5 Helpful Service Desk Integrations That Improve Efficiency

There are a number of helpful service desk integrations that help organizations connect ITSM technologies to third-party applications. 

Service desks integrations include: 

• Business intelligence (BI) tools
• Development tools
• Customer service tools
• Knowledge tools
• Other service desks

Organizations that integrate their service desk with 3rd-party applications, can provide a better experience for customers and employees alike.

While insightful, service desk data can be difficult to use and gain value from. Organizations that want to make use of service desk data often opt to extract, and replicate it within another tool where it can better benefit the organization.

Well-integrated solutions enable data to flow seamlessly between applications, enabling data replication between solutions and inter-application workflows.

This enables greater data visibility and more informed insight across the enterprise.

Following, are examples of tools that can be integrated with an organization’s service desk to benefit the enterprise: 

Service Desk Integrations Explained

Business Intelligence Tools

Companies with service desks generally have separate business intelligence (BI) tools. They find that they can create more robust reports by combining service-desk data with their own data repositories and perhaps by running reports in their BI tool rather than in their service desk.

When an organization runs reports in their service desk, the service desk’s resources are consumed for that operation, slowing down other operations within the service desk. 

Integrating service desk solutions with BI tools allows for the dynamic, automated replication of individual changes from the service desk to BI tools. 

This enables organizations to run analytics on real-time synced data outside of the service desk to alleviate latency within the service desk tool. This helps BI teams deliver custom reports more quickly or build on their existing repertoire of reporting services.

Integrating service desk and business intelligence tools allows organizations to:

• Run more robust reports/analytics
• Combine service desk data with other organizational data
• Avoid service-desk performance impacts

Development Tools

Sometimes, service desks open a ticket that development teams must address. Closing out a service desk ticket and transferring it to a development tool can limit customer’s visibility into their request.

Integrating your service desk with your development tool increases the customer experience by allowing them to gain visibility into their requests, without changing applications.

End-to-end visibility and real-time synchronization of tickets between service desks and development tools helps developers in planning development sprints. Additionally historical data from the service desk can be used to more accurately plan for future resource allocation.

Integrating service desk and development tools allows organizations to:

• Enhance visibility for customers and development team
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Prepare for development sprints

Customer Service Tools

Integrating service desks and CRM tools leads to better relationships with customers.

The process is more efficient, as the customer avoids the hassle of repeating what the organization already has logged in a different system. It also helps improve the customer portal by providing a complete view, including a comprehensive profile, incident status and billing status.

With streamlined views and processes in place, the integration helps organizations meet the service level agreements (SLA) with customers.

In addition to improving customer service, an integrated system gives your organization better visibility for individual users and for groups, giving you the ability to track trends with better accuracy.

Integrating service desk and CRM tools allows organizations to:

• Give agents a 360° view
• Reduce inefficiency and error
• Enhance customer relationships
• Improve visibility for relevant departments across the enterprise

Knowledge Tools

Customers are more likely to engage in self-service when the service desk gives customers the knowledge they need before they choose to report an incident.

Integrating a service desk with knowledge repositories helps organizations more accurately provide their customers with possible solutions right away, reducing escalation. This helps reduce support costs.

Where a customer does reach out to support teams, service desk to knowledge tools integrations also help support employees access relevant information, without needing to search within a different tool. 

Allowing direct access to knowledge from the service desk means solving problems more quickly and increasing customer satisfaction.

Integrating service desk and knowledge tools allows organizations to:

• Reduce support costs
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Empower the service desk staff
• Maintain a single repository for all relevant knowledge

Other Service Desks

Sometimes, organizations want to connect to service desks. For example, to connect a managed service-provider’s instance with a customer’s instance. Whether you are the service provider or its customer, such an integration enhances service for the end-user.

When an organization has its own testing or development instance that is separate from the production instance, it reduces the risk of rollout errors.

Integrating multiple service desks allows organizations to:

• Sync with service providers or customers for maximum user benefit
• Ensure the quality of development efforts
• Reduce costs and brand impacts from problematic rollouts

How To Integrate 3rd-Party Applications with Your Service Desk

Integrating service desks with 3rd-party applications enables inter-application workflows, by allowing data to pass seamlessly between tools. To achieve this, organizations need the capability to extract data from one tool and replicate it to another. 

The problem is, popular service desk solutions such as ServiceNow can be difficult to extract data from. To facilitate data extraction and integrate a service desk with third-party applications, organizations have the following options:

Manual Service Desk Integrations

At small scales, extraction and replication can be handled manually. This is often dubbed the swivel-chair approach as the employee – i.e. a service desk admin – must manually extract data from one application, change applications (“swivel”) and copy it over. 

But even at small scales this approach increases the potential for human-error.

At large scales, or for organizations scaling up, the data volumes and data needs of the enterprise make a manual approach unsustainable.

DIY/Custom Service Desk Integrations

Where the manual approach does not meet requirements, organizations sometimes opt to build an integration solution in-house. Custom integrations negate the need to manually extract and replicate data from one solution to another. This frees up employee time to work on more proactive tasks.

But typically, these integrations take considerable time to build and come with the obvious costs of labor hours and resources required to implement the integration. There are also hidden costs that organizations often underestimate.

Once built, the integration must be maintained. The cost of maintaining the integration is also often underestimated. Custom integrations often fail, resulting in costly data losses and increased resolution times.

After successive failures, organizations may choose to monitor the integration more closely, further consuming employee resources. Additionally, custom integrations must be made compatible with new upgrades, again, requiring employee resources. 

Organizations should also be wary of any performance issues associated with their custom integration.

Organizations using service desk solutions such as ServiceNow, use web tools to facilitate integrations. However, since ServiceNow is itself a web tool, the custom integration solution shares the same bandwidth ServiceNow uses to run queries. 

This limits the speed at which data can be extracted, and also impacts ServiceNow query speed. Ultimately, this dynamic limits the enterprise’s capacity to synchronize data between two tools in real-time. 

Native Service Desk Integrations

By leveraging a native application to facilitate service desk integrations, organizations can avoid the manual approach to data extraction and replication, as with custom integrations.

But where custom integrations for service desk solutions like ServiceNow limit instance performance, a native application can leverage push technology to extract and replicate data without a noticeable impact. This enables the best possible throughput.

For organizations that want readily available data and a healthy, efficient service desk environment, this capability is essential.

Perspectium is a native application for ServiceNow integrations that helps organizations avoid the issues with, and hidden costs of custom-built integrations. 

With Perspectium, ServiceNow users move tens of millions of records a day without a noticeable impact to performance. ServiceNow even use Perspectium internally.

Whether you need to connect your service desk with other service management tools, big data repositories, enterprise applications or your customer and suppliers, Perspectium will implement, monitor and maintain those connections – giving you one less thing to worry about.

The Perspectium Pedigree

At Perspectium, we have hundreds of years of collective experience in service management, and bring a deep understanding of ITSM processes with our solutions.

We ensure that information is in the right place at the right time, complete with the data control, high availability and throughput demanded by modern enterprises. 

We take responsibility for getting your data from A to B. There’s nothing for you to write, assemble or maintain – we deliver solutions that are complete from end-to-end.

All delivered as a subscription service with 24/7 support, in monitored and automated data centers, with onboarding and any customizations included.

Need help with your ServiceNow integration project? Speak to us.