Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher |
| Access | Admin |
The service catalog is built into the help centre and lets employees submit requests to internal teams such as HR and IT. Building one is therefore turning it on, adding categories and adding services, and the request forms are generated for you rather than designed by you.
Build it
- Decide what to restrict, and that depends on which Suite you are on. On an Employee Service plan the help centre must be restricted to signed-in end users. On a Customer Service plan it need not be: the catalogue itself already requires signing in, so restricting the whole help centre would hide your public knowledge base for nothing.
- In Knowledge admin, click Settings, and under Service catalog select Turn on service catalog. Click Update.
- Click Service catalog in the sidebar, then Create and Category, for the things people ask for: equipment, access, facilities, people changes.
- Click Create Service for each offering. Give it a Title and description, use Add field for what the fulfilling team needs to know, and put it in a category.
- Announce it where staff already look.
You need to be a Support admin to create services.
Use approvals rather than an approval field
Most internal requests need somebody's agreement, and Zendesk has approval requests for exactly this. An agent creates one against the service request's ticket and sends it to an approver, who can be another agent or an end user.
The detail that changes the design: an end user can approve or deny in the help centre without needing a Zendesk licence, so a budget holder or a line manager does not need a seat. Approval requests can also be sent automatically through action flows with the Send approval request action, which is what turns approvals from chasing into a step that happens.
Recording "who approves" as a form field gets you a name. Approvals get you a decision.
Check you have them before you design around them. The catalog itself starts at Suite Growth, but approvals need Customer Service Suite Professional, or Employee Service Suite Growth. On Customer Service Suite Growth you can build the catalog and not the approval step. Check that before the onboarding service is half designed.
Start with new starters
Onboarding is the request that touches the most teams and goes wrong most often. One service that collects everything needed for a new colleague pays for the whole exercise, and it is also the case that most needs both approvals and requesting on behalf of somebody.
The competition is the corridor
Staff have alternatives: a message to someone they know, a word at a desk. A catalog wins only if it is faster than that, which means short forms and visible progress.
A form asking fourteen questions loses to a chat message every time, and then the work arrives untracked.
Show what happens next
Internal requesters chase because they cannot see progress. A status they can check, and a realistic timeframe in the service description, removes most of the chasing.
Review it with the teams
Every quarter, ask the fulfilling teams which requests still arrive incomplete. Those are the fields to add, and they are the only ones worth adding.
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