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Service Desk Integration can be broadly defined as the ability to electronically exchange service tickets ('Incidents') with your customers. The alternative to Service Desk Integration is the manual creation and updating of Incidents, which involves customers picking up their phones and calling your call center to create or update a new or existing Incident.
All Service Desk Integrations share three common features:
| • | Opening New Incidents: Customers can create a new Incident in your Service Desk application by forwarding an Incident that exists in their own, internal Service Desk application. Integrations can be automatic, initiated when an Incident is created in the customer's Service Desk that meets criteria that you, the Service Provider, establish. Integrations can also be manual whereby a customer may forward an Incident from their Service Desk to yours by setting the Incident's resolution state to 'Forward.' |
| • | Updating Existing Incidents: Once an Incident has been forwarded from a customer's Service Desk to yours, the two Incidents are bi-directionally linked. Changes and updates that you make to the Incident created in your Service Desk are replicated back to the originating Incident in the customer's Service Desk system and vice-versa. This bi-directional integration enables a customer to stay informed of progress of any given Incident by viewing that Incident within their own Service Desk system. |
| • | Closing Incidents: When a Service Provider closes an incident in their Service Desk, the associated Incident should be closed in the customer's Service Desk and vice versa. |
In most cases, your and your customer's Service Desks will be separated by a secure Wide Area Network or the public Internet as shown in the diagram below.
The most common approach to Service Desk Integration is for the Service Provider to host an Incident exchange gateway in their computing environment. This exchange gateway is responsible for routing Incidents between the Service Provider and multiple customers as well as providing advanced capabilities such as guaranteed delivery, data transformations, etc.
The Promise of Service Desk Integration
Integrating your Service Desk with your customers and strategic service partners is a non-trivial project. If you've already attempted a Service Desk Integration project, you already know this. So why do it? The answer is easy, the potential payoff is huge:
| • | Faster Response Times: An effective Service Desk Integration Gateway enables your customers to forward Incidents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Customers are not subject to call hold times or having to verbalize a problem to a call center agent. By receiving the Incidents faster, you are able to start working to resolve the underlying issues sooner and thus provide your customer with a faster mean-time-to-repair for outages. As you know, speed is the key in the technical support services business. |
| • | Lower Operating Costs: By enabling your customers to forward Service Desk Incidents electronically, you will avoid customer calls into your call center. Our experience is that this reduction in call volume is typically significant and leads to real reductions in call center staffing levels. |
| • | Fewer Mistakes: Even the best call center agents make mistakes when creating or updating Incidents. These mistakes are virtually eliminated when you exchange Incident information electronically with your customers. Removing the call center 'middle man' not only speeds your response, it also improves the accuracy of communication by directly linking your technical staff with the customer's technical staff. |
| • | Stronger Customer Relationships: A successful Service Desk Integration will inevitably lead to the integration of your customer's support processes with your support processes. In essence, you will become a virtual extension of your customer's internal IT technical support organization. This integration of both people and product (to use ITIL terminology) over time becomes expensive to replace and leads to a long term, profitable relationship with your customers. |
| • | Happier Customers: If you deliver your support services faster, with fewer mistakes and ensconce your organization as a virtual extension of your customer's support staff, you will create happier customers. |
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