What is ESM, and what is its value to your organization?

Enterprise Service Management: it’s a huge buzzword in the service management community. Thinking about hopping on the bandwagon yourself? First, you have to find out what the value of ESM is for your organization. Discover the three biggest advantages and get ready to take your service delivery to the next level.

What is ESM?

ESM stands for Enterprise Service Management. At its core, it's all about collaboration: it means working together with different service departments such as IT, Facility, or HR. But sharing services doesn’t always look the same.

In some organizations, the process is still in an early stage, so it simply means service departments use a common tool to process calls. In other organizations, service departments also have a single point of (first) contact for their customers. And sometimes, ESM goes way beyond that, and all service department processes are integrated in a full-blown approach.

Want to dive into more theory? Check out these 6 articles about silo-breaking >>

Arguably more important than the theory around is how ESM benefits your organization. Discover the three biggest advantages of below.

1. Improved customer satisfaction

Imagine this: one of your coworkers has to give a presentation in half an hour when they find out the screen in the meeting room isn’t working. Bummer! There are multiple phone numbers they can call for help, but that only stresses your coworker out more. Who’s going to answer the phone? And will help arrive in time for their presentation?

If every service department has a single point of contact, your customers don’t have to wonder who to turn to with a question. Such a point of contact can take many different forms, from an actual location to a joint self-service portal or phone number. It’s nice to have a place to turn to with questions and requests, especially when customers need help fast. Thanks to your single point of contact, your coworker knows where to go, you fix the broken screen, and they’re good to go with their presentation.

The shared services model allow your organization to build its service and support capabilities around employee wants and needs >>

2. Different service departments coming together

More often than not, service departments such as IT, Facility, and HR work in silos. When you break those silos all of your service departments come together to join forces.

So why is that a good thing?

Your service departments have no choice but to work together to provide top-notch services.

Let’s say you get feedback from your coworkers about meeting rooms that are often fully booked, while no one’s actually using them. To fix this problem, you decide to place sensors that measure whether someone’s using the room or not. You have to connect these sensors via WiFi. But FM alone can’t handle this – they need help from IT. And whose sensors are they anyway? Is FM or IT responsible for maintenance? 

Service departments need each other more and more – not only because of smart technology, but also because of high customer expectations. Your customers expect meeting rooms with intuitive technology that support Bring Your Own Device and a flawless on- and offboarding process. This may seem impossible, but despair not: you can meet all of these demands with a joint approach. This means different teams don’t work in their own bubble, but work together to ensure the best possible service. 

Utrecht University embarked on its very own ESM journey. Find out how their service departments started working together>>

3. Cost reduction

If service departments combine forces, they should also work in the same software. Using the same tool across service departments reduces costs in two ways. First of all, you no longer waste money on double licenses and you prevent your employees doing work twice, since your departments will know exactly who does what. Your assets will no longer be registered in a different tool at IT, HR, and FM and working together will be easier and much more transparent. 

In addition, you make the customer journey simpler, which is in itself a cost reduction. If a customer has no clue where to make a request, they might need half an hour to ask their question to begin with. With a single point of contact, it might only take him five minutes, which leaves 25 minutes for him to focus on the things he does best.

This is why a single point of contact is essential for enterprise service management >>

Ready to take the next step?

Now that you know what the value of ESM is, it’s time to introduce it at your service desk. Learn more about the three routes you can take to launch ESM in your organization in this blog. Do you want to improve your customer satisfaction, work together more, and get those costs down? Download our e-book to find out how to reap the benefits of true collaboration!