Rajeev Goyal
ServiceNow Practice Head
November 14, 2024
Collaborate with Royal Cyber to Create ServiceNow Service Catalogs
What are Service Catalogs?
Service Catalogs are not just a list, they are a comprehensive repository of your organization’s services and solutions. They are a powerful tool that can significantly enhance customer satisfaction, streamline operations, and improve service delivery. By quickly enabling users to identify potential self-service areas, they boost customer satisfaction and serve as one of the crucial ITSM best practices. Their importance cannot be overstated, making their implementation urgent.
This blog aims to showcase the importance of creating service catalogs for businesses to help users and customers better understand what the organization offers. And how it can help customers interact with the organization better through these catalogs to fulfill requests or troubleshoot issues. In addition, we will take a deep dive into our unique and innovative catalog creation process with the help of the ServiceNow service catalog. This process is sure to pique your interest and provide valuable insights.
Types of Service Catalogs and How to Build Them
There are two types of service catalogs: business service catalog and technical service catalog.
Business service catalogs are shared with customers and users and help the organization articulate what it has to offer. When connected to a web catalog, they are utilized explicitly for referencing and ordering services. Technical service catalogs contain the information the company needs to provide delivery and support services to customers. Without it, there is no visibility into how underlying components support the service in meeting customer needs. There are several steps organizations need to consider when creating catalogs:
- Define the purpose of the catalog being created.
- Get detailed information for explicit descriptions of what each service offers and the benefits to the user.
- Create a proper structure for the catalog flow to help make the navigation easier.
- Design the catalog for improved engagement and leverage pre-built templates to streamline the process.
- Test the catalog journey by getting feedback from users through testing.
ServiceNow Service Catalog is not just another tool; it’s a game-changer that builds engaging, detailed catalogs. Its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features make it the perfect tool to help your organization create compelling service catalogs. With ServiceNow Service Catalog, you can be confident in its effectiveness in simplifying the catalog creation process, freeing up your time and resources for other important tasks.
ServiceNow Service Catalog
With ServiceNow Service Catalog, organizations can help employees and clients fulfill their requests and carry out self-service through user-friendly catalogs.
- Service Catalog Builder: The Service Catalog Builder experience allows users to create or modify catalog items or record producers with specific limitations. This feature also enables users to delegate the task of creating and maintaining the catalog to others.
- Service Catalog Wizard: When the catalog information is large and complex, build multi-step catalog experiences with the Service Catalog Wizard within the UI Builder.
- Service Catalog Item Designer: Create, maintain, and publish catalog items with the Service Catalog Item Designer. Non-administrators can use this feature because it uses a structured design and publishing process to ensure consistency of usage.
There are several benefits to using this tool:
- Increased accessibility with customers being able to use self-service capabilities
- Faster service delivery through timely and detailed service requests improves operational efficiency.
- Achieve complete visibility over the services and products offered and delivered to customers. Service Catalog has mobile integration capabilities to track request and approval flows.
- Improve the software development lifecycle for IT departments with a user-friendly and guided experience.
- ServiceNow Service Catalog can be integrated with products such as Service Portal and Employee Center. Developers can also add Service Catalog topic blocks to the Virtual Agent powered by NLU and LLM to perform request submission tasks.
When creating the catalogs, it is essential to have the right team to ensure that all services are represented accurately and that the standard catalog items are presented user-friendly while also being released quickly for customer and user access. Creating catalogs can be a long, drawn-out process, which, therefore, requires the services of an expert team. This is where Royal Cyber steps in.
How Royal Cyber Built Service Catalogs for an Insurance Client
This section overviews our process of creating catalogs for a leading insurance company. To create the catalogs efficiently, we went through a 12-stage process called the “Story Lifecycle”. This journey, starting with the “Draft” stage and culminating in “Complete,” ensured that every catalog aspect was meticulously reviewed, tested, and approved. The process was designed to be thorough, with occasional cancellations to ensure the final product met the client’s expectations. The diagram below provides a detailed overview of this journey:
The workflow operates as follows: The process starts with creating and assigning the catalog, following which the developer contacts the subject matter experts and process owners and creates code for it. After the catalog is created, the business analyst and process owner review it while it is being tested. Following the catalog’s approval, the requestor puts it through UAT (user acceptance testing), and once the catalog clears, it is put into production.
Automated Task Allocation for Each Stage of the Catalog Creation Cycle
At each stage of the story lifecycle, several tasks were automatically assigned to different team members to be carried out throughout the catalog creation process. The diagram below represents the automatic tasks assigned for each stage.
Time Measurement of Each Stage of the Catalog Creation Lifecycle
Efficiency is one of the critical parameters that must be measured when changing any process. Therefore, even with our custom catalog creation process, our team’s primary goal is to ensure no bottlenecks and smooth movement between the different stages in the lifecycle.
As the diagram above shows, the average time for the service catalog creation process has steadily decreased thanks to our process. Initially, creating a catalog took almost three months. However, as of last week, it was found to take around 40 days (about 1 and a half months), thanks to our custom process and focus on remediating the bottlenecks. Therefore, by having visibility into how long the process takes within each stage of the lifecycle, our team can identify any obstacles that need to be resolved and ensure better operational efficiency.
Why Choose Royal Cyber to Create ServiceNow Service Catalogs:
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