The Service Catalog organizes all the services that your business provides. It helps you maintain a structured list of these services and makes it easier for your users to request for them.


You can include information like cost, availability, ordering and request processes for your services.


Here's a video demo of the Freshservice Service Catalog:




A quick guide to adding Service Categories and Service Items to the Service Catalog:


Part 1 – To add a Service Item:

  • Go to the Admin console and click on Service Catalog under General Settings.
  • Click on Add New and select Service Item. This pulls up the New Service Item form (shown below).
  • Fill in the details.
    • Image: The image you upload will be displayed as the thumbnail for the service. The image you upload should be 130 x 130 pixels. 
    • Item Name: This will be the default name of requests raised for the service.
    • Service Category: You can choose one of the default categories provided and add new categories if required (see part 3).
    • Short Description: This is displayed to the requesters below the image when they browse the catalog.
    • Description: Add a more detailed description of the item. This will be the default description of the service requests.
    • Cost: Click on the pencil icon for the option to make it visible in the portal.
    • Estimated Delivery: Can also be made visible on the portal.
    • Requested for: This allows users to raise service request on behalf of other users 
  • You might need to add fields on the 'Request Form' for the item (like 'Manager's Name', for instance). For this, you can drag and drop custom fields from the right pane.
  • Hit Save & Publish when you’re done, or click Save as Draft if you wish to revisit the item record later. You can also see a preview of the item by clicking Preview (as the name suggests, it updates the item in the database and then displays a preview).




Custom Fields
You can customize your Service Catalog to include fields such as dates, priority, billing details, invoices, and other particulars that will help capture information, which can prove to be useful when you go ahead with IT operations. Once you add custom fields, you can let your customers and agents fill in the information for any service item requested.


  • Once you drag and drop a custom field, you can fill up the field name and also select the behavior for the particular field such as "Mandatory field"  and click Done.



Dynamic Sections

Lengthy forms with irrelevant fields never contribute to a good self-service experience. What if your service request forms could fetch contextual information from the user without bombarding them with too many fields to fill?

Dynamic sections enable you to display fields based on the drop-down field values selected by the User. 


To Add Dynamic Sections:

  • Click on ⊕ Add Dynamic Sections.

  • Select the drop-down value for which the section should be displayed in the Show this section for field.

  • Drag and drop the necessary fields to be displayed.

  • Repeat the above steps for all the drop-down values for which you need to display dynamic sections.

  • Note: Freshservice supports dynamic sections for up to 5 drop-down fields.


 


The Service request form would like this for the user:

 


Adding Content Fields




Ensuring a good self-service experience includes creating compact, neat forms for your end-users to fill. You would also want to add external documentation links, or contact details to provide more contextual information to your users while filling a form.


With content fields, you can now add a rich-text section to all your incident and service item forms in Freshservice. You can create sections in your forms with content headers, and you can also add relevant links.


You can refer to the article here to learn more about Content Fields.


Note:

Content fields are now supported for tickets and service item forms. You can add these fields to the respective service item forms, and to the ticket forms from the form fields settings in the admin panel.


Part 2 – To add additional items to a Service Item:
When creating a new service item, you can add other additional items that your customers may ask for at the time of raising a service request. This eliminates the need for your customers to create multiple requests for different service items.


For example, in the New Employee Hire service item, you can specify additional items such as MacBook Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Access to Google Analytics, etc. Your company’s HR executive can simply select these additional items at the time of creating the service request for a new employee if their job requires it.



Note: 
1. The additional items must first be added individually in the Service Catalog.

2. This option is not available for loaner service items.


You can also mark certain additional items as Mandatory by selecting the checkbox next to them. If you'd like to Delete an item, click on the minus sign to its right.


Select the checkbox against the option “Create Child Requests for each of the items above” if you want individual child tickets to be created for each of the additional items. Enabling this option will link the added child tickets (for eg. Payroll Setup) to the parent ticket New Employee Hire. The child tickets will then be handled by agents in the respective departments and the items must be delivered within the timeframe under the corresponding SLAs.


If this box is left unchecked, all the items get requested under a single service request that can be assigned to just one agent.

Finally, this is how a service request will look for a requestor if the Admin has allowed the option of requesting additional items.



Freshservice 'New Service Item' Form


To see how Service Requests with multiple items and child service requests are handled in Freshservice, check this article.


Part 3 – To add a Service Category:

  • Go to the Admin console and click on Service Catalog.

  • From the Add New drop-down, select Service Category.
  • This form is pretty simple. Just enter the name for the category, provide a brief description and hit Save.


Freshservice 'New Service Category' Form


Once an item is added, it can be requested from the Service Catalog tab on the portal. Agents can also request for items on requesters' behalf by going to the Tickets tab and clicking on Request Items.