Service Request Approval
Improve employee productivity through faster service request approval
While IT service requests are often a lower priority than incidents, they sometimes need to be handled quickly. This need for speed might be due to a compelling operational business need, a requirement to ensure employee safety, or another reason that means fulfilling a service request is a priority.
Some request types can be “preapproved” to speed up their provisioning. But for requests where hierarchical or financial approval is still needed, any delays in request approval or, more accurately, the inability of request approvers to do what they need to do as efficiently as possible can cause employee and operational issues.
Managing high-priority service requests efficiently and effectively
An organisation can’t wait for employees to see some types of request-approval emails in their email inboxes. Not only does this cause unnecessary provisioning delays, but it might also adversely affect business operations and outcomes. Instead, optimised service request management capabilities need a more effective mechanism for communicating high-priority service-request approvals. Plus, driving the necessary actions.
This way of working needs to remove the unwanted delays caused by email – especially when email is not deemed an important communication channel by some.
The problem
A leading, global advisory and brokerage firm was struggling with unwanted delays in its service request provisioning – with the bottleneck identified as request approvers missing the related emails in their busy inboxes and often made worse by the failure to immediately take action due to the requirement to access the source system to better understand and complete the approval need.
It realised that addressing the delayed service request provisioning issue needed a more effective way of communicating approval requests to authorised personnel and enabling their actions.
Improving service request approval with Heed
After considering various potential improvement opportunities, the organisation now uses the Heed proactive messaging workflow platform to help employees efficiently see and approve their waiting service-request approvals. Heed suitably prioritises an approver’s request-related communications within a consolidated message stream and, where necessary, it also pushes these messages as device-based notifications.
Importantly, a single request approval message provides the company’s employees with everything they need to action the service request – both the relevant request information for decision-making and an action button. Plus, any request approvals that no longer require the employee’s attention are automatically removed from their message stream to avoid unnecessary time-wasting across approval groups.
With Heed, employees can quickly respond to incoming service-request approval communications, which means faster provisioning that drives better business operations and outcomes.
How Heed helped
With Heed, the organisation’s IT department no longer waits unnecessarily on request approvers to action service requests in a timely fashion.
Notable benefits include:
- Shorter provisioning times and higher customer satisfaction for service requests that require approval
- Fewer employee and business issues caused by delayed provisioning
- A reduction in service request handling costs of $750,000
- A reduction in the average approval time from 1 week to 2 days
- A reduction in unnecessary requests of 25%
