As an IT professional, what’s harder: Improving the quality and efficiency of processes or aligning them with specified business goals? Let’s face it, IT can be a tangled mess of cables, servers, and acronyms. But amidst the chaos, there’s a beacon of hope: ITIL best practices. It’s a set of service management best practices that can transform your day-to-day IT service delivery from Frankenstein’s monster to a well-oiled machine.
This article via @FreshworksInc shares everything you need to know about ITIL best practices, including seven ways they enhance the end-user experience. #ITIL #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on XWhat is ITIL?
ITIL, formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of guidelines that helps an IT department deliver, facilitate, and improve its services. Think of it as a roadmap for aligning your IT services and operations with the overall business goals and achieving desired outcomes.
Companies, big and small, rely on ITIL to cater to various business functions related to IT service delivery for employees, vendors, business partners, and customers. Embracing a set of best practices can help you make the most out of ITIL.
Overview of ITIL best practices
ITIL is among the most reliable frameworks extensively used by IT professionals worldwide. Companies have adopted it over the decades and gained adequate insights for incident and change management, problem resolution, and service catalog maintenance. These insights fuel the best practices for optimizing IT service management (ITSM) and service delivery.
ITIL best practices have evolved in response to emerging ideas and technologies, serving as guiding principles for IT teams across domains. From service design and management to ensuring a stellar customer experience, ITIL’s best practices offer a robust foundation for operational excellence.
How does ITIL help enhance the customer experience?
ITIL helps you develop a solid, 24/7 customer support system and polish your service offerings so you can provide the ultimate customer interaction experience.
The ITIL 4 DSV (Drive Stakeholder Value) module offers seven steps for an ideal customer journey. These are:
- Explore: Thoroughly comprehend customer needs and expectations of the service to establish a solid foundation for the engagement.
- Engage: Constantly engage customers and end-users, actively seeking and valuing their feedback as an integral part of service improvement.
- Offer: Given the array of choices available to customers, it is imperative to deeply understand their requirements, regularly evaluate performance, and consistently enhance services to meet evolving needs.
- Agree: Collaboratively define the scope of services and desired outcomes with the customer. Utilize customer feedback and market intelligence to anticipate and fulfill their expectations proactively.
- Onboard: Execute effective negotiation and onboarding processes, ensuring alignment with agreed-upon terms while focusing on delivering the promised services.
- Co-create: Actively collaborate with customers, demonstrating a commitment to incorporating their feedback and opinions into service delivery and reinforcing a sense of partnership.
- Realize: Monitor service performance closely to ensure it consistently meets the desired expectations. Swiftly address any deviations and proactively seek opportunities for improvement.
Following these seven steps, you can use ITIL to meet and exceed customer expectations and foster long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.
The ITIL 4 DSV (Drive Stakeholder Value) module offers seven steps for an ideal customer journey. Read about them here. #ITIL #ServiceDesk #ITSM Share on XWhere are ITIL best practices applicable?
ITIL principles are applicable in various business contexts, such as:
1. IT asset management (ITAM)
IT asset management is crucial for planning and overseeing the entire lifecycle of IT assets that contribute to delivering products or services within a business.
ITIL best practices make IT asset management simpler and more productive for you by optimizing asset utilization and aligning IT services with your business goals. This, in turn:
- Improves operational efficiency
- Reduces business risks
- Enhances overall organizational performance.
The introduction of ITIL 4 in 2019 marked a significant advancement, offering IT professionals a fresh, holistic, and customer-centric approach to ITAM. The key guidelines provided by ITIL for ITAM are outlined below:
- Assess the practices: Start by evaluating the existing IT asset management practices. Then, identify the gaps and challenges in the current procedures.
- Focus on asset value: Understand how each IT asset impacts the business and prioritize and allocate resources accordingly.
- Monitor and improve regularly: Break down all ITAM activities into smaller, observable tasks. Monitor regularly, gather feedback, and work towards improving them.
- Collaborate and share responsibility: Encourage communication across departments and foster inter-departmental cooperation for effective decision-making and shared responsibility regarding IT assets.
- Think holistically: Develop a comprehensive understanding of the asset lifecycle to make informed decisions on asset investment and management. ITIL guidelines facilitate better decision-making by providing insights into asset investments, maintenance, and replacement, ultimately reducing costs and minimizing wastage.
2. Incident management
Unplanned interruptions or “incidents” hinder users’ ability to work, causing productivity loss and revenue impact. ITIL’s incident management practices aim to minimize such impact by swiftly restoring normal operations. The guidance includes to:
- Properly communicate and document throughout the incident lifecycle: ITIL suggests effective stakeholder communication and documentation. This includes a list of stakeholders with contact details, preferred communication modes (like SMS, WhatsApp, email, or phone), acquiring the necessary information before contacting stakeholders, and communication templates for incidents.
- Avoid escalations: Send complex events to a specialized team for faster resolution, ensuring all incidents are addressed promptly.
- Have an elaborate knowledge database: Ensure easy accessibility of reference material like an SOP when your team needs to troubleshoot independently. A handy knowledge base ensures quick solutions to incidents without involving senior managers and specialists.
- Integrate all NOC tools: For proper incident management, integrate communication tools like emails, texts, customer service portals, knowledge databases, and workflow management software with the Network Operations Center (NOC). If not blended well, your support teams will have to manage multiple screens for each tool, thus consuming more time and resources.
- Use ITIL guidance for service-level operations: Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you monitor and measure your team’s performance. A few example metrics to consider are the time to action on critical incidents, time taken to raise a ticket, Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), and time taken to send notifications.
3. Knowledge management
ITIL 4 emphasizes that knowledge must create value and offer accurate information when needed for organizational success. It outlines three critical points:
i. Knowledge-sharing across the organization
Your employees must understand the concept of knowledge sharing and have the tools to create, use, and share it with the rest of the workforce.
Quick tips:
- Revamp old knowledge-sharing models
- Facilitate the use and transfer of accurate knowledge
- Spot and monitor your knowledge assets
- Promote a learning culture in your organization.
ii. On-demand knowledge availability
Ensure relevant knowledge and information are accessible when needed, supporting timely decision-making and efficient problem resolution.
Efficiently allocate and utilize organizational resources, optimizing the use of knowledge to enhance productivity and achieve business objectives.
4. Change management/enablement
ITIL views change management (or change enablement if you’re using ITIL 4) as the modification of your company’s IT infrastructure. Its primary focus is risk management while a change occurs, and ITIL best practices for change management include the following:
- Make a plan: Dive deeper into finer details like the cause of change, what needs to be done about it, and each team member’s role in the change management process.
- Train your team: Communicate your plans, performance benchmarks, and end goals to each team member and equip them with the resources to execute tasks effectively.
- Collaborate well: Ensure success by having all teams collaborate seamlessly in line with the change management plan. Foster open communication and transparency to promote effective teamwork.
- Clarify organizational hierarchy: Employees should know their team hierarchy and communication channels. This includes understanding their reporting structure, subordinates, and the escalation matrix for effective coordination.
- Keep processes simple: Break up complex processes into smaller tasks to make them more manageable.
- Document everything: Document all change management activity and leverage insights to enhance process performance and identify strengths and weaknesses continuously.
Learn more about ITIL best practices.
7 top ITIL best practices to enhance the end-user experience
1. Conveying the value of ITIL
To effectively convey the value of ITIL, articulate its ability to enhance operational efficiency, streamline processes, and elevate overall service quality. Emphasize how ITIL aligns IT services with organizational goals, fostering a proactive approach to problem-solving and improving end-user satisfaction. Use real-world examples and concrete benefits to illustrate how embracing ITIL practices contributes to a more resilient and responsive IT infrastructure.
2. Improving incident management
Incidents can halt daily activities and impede a business’s progress. For example, if the warehouse management system of an online e-commerce portal encounters a bug, it could jeopardize order completion and lead to significant customer loss.
ITIL suggests two mechanisms to improve incident management:
- Club similar incidents together. Often, multiple end-users face a common issue. ITIL recommends raising different tickets for each but treating them as one issue. This will help save time and reduce your team’s workload.
- Close an incident only after complete resolution. A ticket should not be closed until the end-user says the issue has been resolved. Ensure your employees don’t close a ticket just because they have addressed the issue.
3. Tracking all incidents and requests in one place
End-users, whether customers or employees, may use any of the multiple communication channels available to raise an issue. They could reach you via email, text, phone, live chat, or self-service.
Multiple routes can make it difficult to monitor each incident and request. ITIL points out how your IT team can track all interactions from a single dashboard. It will make all data available on a unified screen, thus saving time for your team to focus on resolving issues.
4. Offering self-service to end-users
88% of global users expect companies to offer self-service for quicker query resolution. This makes self-service a vital ITIL best practice for organizations.
Quick tips:
- Create a self-service portal or app.
- Compile a list of FAQs.
- Add Help articles on your website.
- Share links to step-by-step video guides for product usage or troubleshooting.
- Offer Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and chatbots.
5. Identifying risks and taking proactive measures
Here are some ITIL guidelines regarding risk assessment and proactive measures:
- Monitor incident trends and patterns within your organization. Try to understand their root causes and how to prevent them.
- Monitor all your IT assets from a single dashboard. This will help you track them and quickly highlight if any device needs replacement or service.
- Proactively inform your employees and customers in the case of large-scale incidents, like a corporate system outage. This will save you the trouble of responding to numerous emails and calls highlighting the same issue.
- Gather feedback from customers and employees regularly and implement opportunities to improve your service and overall business performance.
Manual processes can be very time-consuming. You can automate three major tasks to ensure your business functions smoothly:
- Chatbots. Advanced IT service desk systems can help you create chatbots to answer your end-users’ basic queries and route chats to appropriate team members.
- Ticket routing. Automation can push tickets directly to the agents who can resolve them.
- Alerts. Automated notifications can alert your team members about ticket creation and your customers about ticket resolution. It saves time and keeps end-users updated.
7. Reviewing and reporting KPIs
Regular reviews and reporting can help you monitor and improve the performance of your IT support. Focus on the following KPIs:
- Average resolution time. The time taken to resolve incidents and queries.
- Monthly number of tickets. The number of tickets raised and closed in a month. It indicates the demand and if you have enough agents to address them.
- Per-ticket cost: The cost of raising and resolving ticket costs, including promoting self-service to reduce the per-ticket cost.
- Changes made after major incidents. Tracking changes in business processes after major incidents.
- User satisfaction. Your proficiency in handling and resolving issues. Short and long surveys can help you ascertain how content end-users are with your service.
This article is sponsored by Freshworks.
Learn more about ITIL 4: Framework & Best Practices – Freshservice (freshworks.com)
Further Reading
Please use the website search capability to find more helpful ITSM articles on topics such as continual or continuous improvement, developing service management teams, project manager relationships, ITSM tools, improving customer experiences, how to manage incidents effectively, the key ITSM processes, changes to the ITIL framework, and digital transformation.
Vishnu Selvaraju
Product Marketer with extensive writing experience under various positions in consumer and B2B industries. Specializations include writing blogs, SEO content, and copywriting.
