Best Practice for designing Request Offerings is to always set a Unique ID for your Request Offering form controls.
Unique ID plays a critical Design & Architecture Role
Unique ID is the Parameter Name which in turn is used for searches, filters, and reporting for Service Requests.
Don’t Do This!
What if you don’t set unique id? You will be in a world of pain when you try to search, filter, or report on Service Request Parameters. In the example above you can see the unique id for the Approving Manager for example is combo_10. That’s not meaningful now is it.
You always want to set a your Unique ID to a meaningful name.
Do That!
But that’s not all… You have many request offerings which have many service request parameters. So you need to use consistent unique id’s across all your request offerings.
Use a Data Dictionary for your Service Request Parameters and use it whenever you’re defining Unique IDs to look up existing Unique IDs and to add new ones.
One of the most under-utilized features of Ivanti Service Manager (HEAT Call Logging System) is the Self Service Portal.
Some organizations are hesitant to roll out Self Service, other companies simply don’t know where to start, and then there is the huge price tag from Ivanti Business Partners that lack consultative approach and are prone to utilize scope of work templates and cookie cutter ivanti implementation project plans that under-utilize Self Service.
What are the benefits of Self Service?
The self-service portal is more than the name implies. From experience and past Ivanti Implementations I can tell you that my customers have experienced a 50% drop of service desk calls and emails (shift left methodology), on average, with IT service desk resources freed up, and intangibles like increased customer satisfaction, plus well streamlined Service Request workflows.
Shift-Left Methodology is where it’s at. Enabling the customer to self-resolve incidents, request services, and monitor the progress of incidents and service requests. And that’s not all, HR Onboarding, Off Boarding, and Change Requests can be automated as well.
Self Service not only replaces online forms, intranet sites with pdf forms, and the underlying administrative burden, or worse yet, paper forms. but better yet, Self Services improves data capture and underlying workflows significantly, improving Service Delivery timeframes.
Beyond the typical Service Desk implementation of self service, there are advanced implementations for self-service kiosks and online booking & reservation systems.
One of my clients, the City of Brampton implemented self-service kiosks and an online booking system for their parking authority and had this to say:
“Gregor was able to implement what everyone else said couldn’t be done! A booking and reservation system for our parking authority. Now citizens of the City are able to reserve daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly parking passes. Gregor delivered what other consultants said was impossible.”
First and foremost you want to do an intake of your top obstacles and challenges, see my Ivanti Implementation Poll for ideas, and then contact a seasoned consultant. Why? You are not getting the most out of your Ivanti Implementation until you talk to me. Guaranteed.
With Covid-19 the world has been turned upside down. Customer Service in many industries is facing an influx of calls, emails. Air Asia has done a great job implementing AI to deal with flight cancellations and issuing credits. Ivanti Service Manager will be adding AI functionality very soon (stay tuned on some great examples and ideas for your company’s implementation).
What can you do now to streamline customer service and service desk processes for Covid-19?
Self Service Request Offerings
Where you are in the travel or hotel industry or an organization dealing with IT infrastructure strategies for remote works, Ivanti Service Manger can help.
Use Anonymous Forms
You can set up Anonymous Login in situations where not all customer, employee, or account data is available or configured.
Implement simple Self Service Request Offerings
Make forms easy and simple to use by requesting and requiring only absolutely essential information such as a unique identifiers, such as email address, reference number, booking code, asset tag, etc. as well as contact information (again email address) and phone number, or shipping location.
Use dropdowns or radio buttons to identify the type of inquiry or better direct the inquiry. This is very powerful if you create a generic request form and then have options to better channel those requests. Think workflow, tasks assignment, approvals, which can be configured based on cases.
Going back to my example with Air Asia, I was prompted for my Booking Reference #, Last Name, travel origin, and type of request (rebook, credit). Upon providing all the information I was provided a credit to my account for my flight.
To implement the same functionality within Self Service you would create a request offering, with anonymous login if your target audience does not have logins, with all the above mentioned information, along with requester contact email address, and then in your workflow configure the path based on the type of request and forward to the corresponding team or notify the corresponding department to process the request. Upon completion Ivanti Service Manager can be configured to send out the corresponding closure notification to the requester.
ITSM/ITAM/ESM Blog 
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