| Helpful Do’s and Don’ts for Structuring Your Service Catalog |
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The next question is, how are you going to structure it? You’ve considered several possible ways for organizing and presenting your products, information and services through a service catalog. Unfortunately, not all systems of organizing are viable for your customers. And that’s important, because your customers are who your service catalog is for. So what do customers want and need when they turn to request services using your actionable service catalog delivered through your company's intranet?They expect a system they can navigate intuitively. There should be three main levels (or tiers), one for groups (the main level), one for categories (the second level) and one for items (the third level). All the items in a given list constitute a category, and all the categories in a given list constitute a group. It looks like this:
So far, so good. Seems simple enough, right? The thing is, you can structure your service catalog as suggested and still have your customers tearing their hair out every time they try to use it. Why? The reason is poor choice of what the catalog developer designates as groups and categories. Where IT departments typically fall down is how they structure these two things, in other words, how they “sort” the items that they offer. There’s a right way and a very wrong way to do this. Let’s look at how the pros work it. Amazon.com is well-known for its user-friendly and highly successful service catalog. This is an online store catalog, used in the public marketplace, and yours, of course, has a different purpose. You’re creating an IT service catalog, but the principles of what works and what doesn’t are the same, whether you’re designing a catalog for internal office use among your company’s employees or whether you’re designing one for the world of public commerce. When you go to purchase a book on Amazon (if you don’t begin with the search feature), you’re asked to first select the section (group) that the item you’re looking for fits under. The choices you’re given are the categories you naturally hold in your mind as the consumer: DVDs, CDs, books, toys, and so on. Let’s say you select “books”. Next you’re asked to pick the category of book you’re looking for (fiction, history, reference, technical, etc.). If you indicate you want a technical book, you’ll then be directed to an item list, and there you’ll find the particular product you need. The digging down has gone from general to specific, based on your personal need and on your intuitive system of mentally categorizing what you expect to find at Amazon. Your thinking went like this:
The way Amazon has organized its catalog identically parallels the way you, as a customer, naturally think. This makes it an intuitively structured catalog and, as a result, one that’s simple to use and highly popular. Their excellent service catalog is arguably the reason why Amazon is a world leader in online marketing. How successful would Amazon be, though, if instead of listing their products to reflect their customers’ thinking they had organized the service catalog to reflect the thinking of their staff: which shelves the products are on, which of their internal departments orders which set of products, or which fulfillment company handles which orders? Customers would throw up their hands, mutter a curse or two, and look for another place to do business. In this competitive era, the threat of outsourcing constantly shadows IT departments. This makes it especially important for IT administrators to build their service catalog in a way their customers find easy to use. If you try to think like a customer doing a search for an item, you’ll be designing your catalog along the right lines. Here is an example of how not to structure your first tier:
Do you see why? What if your customer is looking for an R2D2 Learning Laptop? Should they look for it under IT Services or under Training? Or will they find it under Office Services and Supplies, since it’s a loaner item? How confusing! You can’t go wrong if you think customer-friendly. Consider asking your customers themselves to help you, to sketch out a diagram of how they’d organize your products if the task was theirs to complete. If you take this approach, you’ll create a service catalog for your business that matches or exceeds your customers’ expectations, earns you points with your CEO, and raises the reputation of your IT department. Who could ask a service catalog for anything better than that? Get Intracart today...Say goodbye to the incessant ringing of your help desk phone… just 395.00 USD - right now! Purchase Intracart Professional today for only 395.00 USD including 30 days money back guarantee, no questions asked!
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You’ve read all about it, and understand its importance. You’ve selected your software, and now you’re ready to build it: your company’s Actionable Service Catalog.
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