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We are currently trying to design our service catalogue in our new customer portal and are really struggling with software in the catalogue. 

Our current system is an intranet page where people scroll through nearly 100 items in a single list, which is not a great user experience.  

We have reviewed the current list and got it down to about 60 items but it’s still a lot.  

We’ve tried to think up categories, so we can display it better but it’s hard to define in terms of what the customer thinks a piece of software belongs to category wise!   

We will obviously be using the main search functionality, which should help, but I just thought I would ask the community how they have tried to get around this problem?

 

Thanks

Phil.

@pcooke I know @BarclayRae has some good guidance on service catalogues. I’m sure he’ll chip in once he sees this :)

For our categories we have things like:

Application Access - request access to an application

Hardware Requests

Azure Infrastructure

HR Management

Guest Access Request

then we have things that are really unique to us

Power BI Requests

Company Product Name Requests

Special Projects

 

Really depends on how your users request things.  We mapped the requests to how our flows work as well so HR Management requests are only seen by HR department. Azure Infrastructure are only seen by Development team, etc.

 

Hope that helps.

Hello @pcooke you can also limit visibility of individual items by driving your users to first select a category like @PatrickMurphy mentioned. This will help narrow the amount of items to shift through right from the beginning. This does take a little change to the code base for the support portal but if you reach out to support@freshservice.com they can help set that up for you.

Hope that helps.

Just to add, I've started using additional items on catalog items. I asked support to help me hide an area called "additional items" and put them in there. The can be referenced from other forms then but can't be selected on their own.

 

It's another option anyway. 

The best way will depend on your the way your organisation perceives the information, not the way IT does!

 

IT we’d do it by tech stack, authentication method, what’s similar. The customer is going to perceive it from their position within the organisation and who they perceive owns the software. 

 

A blind guess, not knowing your business I would go

  • Finance - Payroll, invoicing, AP
  • People - Travel, HR, training, learning, talent, hiring
  • Productivity - Office, Project, Primavera, Monday 
  • Collaboration - Teams, Chat, Slack, Miro, Trello
  • Software Dev - Jira, Jenkins, GitHub
  • Sales - CRM, Hubspot etc
  • Specialist Software to your business Group A...B...C

Hi @pcooke, 

 

Thank you for reaching out! 

To show the right service items to your customers please follow the below steps, 

 

  • Place your users in appropriate requester groups. 
  • Create service items and set visibility restrictions and make the item available only for certain requester groups. 
  • Classify and label the Service categories based on Requester groups and the items they will require. 
  • For items that should be shared between two groups, duplicate with an additional name. 

 

Hope this helps! :) 

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