Turning on the service catalog

Switching the catalog on, and the three services worth starting with rather than the forty you could list.

Switching the catalog on, and the three services worth starting with rather than the forty you could list.

Turn it on

1. In Knowledge, click Settings in the sidebar and turn the service catalog on. With several help centres, pick the brand first. It is off by default and only a Support admin can switch it on.
2. Create a category or two.
3. Click Service catalog in the sidebar, then Create Service. Give it a Title and a description.
4. Build the request with Add field: the custom ticket fields the fulfilling team needs, and Upload files where an attachment is part of the request.
5. Assign it to a category with the settings icon, click Save draft, and publish it from the dropdown beside Save draft.
6. Set routing so requests reach the right group.

Two things about the form. Its fields have to be set to let customers edit them, or they will not appear on the request. And the service request form itself is generated for you: it is a form of its own kind, used only by the catalog, and you cannot edit or delete it. What you shape is the field list on the service.

Start with three

The three things people ask for most often. You already know what they are, because they arrive as tickets every week.

Three services that are genuinely used teach you how the form should work, what the team needs to know, and where the routing breaks. Forty services built from a spreadsheet teach you nothing and take a month.

The form is the point

A catalog entry without a good form is a fancy way of raising a ticket that says "I need a laptop". Ask what the fulfilling team asks: which model, for whom, by when, charged to which budget.

Every question you ask here is one they do not have to go back for.

Name services as the outcome

"New starter setup" rather than "Onboarding workflow B". People pick from a list before they have explained anything, so the names have to make sense to somebody outside the team.

Route it properly

A service knows who fulfils it, so requests should arrive with the right group already set. If somebody is triaging catalog requests by hand, the routing is not finished.

Your theme has to support it

Check this before you start, not after. Switching the feature on is a minute's work; updating a theme is a development job, and finding that out at the end is the version of this that wastes a week.

One more condition on an Employee Service plan: the help centre has to be restricted to signed-in end users. That is usually what an internal desk wants anyway, but it is a requirement rather than a preference.

See also

• What the service catalog is
• Managing services and categories
• Designing a form that helps agents and customers both