Service catalog examples from across industries

A service catalog works like an online shopping website, where users can interact with the internal offerings of a company. A service catalog is a menu of facilities and services offered by organizations to their internal users. Service catalogs offer IT and support services, but they usually facilitate inter-department communications and allow employees to access everything they need to perform their duties.

Service catalogs play a vital role in optimizing processes and communication throughout an organization. A well-organized service catalog allows companies to reduce their labor expenses, while also improving their employee morale by allowing easy access to the support they need.

What are service catalogs?

Service catalogs are a source of accurate information about IT and other services offered by an organization in one place to its employees. A service catalog works like a centralized database of employees' various supports and systems. Service catalogs are primarily used for IT services, and allow end users to access any services or products offered, much like an e-commerce site.

Service catalogs are often used as internal systems to improve organizational communication. Still, they can also be provided to external users as support systems or to order services from a company.

7 IT service catalog examples

Catalog services are used by businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes across industries in every corner of the globe. Below are some examples of service catalogs, and how they are used in the real world by several noteworthy organizations. As you will see, service catalogs have been used in academic institutions, non-profit organizations, world-famous storefronts, and large multinational companies. 

A lot of questions come up in the process. What about provisioning? What about permissions? What about related services? To get a better idea of how certain companies handle these questions in the IT organization and how their service catalog management takes place, let’s look at a few examples:

1. M&C SAATCHI

M&C Saatchi is a large international advertising agency with over 2000 employees across 25 offices globally. With such a large workforce distributed internationally, communication and coordination of work could quickly become complex.

However, M&C Saatchi has implemented a sophisticated service catalog to streamline work and improve productivity. Their catalog is tailored to the company's and its employees' needs. It provides quirky yet descriptive details about various services to empower employees to quickly access the support they need.

Additionally, the catalog utilizes references and terminology that employees will be familiar with to navigate it intuitively. This example clearly shows how a service catalog can be highly customized for the unique requirements of a large multinational organization. By tailoring the catalog to its workforce, M&C Saatchi ensures it delivers maximum value in streamlining communication and workflows.

2. Freshworks

Freshworks is a software company offering 10 integrated products to clients in the customer engagement space. Effective communication between departments like HR, engineering, marketing, sales, and facilities is critical with different products utilised by various teams.

Freshworks has implemented a centralized service catalog that acts as a hub connecting these distributed teams. Through the catalog, new employees can complete their onboarding tasks online. Roles can be referred to eligible candidates for open positions. Infrastructure requests to procurement for hardware or software installations can be raised and fulfilled efficiently. It also streamlines accessing information for finance and payroll needs. This demonstrates how a single service catalog can support diverse yet related operations across multiple departments within a large technology organization.

By consolidating previously scattered processes, Freshworks has improved inter-departmental collaboration and transactions.

3. McCormick & Company

McCormick & Company is a global leader in flavor solutions with a diverse product portfolio. To effectively manage their large workforce, the organization requires standardized HR processes. McCormick has developed a customized service catalog offering employees unique HR solutions.

Staff can use the catalog to complete standard forms easily, request routine HR actions, and access employee handbooks and company policies. It also acts as a knowledge base for frequently asked questions. This tailored implementation empowers McCormick’s workforce through convenient self-service features without adding to the existing workload of the HR team. The catalog also helps ensure organizational standards for people management processes are uniformly followed across global operations.

Overall, McCormick has been able to streamline HR interactions and maintain compliance through their thoughtful service catalog design.

4. Harrods

Harrods is an iconic luxury London department store and attraction that sees millions of visitors annually. With over 330 individual retail departments and 12,000 employees, effective communication and streamlined support is critical to their extensive operations.

However, the scale also means maintaining transparency and oversight can be challenging. Harrods addressed this by implementing an intuitive enterprise service catalog.

Through it, any employee can easily create and track support requests related to infrastructure, IT, facilities, or customer service. Managers also have visibility into ongoing issues and resource allocation. This standardized the previously chaotic request fulfillment process. At the At the same time, the catalog empowered each employee with self-service features tailored to their needs.

As a result, Harrods now has a unified system that facilitates coordination on a massive scale while prioritizing user experience.

5. Rowan Salisbury

Rowan Salisbury is a large school district located in North Carolina serving nearly 20,000 students across its 35 schools. With such a sizable student and staff population, effective communication is critical. The district implemented an online service catalog designed as a centralized knowledge base and announcement portal.

Here, students and teachers can conveniently search for answers to common questions, and access guidance documents and policies. They also have options to reset passwords or submit maintenance requests for their classrooms efficiently.

Furthermore, the catalog consolidates important notifications and releases from various departments into a single hub. This has streamlined previously scattered information sources as well as everyday administrative tasks.

As a result, the entire Rowan Salisbury community from top-level management to individual classrooms, can instantly access tailored resources supporting their work through this centralized catalog.

6. Carnegie Science

Carnegie Science is a prestigious non-profit organization known for groundbreaking scientific discoveries. It brings together exceptional scientists engaged in cutting-edge exploration at the frontiers of their respective fields. To support such a community of thinkers and innovators requires empowering easy access to information. Carnegie Science has developed a sophisticated service catalog in the form of a robust knowledge base and search portal.

Researchers can independently look up exhaustive FAQs, popular evidenced-based solutions, technical equipment standards, and various IT-related support services. This consolidates important references that were previously scattered. The catalog also streamlines maintaining oversight of organizational procedures.

Now scientists at Carnegie Science can efficiently resolve common queries and focus on their critical work. Simultaneously, the knowledge base approach future-proofs their operations with institutional memory.

7. C&K childcare and kindergarten

C&K is one of Australia's largest non-profit providers of early childhood education and care operating more than 350 childcare centers. With such a vast network, effective operations and support are essential, especially in sensitive contexts involving young children. C&K has implemented a highly customized centralized service catalog supporting various core modules. This includes streamlining admissions management for parents across locations.

The catalog also has dedicated functions and workflows for medical emergencies, incident notifications, and complaint resolution according to local regulations and standards.

Additionally, it covers roles like facilities management, HR, finance, and procurement through prescribed categories and processes. This has brought unprecedented coordination to what were previously dispersed functions.

Most importantly, C&K tailored the catalog experience with child and provider needs in mind to ensure the highest standards of care through an intuitive interface and functionality.

Benefits of using service catalogs

Service catalogs offer several key advantages to organizations. A service catalog can help your business to centralize communication, reduce labor costs, standardize services, leverage AI, and make your IT team's life easier. Utilizing service catalogs is a wise move for businesses, as it allows you to optimize your operations while improving the quality of your work. 

See below for more on the benefits of using service catalogs:

Streamlined communication

The greatest advantage to implementing a service catalog into your organization is streamlining communication. A service catalog allows users from throughout your organization to get in touch with IT team members to access the support, services, and products they need. This allows team members to quickly raise issues and find solutions promptly, improving productivity throughout your organization. 

Service catalogs can also include communication features for various departments in your organization. As a result, someone working in accounts can easily reach someone from marketing and HR to resolve an issue without leaving their desk. Streamlining communication improves staff morale, increases productivity, and improves your business's bottom line. 

Standardizes service delivery

Implementing a service catalog greatly helps in standardizing service delivery across an organization. With a centralized catalog of all available services, there is consistency in how users can discover, order, and receive support. Every internal customer experiences the same high-quality, uniform process when they engage with various business functions.

Standardization brings efficiency by reducing variability and randomness. Employees know exactly what to expect and where to go to get their job done.

It also ensures that best practices and standard operating procedures are followed organization-wide. New hires can quickly get up to speed by referring to the catalog. Any changes or updates to existing services are reflected uniformly. Service level agreements and key performance indicators become more visible and measurable. Meeting compliance and security requirements is simplified. Overall, it helps mature the services landscape and turns it into a well-oiled machine.

Resources are optimized and wasted effort is minimized when standardized processes are in place. Employees save time and focus on their core roles, while leaders can step up innovation by removing process inefficiencies.

Cost savings

Service catalogs can offer substantial cost savings to organizations, particularly for medium and large companies. Service catalogs can allow IT workers to easily manage requests, and provide support, products, and services to users in a streamlined manner. As a result, IT workers in the organization can get more done in the workday, reducing labor costs. You can maximize these cost savings by implementing AI to handle routine tasks in your services catalog.

Service catalogs also improve efficiency and productivity in your business. They improve communication throughout your business, allowing different departments to save time when dealing with your IT services, improving their productivity. This allows you to get more done with fewer workers across your organization, reducing your costs. 

Enhanced self service

Another major advantage to implementing a service catalog is the enhanced self-service available to users. A service catalog can allow users to order services and products from your IT desk, and install them by themselves. This takes a burden off your IT team, and it allows users to easily get access to things they need. 

Self-service features are accelerated by leveraging automation and AI. These technologies can automatically handle repetitive tasks, allowing users to interact with your service catalog without the need for human assistance.

Continual service improvement

Service catalogs allow all stakeholders in your organization to interact with all the services and IT products offered on the menu. You can track these integrations to gain data offering actionable insights into where you can make improvements or reduce costs. For instance, if you notice a particular service is not being used, you can remove it to reduce your costs. 

Similarly, if another service is used frequently, you can look into adding similar services, or expanding what's offered within that service. This allows you to fine-tune your services, with real-time data on what works and what does not work. As a result, your services will become refined over time. 

ITIL service catalog, ITSM service catalog, and IT service catalog best practices

In order to get the most out of your service catalog for your IT department (or IT service department), you need to lay some solid foundations about how the system will be implemented and updated. Having a strong foundation allows you to maximize the advantages of implementing the system and reduce the errors and issues that inevitably arise when introducing new technology into your operations.

Here are some best practices you should employ when introducing a services catalog to your operations: 

Prioritize the most popular services: Your first priority when establishing a service catalog should be to start with your most commonly requested services. Your most popular services are the ones that users will want access to more often and therefore are the ones that users rely on when interacting with your organization.

Prioritizing more popular services also allows you to organize your catalog into which services are more important than others. After identifying and establishing the most important services you offer, you can update and extend your services catalog to include the more specialized and niche services you offer. 

Keep stakeholders informed: Ensuring that all stakeholders in your organization know about your services catalog and what they can use it for is crucial. There is no point in creating a centralized system for your IT and business products and services, if nobody knows it exists or how it works. The same applies to updates or changes to the service catalog too.

Whenever you are adding or removing a feature from the catalog, ensure that all users and stakeholders in the system are aware of the coming changes and how they affect them. 

Leverage AI/automation: AI and automation are crucial for maximizing efficiency and reducing the costs of operating your service catalog. AI can take care of repetitive and simple tasks and answer queries from users, which frees up IT workers to handle other tasks. As a result, you can leverage AI to allow your IT team to improve their productivity greatly. 

Automation also plays a role in simplifying processes and improving user experience. You can offer advanced features, allowing users to send and track requests, and allowing users with no coding experience to use IT products and services by leveraging AI and automation throughout your services catalog. 

Provide quality user experience: Offering an interface that is easy to interact with is a crucial aspect of implementing a service catalog system. If your system is too complex, or difficult to interact with, users will be less likely to rely on the system. This makes the system less effective and adds inefficiencies to your organization. 

Here are some ways to make your system user-friendly:

• Keep everything simple- do not require any long forms or lots of information for simple tasks

• Make the self-service portal easy to access for end users across apps and platforms 

• List the most popular services at the top of the catalog to make finding them easier

• Take time to think through what makes the most sense when laying out the navigation for your service catalog

Continually measure success: Keep tracking how well your service catalog works by looking at things like how many services people are using, how many are fixing their own problems, how happy they are, and if you're saving time and money. Talk to the users regularly through surveys or discussions to find out what they like and what could be better. Use data to see which services are popular and which ones aren't getting the attention they need. Update the catalog regularly based on what you find and the changing needs of your users and business. This way, you keep improving and showing its value to everyone involved.

Think about the templates you use in the form of a service desk and service request agent. Think through your business goals and current customer satisfaction ratings. Try to outline your service offerings in a clear fashion. And think through which metrics you want to impact in the IT service desk department. It’s important not to just simply think about time management but also about business impact. You want to simplify the life of your service owner. But you also want to ensure you’re thinking through your service catalog as part of your overall service portfolio.

Start building your service catalog today with Freshservice

Freshservice is a leading provider of service catalog solutions, allowing organizations to easily create and manage effective service catalogs. With Freshservice, you can start building your service catalog in just a few steps.

Easy Service Catalog Creation and Management

Freshservice simplifies the process of creating and managing effective service catalogs with its intuitive user interface. It guides you through selecting the services, products, and internal resources you want to include, allowing you to organize them into logical categories for end-users to quickly find what they need. 

Furthermore, Freshservice handles the enforcement of approval workflows, ensuring you maintain control and consistency throughout the catalog.

Branded Self-Service Portal

Once your catalog is complete, internal staff can easily access it through a branded self-service portal. Freshservice seamlessly integrates with commonly used tools like Microsoft Office and G Suite, providing streamlined experiences for your teams.

Powerful Yet Simple Catalog Builder

Freshservice's powerful yet simple builder makes it possible for organizations of any size or industry to design effective custom catalogs without technical expertise. You can focus on tailoring the experience specifically for your teams rather than worrying about code.

Efficient Administration and Updates

Ongoing administration and updates are simplified with Freshservice. The dashboard provides real-time insights into catalog usage, allowing you to identify which services need improvement or promotion. 

Additionally, you can enable feedback submission and polls to gather user opinions, continually enhancing the catalog based on actual needs.

Meaningful and Lasting Catalog Experience

Freshservice ensures your service catalog remains every bit as meaningful for users and teams over time as it was on day one. 

By addressing evolving needs, the platform helps maintain the catalog's relevance and usefulness.