Discover the top 5 ITSM market trends for 2022, from employee experience in a hybrid workplace and automation to process hacking.

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What does an ITSM tool cost? Although this is a complicated question to answer, because there are so many factors to weigh up. Read the blog.

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In this blog, we’ve compiled a list of 5 key questions to ask yourself when comparing ITSM providers, to help you find your perfect match.

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Read the stories of 3 IT departments who reduced their workload with TOPdesk's ITSM tool. Now they have time for things that truly matter.

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Could it be possible that historical paintings could capture the experience of an IT help desk worker? Absolutely, with memes.

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Discover the 3 biggest advantages of modern ITSM solution for your IT service desk, ITSM tools improve efficiency and empower your end-users.

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How can you reduce the number of incoming calls and the average duration of the calls you do receive? Knowledge management is the answer.

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There’s been an ever-growing interest in self-service and automation the last few years. And that’s great! It has a ton of benefits for service desks. But some questions still arise: does it create new work? Will it take away my work? Find out the answers in this blog.

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Stop reinventing the wheel with every call: use the collective knowledge of the service desk to solve calls with knowledge management best practices.

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How can you successfully implement digital self-service at your service desk? Find out what you should – and shouldn’t – be doing.

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Life at the service desk can get tricky. Feeling like pulling your hair out? Use these 7 life hacks to feel on top of the world again in no time.

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What are the benefits of knowledge management for your service desk? Read why you should invest in KCS and calculate how much time it’ll save.

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By leveraging service desk automation, service desk employees can spend their time doing what they do best: using their expertise to resolve complex calls.

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Wondering what the top 5 service management trends will be in 2021? If so, look no further. Check out this blog to find out our expert predictions.

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Industry expert Stephen Mann dives into ITAM vs ITSM. What exactly is IT Asset Management (ITAM) and how does it relate to ITSM?

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What is shadow IT? Read the answers to 5 frequently asked questions about shadow IT and find out how to manage shadow IT in your organization.

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Ready to start customer journey mapping? Find out what happens when Oliver requests a laptop from your IT department with our simple customer journey map!

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What does the Shared Services Manager role entail? Stephen Mann shares the 7 responsibilities and ideal traits of a shared services manager.

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Industry expert Doug Tedder explains how to improve collaboration between departments and takes away the main barriers.

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How does your organization stand out from the crowd now that digitalization is the new normal? Thought leader Steven van Belleghem reveals his three tips!

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How do you implement a shared services model? Learn how to make the most of the benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM).

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Transform the service departments in your organization into business partners and add continuous value with the TOPdesk Service Excellence Maturity Model.

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Digitalization is no longer a novelty. Nancy Rademaker reveals why employee engagement and customer experience go hand in hand with digital transformation.

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Change management processes can be overly complicated at times. Find out how to simplify your change management process and make it easier for everyone.

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Once you get to return to the office, service departments are key in accommodating office social distancing. Use these tips to make the return go smoothly.

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Which Sesame Street character at the service desk are you? Take the quiz to find out and download our Microsoft Teams background for your next video call.

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Scrum and agile are hot topics. But how does agile ITSM work? And how can you apply scrum to your IT team?

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The service desk as we know it won’t exist anymore in 2030. But what will it look like instead? Let’s take a look at the service desk of the future.

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What causes panic at your service desk? We share 4 scenarios that send your service desk’s panic levels through the roof – and look at possible solutions.

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How do you launch Enterprise Service Management in your organization? Reap the benefits of working together with one of our three routes to planet ESM.

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Doug Tedder explains why having a single point of contact (SPOC) is so important for ESM. Discover which 7 steps to take towards your very own SPOC today.

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What is swarming? Find out how it compares to the traditional three-tiered support model and why it’s more about culture than structure.

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Discover how to make your Service Level Agreements actually work with industry expert Stephen Mann’s five SLA best practices.

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Find out the secret ingredients of successful organizational culture that’ll make your employees thrive.

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ESM, or Enterprise Service Management, means working together with service departments such as IT, Facilities, or HR. Read how it benefits organizations.

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How can you say goodbye to service desk stress? Our 5 tips help you add value to your organization while making your employees happier at the same time.

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Do you work at a municipality and are you responsible for IT or citizen support? Our expert Wouter explains why your two departments need to join forces.

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Struggling to balance security and employee experience? Check out our comprehensive guide on how to maintain security when employees work remotely.

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Curious how your service teams can help save the earth? We share 6 tips for Earth Day projects that’ll help your organization go green.

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Want to know the secret to improving your customer experience? Find out how customer journey mapping and customer journey touch points can help you.

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Setting targets for your department. Easier said than done. Where do you start? Service desk KPIs are the answer. Find out the lowdown on KPIs here.

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Spoiler alert: the ITIL service lifecycle is gone in ITIL 4. But don’t worry: it isn’t dead and you can still use it. Find out what your three options are.

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Can you improve the forms you use and make them more customer-centric? Find out how to improve your self-service portal with these best practices.

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How can your IT service desk create even more value? Stephen Mann shares five ITIL incident management best practices that’ll improve your IT service desk.

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Want to know how your customers really feel about your services? Ask them! Use these 10 methods of obtaining customer feedback to find out.

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How can you justify adopting problem management? Read these 10 practical problem management tips to get started.

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An Enterprise Service Management case in action: how Utrecht University embarked on their very own ESM journey – and what good it did them.

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One of the hardest things for service desk staff is saying no to requests. But it’s necessary. How can you say no and still leave your customer satisfied?

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The change process can be long and tedious, slowing down your organization. Time to reinvent your CAB. Here’s how.

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Many organizations only use ITIL problem management tools and techniques in a reactive way – usually in response to a major incident. And that’s a problem.

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What do terms like RPA and SIAM mean? And how can they benefit service delivery? We collected a list of today’s most relevant IT service management terms.

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Before we dive into this new decade, we’re taking a step back to look at the year that has passed. Here are the top IT Service Management stories of 2019.

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Your service desk likely won’t be affected by snow storms or a pilots’ strike. But you can still learn from self service failure in the airline industry.

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Now that IT organizations are outsourcing more services, SIAM is becoming more and more relevant. But what exactly is SIAM? And does it really help?

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How will ITSM change this year? We collected the 5 most relevant ITSM trends 2020 that will change service management.

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Make the most of Cyber Monday and surprise your employees with original festive season gifts. By doing a bit extra you’ll reap double benefits. Read this blog for 7 tips!

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ITSM & DevOps: Friends or foes? Spoiler: It’s friends. Pacing is the challenge, communication is the key.

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Intrinsic motivation is the major factor that makes a good service desk employee. But how do you select team members based on this character trait?

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It’s October again. It’s time for Halloween, so it’s the season to be scared. It’s probably not a coincidence that October is also Cyber Security Awareness Month, because if there’s one thing that keeps IT departments everywhere up at night, it’s security breaches. Here are five common cyber security fears

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Do your service desk employees perceive chatbots as a threat? Put their minds at rest. Chatbots don’t work under their own steam, but rather in collaboration with people. Keen to learn more? Frank Smit, Chief Innovation Officer at our partner OBI4wan, explains what chatbots are and which processes you can (and cannot) utilize them for.

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We’ve designed a Service Desk Bingo card that contains a number of common scenarios. How quickly can your team chalk up a full house?

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Why are some companies so much better at embracing the digital era than others? Peter Hinssen gives the answer in less than 3 minutes.

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Setting up Problem Management can seem like another job to add to your already packed list. Here are 5 Problem Management best practices to help you along.

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Knowledge management sounds promising, but you have to do it right. Discover the secret of successful knowledge management in this video.

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Your service desk is customer-oriented, but your KPI is the number of processed calls. Sounds familiar? Here’s 4 customer satisfaction KPIs to track.

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Trendwatcher and futurist Richard van Hooijdonk thinks technology is changing faster than people keep up. Watch the video for his solution.

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The priority equation ‘Impact x Urgency’ isn’t as simple as it may seem. Here’s how to handle Incident Management with the Incident Priority Matrix.

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AI is quite the buzzword, but what will it actually do for your services? Is it that great, or is it a hype that will fizzle out as quickly as it came up?

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The basic idea behind shift left is simple: IT brings solutions they provide closer to the customer. These are the five core benefits of Shifting Left.

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What’s your sysadmin superpower? Do you solve every problem, are you the protector, the geek or a legend? Test it with our system administrator quiz!

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Soft skills are indispensable for your IT department. Do you want to convey technical knowledge in an understandable way? These are the 9 skills to master!

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Delivering great service requires collaboration between various departments. Enterprise Service Management (ESM). When you adopt an ESM approach, you force yourself to look at your services from your customer’s point of view.

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Got your KCS system set up? KCS is more than just a process. Get your teams ready to make KCS successful in your organization. Preparation is everything.

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How to improve your Customer Experience without increasing your budget? Here’s one idea you can steal from your sales team.

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How to get Knowledge Management right? Based on years of experience, my team and I have made a 6-step plan for successfully implementing KCS.

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Are personality tests worthwhile? And can they promote teamwork on your service desk? Our conclusion: they are useful, but not the be-all and end-all.

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How do you win customers over to use your self service portal? We’re applying Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion to this challenge.

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Lean is all about optimizing customer value delivery and making processes as efficient as possible. How can Lean help you improve your service management?

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AI is becoming important in the service industry. Is AI influencing the role of service desk employees? We asked the makers of ‘digital colleague’ Amelia.

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Did you know May 25 is Geek Pride Day? People use this day to acknowledge their geekiness and spread it to other people. In the spirit of Geek Pride, we’ve decided to share 10 things geeky about TOPdesk.

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Disgruntled employees complain about their colleagues being unhelpful and many other things. Happy service desk employees do exist. So, what’s the secret?

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How self-sufficient are your service desk customers? In this blog post, we explain 3 ways in which AI can help make your customers more self-sufficient.

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What is VeriSM? How do you apply VeriSM in service management? Trends come and go. For every trend, the question is: how will it help your service desk? Service management expert Gunnar Oldenhof explains VeriSM.

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Are you helping your employees find a new challenge within the company? If your service desk employees have grown, there’s a good chance that they will go to another employer. Don’t want your talents to leave? Help them to find a new challenge.

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Game of Thrones is coming to its 8th and final season. Now before we get all teary-eyed and find out who ends up on the Iron Throne, we’d like to share 4 insight that the series’ characters impart about customer service that you can use at your service desk.

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Augmented Intelligence is part of Artificial Intelligence. Augmented Intelligence focuses on software that thinks along with people and can take over small repetitive tasks. Are you worried that AI will take over the world? No need. AI is there to help you.

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It happens. Your best database specialist decides to leave. Or the one service desk employee all your customers love. How do you respond? Are you happy for them? Or disappointed? How you respond makes all the difference for your success in managing and retaining talent in your organization.

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If you’re looking at better knowledge sharing in your organisation, one of the biggest knowledge management challenges is preparing your service desk for the change in operations. Discover how you can overcome them.

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Everybody wants to design great experiences for their customers. But how do you do that? To give you some inspiration, I’m sharing some of my favorite articles on designing great Customer Experience.

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How do you apply the Agile principle of ‘working software over comprehensive documentation’ to improve your service catalogue? Here are 4 tips for creating a successful digital service catalogue.

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Improve your customer experience by mapping out customer journeys to give you an idea of how your customer percieves your service delivery.

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After a self-service implementation, it’s never easy getting your customers to use your self-service features. Sometimes it’s even harder than getting people to try green eggs and ham. Welcome to Dr Seuss’ service desk.

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Last week saw the publication of the first part of ITIL 4: ITIL Foundation. This long read answers all your burning questions. Such as: What’s new in ITIL 4? And does the new ITIL version help you adapt to developments such as agile and DevOps?

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According to the Agile Manifesto, customer collaboration goes beyond contract negotiation. You can use this principle to professionalize your service catalogue. But how do you go about increasing customer satisfaction through your service catalogue?

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A digital workforce is a collection of “software robots” that support and augment the work humans do. Robots can be faster and more efficient. But the digital workforce at the service desk won’t replace service desk staff any time soon. Here’s why.

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When creating your team, do you choose personality over skills? Hiring the right people is essential for creating a successful organization. But how do you hire the right people? When recruiting new colleagues, it’s essential to focus on their personality, not just their skills.

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Introducing Scrum is often too rigorous a tool for improving the service delivery of your agile service desk. Instead, try Kanban.

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You don’t get satisfied customers by trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes it’s better to outsource certain tasks. But how much should you outsource if you want to increase customer satisfaction?

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Your service catalogue only has value for your organization when it’s up to date. But how do you ensure that your team actually makes time to regular update the service catalogue? My advice: an agile service catalogue.

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What will happen in the ITSM world this year? Which new trends will pop up? And how will current trends develop? 5 ITSM trends from A.I. to ESM.

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Are you about to merge two or more service desks? Perhaps due to a merger of companies, or a centralization within your organization? The key is drafting a service catalogue together. Here’s why.

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Agile is used more and more in other departments as well, including the world of IT. Still, the question at many organizations remains: how? How do we combine Agile with how we’ve been working for years? Bimodal IT is the answer.

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Are you planning an improvement project within your organization? Consider performing a baseline measurement first. You’ll increase the chance of success.

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In this video series, we explain an ITSM concept in about 60 seconds. This week: the service catalogue. What is it? And how does it help you do your work better?

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Omotenashi comes down to three core values: anticipate the customer needs, attention to detail and genuinely appreciate that the customer came to you. Try to incorporate each of the three core values of Omotenashi into the service delivery of your service desk.

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ITIL 4 has been launched. What will be changing? And is ITIL still relevant or not? We asked Bas Blanken, service management consultant & agile expert.

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In this video series, we explain an ITSM concept in about 60 seconds. This week: KCS, a.k.a. Knowledge-Centered Service. What is it? And how does it help you do your work better?

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Customer satisfaction or customer loyalty? What matters for a service provider is whether customers will keep coming back to you and will stay loyal.

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So, you want to use feedback to improve your service department. But where do you start? Gökhan Tuna, customer feedback expert at TOPdesk, has got a tip for you. It sounds counter-intuitive, but you get more out of the feedback you receive if you focus on the negative.

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Shared services is a cooperation between supporting departments. Learn what is shared services and how it improves your service delivery in 60 seconds.

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How do you measure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty? Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and the Net Promotor Score (NPS) aren’t good predictors of customer loyalty. I’m sharing a method that works well for predicting customer satisfaction and customer loyalty: the Customer Effort Score (CES).

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What do IT customer satisfaction and the cloud have in common? The cloud enables service providers to achieve better customer satisfaction. By outsourcing the technological preconditions, we’re able to save time and focus on what customers really need.

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In this video series, we explain an ITSM concept in about 60 seconds. This week, we focus on Shift Lift. What is it? And how does it help you improve your service delivery?

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Artificial Intelligence – AI – is a popular topic at service management events. It’s exciting and full of promise for a brighter future. But what are the advantages of AI? How will AI help you improve your service management? Geoffrey Simpson, expert and Product Owner at TOPdesk answers these questions.

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We understand that IT managers get a lot of questions because we get them too. Below are some of our favorite funny questions from our own employees.

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The good news is, working in Service Management, interviews with staff members are often easy to set up. After all, they work at the same office building as you and are often willing to share how they’ve experienced your services. To make sure you maximise this potential, here are 8 tips to help you make the most of these interviews.

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ITSM is always changing. We’re constantly developing new technologies in a bid to make businesses run more efficiently. While that’s all well and good, we seem to have forgotten why we invest in these advances: to benefit people.

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We’re continuing our exploration into Agile Service Management – to find ways you can make your Service Desk operations more speedy and less rigid. Let’s continue by exploring Agile Change Management. How does it work in practice?

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Employee experience is about offering employees a good working experience. Learn what is employee experience, how to improve it, what the role of ITSM is.

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In this blog, I’ll go through some nifty ideas for everything from problem detection to logging your problems. It will be step-by-step based, so for some more over-arching best practices to keep in mind while implementing better Problem Management you can read my other Problem Management blog.

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Traditional Change management can be long-winded and rigid. How do you make your change management process more agile? In this post in our agile blog series, we’ll discuss agile Change Management and a more agile approach to change requests?

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You want to meet your incident management targets, we all do. But what incident management KPIs should you focus on? And what targets should you aim for?

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When you’re tracking customer experience, simplicity is key. These are the most important customer experience KPIs to keep an eye on.

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Good help desk software will help streamline your day-to-day help desk operations. It often includes a ticketing system for your IT, FM or HR customers.

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You’re about to launch a Self-Service Portal. That should be the perfect solution to help your service department improve customer experience and lower costs at the same time. However, for that to happen it’s obviously important that your customers use it. Communicate the ease of a self-service.

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It makes sense, right? Why XLAs matter for your service delivery? If our only performance metric is how many tickets we solve within what time, or how many knowledge items we create – is anyone actually assessing the quality of what we produce?

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With so many counters your customers don’t always understand where to request which service. Enterprise Service Management improves the user experience.

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You can approach agile transformations in two ways: top-down and bottom-up. A bottom-up approach means the team takes initiative, often in IT, to implement a more agile way of working with a single team.

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One of my recent consultancy projects was working with London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), increasing Self-Service portal uptake. And did we!? Within the first three months, Self-Service went from 3% to 40%, and recently to 70%! How did we do it?

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There’s a focus shift in Service Management from numbers to experience. We see this in the growing focus on XLAs and CX and other cool acronyms. It’s all about improvements in Service Delivery. What does this imply for you? What can you do to get up to speed fast to improve the customer experience?

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What do you know about Customer Experience Managers? It’s a popular role with companies as a whole, but not typically with Service Desks. What does this role imply? And how can it inform your approach to better Services?

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Do you have questions about moving to more Agile Service Management, and the implications of doing so? Consultant Bas Blanken – author of our Agile Service Management E-book and several blog posts on the topic – shares his wisdom in this video.

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Knowledge management is a never-ending process; continuous development in your organisation means the knowledge base must be constantly updated with new information. It’s important to regularly measure the health of your knowledge base. How do you do this?

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Since everyone now works on the go – using their own apps and devices – one approach is to ask how you can best enable them to keep doing that.

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A good onboarding is essential for making new colleagues feel at home. These are 10 onboarding ideas you can apply in your organization.

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Want to exceed your customer’s expectations of your service desk? Create a sound foundation by taking away all obstacles your customers might have. How? With Workforce Enablement.

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Is the Knowledge Manager the one doing most of the writing, editing and publishing? This happens quite a lot, it’s not optimal, and this is what to do about it.

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Many institutions lack a clear overview of their contracts and the additional expenses. This leads to unnecessary costs, because you’re paying for services you don’t need anymore, services you already had or services that are simply too expensive.

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Introducing an agile way of working means a culture shift at your IT department. What reactions can you expect from your IT employees?

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Are you looking to improve your onboarding process? In this post, I’ll explain how to work together to set up an onboarding workflow in just two hours.

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Not prioritizing a good employee onboarding is a missed opportunity. These are three reasons why onboarding matters.

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What do you do when a knowledge item is deemed ‘not helpful’ by your customers? Find out what we do over at TOPdesk.

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Some knowledge articles do contain the knowledge and it’s just not communicated that well, or the Knowledge base is hard to coordinate. So what do you do?

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Every step in your incident management process needs to contribute to how quickly an incident is processed. Does a step not contribute to your goal? Remove it.

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Learn how to improve your employee onboarding process. The key is good collaboration between different service departments.

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Agile service management doesn’t provide you with extensive process descriptions you can implement in detail. Agile is a philosophy for how to set up your work.

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Is it possible to pair agile service management and ITIL? We’ve compared the 4 basic values of agile with ITIL and came to a not so obvious conclusion.

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Customer experience is increasingly important to the modern service desk. Luckily, there’re many ways to make sure that you meet your customer’s demands.

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Making the most of self service will save you work. But you need to design the self service portal for your customers – not for yourself. Read our 5 tips.

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Understanding proper Incident escalation is important, and can also contribute to less confusion in the Incident Management Process.

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One of the most common questions we get is how to ensure users actually use the SSP. A part of the answer is having a portal that users want to use.

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You want to measure your Customer Satisfaction and you make a survey, but the results aren’t coming in. Consider if your survey is user friendly enough.

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Is your organization ready for the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that comes into force in 2018? Read 6 tips to prepare yourself!

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You’re the new Managed Service Provider and you’ve signed the contract. Let’s put that contract in a file. But is that really the best thing to do?

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Change Management is still arguably the ITIL-process that causes most people on a project the most problems. But these problems can easily be avoided!

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Processes are rarely documented consistently. How can you contribute to better process documentation, and better organisation?

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SLAs are great for reporting to management but too much focus on that may risk long term damage to your organisation. The solution? A shift towards XLAs.

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When does a problem become an incident? The answer to this is ‘almost always’. So what do you do? Proactive problem management is the way to go.

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Ensure change management happens smoothly in your organisation with these tips for things that should be on your change management checklist.

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There’s a lot of talk about agile. But does agile service management work? Or is the word simply meant to make service management sound cooler?

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The step by step guide to implementing Best Practice Service Management. Read about the 5 steps to simplify your processes and improve your services.

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Best Practice Service Management is an alternative to ITIL. Simplify your work and your processes, focusing on what your customer really needs.

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With frameworks such as ITIL, there is a lot of reading of the guidelines and little actual consideration of how the organisation works. This causes problems.

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You can no longer hide behind KPIs on the technical performance of your services. And SLAs don’t cut it anymore. It’s all about customer experience.

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See how to make your Service team more customer focused by taking four quick steps towards a more customer focused culture.

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Is a new employee in your organization ready for work right away? How do you make sure he is?

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When almost any interaction with your Service Desk can be monitored, how do you report on the right data? These are the service desk metrics to report on.

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We often overlook simple things when improving our services. For Best Practice Incident Management you should make sure you’ve done the fundamentals right.

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Choose a proactive strategy and prevent common issues, reduce costs and improve your services. Here are six simple steps to switch to proactive maintenance.

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Setting up metrics is not always as simple as creating a number you want to reach. You need to set KPIs that you need to shoot for.

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You have set up a system so that after resolving a call your customer can provide you with feedback. But this is where your real challenge starts.

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The image of your IT department might not always be positive. Colleagues will mostly contact you when they have a problem. You’ll need transparency, recognizability and procedures to improve this image. In this blog we give you 5 ways how to improve IT department image.

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Isn’t it better to search for a shared procedure derived from the overarching agreement between the departments: supplying services to the same customers?

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Nowadays most users expect to find a portal with answers to their problems, but how can you make sure that you’re making best use of that portal?

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Shared Service Management is a great development in interdepartmental collaboration between supporting departments. This is how to start sharing services.

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Improving service delivery is a commendable goal, but few of us have the time to sit down and consider the benefits of well-constructed, knowledge base.

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It is important to always provide your customers with sufficient information. When compiling the online service catalogue, always take the following into account.

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The success of an application is partly determined after implementation. At this point, the functional manager is important. But how to take on this role?

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Knowledge management has a slightly dull reputation. But it can be a quick way to reduce your costs per call. An easy way to start this is, is with KCS.

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We are all about Shifting Left so why would be not also implement it ourselves? Read how we implemented Knowledge Centered Service and tips and tricks we learned.

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Most IT-departments use a service catalog – few optimize it for their audience: the end user. Both department and user will benefit from more customer focus.

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Customers become more demanding of services supplied by HR, FM and IT departments. The Google Effect teaches us a lesson in the value of shared services.

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Our top tips for how to gather customer feedback, so that you can learn more about how much your customers love IT! After reading this blog you can get started with customer service reporting.

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To meet the demands of the future, supporting departments need to combine their strengths. This is how to implement a shared services center.

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The SaaS revolution has been a liberation for companies: anyone can have access to software without the need for local database admins.

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We currently update the SaaS environments weekly. This means that the software that is developed now, is live in your SaaS TOPdesk environment a week later!

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In this post I’ll explain how we are going to keep you up to date and make sure that you will not be caught by surprise.

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Over next year, we will improve our delivery pipeline one step at a time. This will eventually result in weekly release moments.

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