Introduction

Purpose

The IT Service Management process and tools market is always changing and evolving.

Servicely, as an emerging AI-based service desk vendor, wanted to understand the current trends in the market so as to continue to evolve the product to meet the current set of challenges and frustrations.

In late 2020 Servicely conducted 23 interviews with service management practitioners and their leaders. These interviews were designed to assess the state of the market and document the current challenges being faced by different organizations with different levels of service management maturity.

From the simple ticketing solutions of the 1970s to the helpdesk environment, then ITSM and the professionalization of the support function, to the current wave of enterprise support function consolidation, service desks have been maturing in scope and sophistication for decades.

Within that progression, different organizations find themselves at different levels of maturity based on organization size, sector, trends of outsourcing and insourcing, mergers and acquisitions, and other factors.

Each generation of processes and tools solves some of the problems left over by the previous generation. The current dominant processes and vendors have done a great service to the market by their capabilities and achievements, and in doing so have exposed new opportunities for value creation.

We hope you enjoy this report, see something of yourself in these challenges and opportunities, and welcome the next generation of solutions.

Profile of Contributors

The service management professionals interviewed for this report included CIOs, Heads of Operations, Service Desk Managers, Service Desk Analysts and others. A full list can be found in Appendix A.

The service desks that were studied are predominantly IT service desks, although several customer service desks and field service desks were discussed.

The companies range in size from 1,000 to 20,000 employees, across verticals including healthcare, software, food production, retail, IT services, and others.

These service desks have between two and fifty Tier 1 service desk analysts. They handle between 300 and 28,000 tickets per month across functions such as IT, customer service, field services, engineering and managed services.

A Note on Terminology

For the purpose of this report the word “organization " is used to describe is used to describe the company (in the case of outward-facing customer service desks) or the IT department (for IT service desks).

The word “customers" describes those who access the services of the service desk. In the case of a customer service desk these could be actual consumers (B2C), employees of a customer company (B2B), or in the case of an enterprise service management they would be employees of the same organisation.

Next - Part 3: Service Desk Performance

In late 2020 servicely.ai conducted 23 research interviews with service desk executives, managers and practitioners, to explore the State of the Service Desk in the post-COVID19 world.

The interview results were synthesised into a report that covers the following topics:

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Service Desk Metrics
4. Increase in Demand
5. Transformation, Consolidation and Integration
6. Shift Left
7. Automation and Orchestration
8. Knowledge Management
9. People Management
10. Support Channels
11. Data Quality
12. Tools
13. Conclusion

This blog series will serialise the topics listed above. The full report is available for download at www.servicely.ai/sotsd.

If you would like to discuss any of these topics please get in touch via the website or book a meeting at www.servicely.ai/calendar.