enterprise service management.

If you want to embrace ESM, try working together in a single digital environment where you can share calls and information easily. Of course, you could opt to simply share calls via email or other media you already have in place. But a dedicated tool does have additional benefits. Obviously, having all information on your assets in a single place makes solving issues related to any object easier. You no longer waste time documenting solutions multiple times.

Sharing a digital space also opens up the possibility for a single digital point of contact, where customers can register all their calls and where your departments can even share solutions directly with customers. The result? Better customer experience, and more time for your departments to focus on complicated issues and innovation.

Ready for more ESM?

Remember: ESM isn’t about doing it all or doing nothing. You don’t have to make huge changes to reap the benefits of ESM – small steps count too.

Feeling inspired? Download our ESM e-book to get the entire ESM low-down and start benefiting from working together!