MSM software provides an extensive range of advanced, time-saving features to ensure that you deliver a world class service, resolving and managing customer requests like a pro. If you are finding your current software solution or manual approach cumbersome or unable to meet the growing demands of your business, or maybe it’s simply no longer fit for purpose, you should make the move to MSM.

Underpinned by industry standards, MSM can be used in any part of your business requiring service and support, along with the evidence to attain and support any industry standards and compliances (e.g. ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, ISO 27001, and ISO 9001).

With a visually appealing, easy-to-use interface, MSM makes the management of requests both simple and intuitive. Providing an integrated support environment, MSM puts emails, social media, phone calls, knowledge articles, discussion boards, and reporting in one place, eliminating the need to move back and forth amongst several applications and windows in order to solve customer issues and requests.

With its innovative, high performance features, resource and SLA management, skills routing, configurable business rules engine, customer web self-service portal, CMDB, and dynamic knowledge management, MSM ensures improved first time fix rates while providing intelligent process automation, user configurable real-time graphical dashboards and pre-configured reports that accelerate management decisions with an improved customer experience.

MSM’s powerful process automation allows for best specialist assignment and selection, along with intelligent change approval, risk assessment and integration capabilities to maximize any investments in your popular system management and monitoring applications.

The provision and management of effective service delivery in a customer-centric environment is no simple task. From the setting of service standards that reflect customer-oriented measures to addressing issues like diversity and customer centricity, attitude and behaviour, and the implementation of a continual service improvement program to ensure that customer insight becomes the driver for continual improvement in service delivery… you are in for a challenge. MSM will support you in your journey to provide improved service delivery and the attainment of your operational excellence goals.

Service delivery is a component of business that defines the interaction between providers and clients where the provider offers a service, whether that be information, a task, or user defined activity. Good service delivery provides clients with an increase in value.

IT has its own set of standard service delivery practices that are followed by most companies. In these practices, service level management is as important as service level delivery. Service level management provides a framework where services are defined and levels of service support are agreed upon.

One of the most successful approaches is using ITIL. Throughout the service delivery process, service providers work to define the content of services, clearly stating the roles and responsibilities of customers and service providers, as well as quality and availability expectations and targets. MSM supports service level agreements (SLA), operational level agreements (OLA) and underpinning contracts (UC). Service Level Management establishes clear goals for all three roles.

We often spend scarce time on mundane, repetitive tasks rather than on planning and resolving business critical issues. With its process automation and user configurable workflow, MSM helps eliminate labour-intensive manual interactions, providing an intuitive approach that automates key processes, such as incident registration and prioritization, specialist assignment, management change approval and SLA assignment.

MSM frees up your time to focus on key issues that improve service levels, enabling you to perform activities easier, faster, better and cheaper. MSM’s extensive process automation functionality and features will:

• Allow new starters to get up running in a matter of minutes
• Provide powerful, proactive features and functionality that help facilitate resolution of customer requests at first point of contact
• Enable integration with systems management automation tools
• Automatically create requests such as incidents, tasks, problems, changes
• Automatically assign change approval requests to the right persons
• Select, assign and prioritize the best specialist(s) to work on a request
• Quickly associate with knowledge items and other records (problems, changes, events, etc)
• Deliver simple, powerful lists and escalation views to help users keep on top of their work queues
• Automatically ensure customers and support staff are kept informed as their requests are moved through their lifecycles
• Provide automated Service Level Management assignment and escalation
• Ensure managers, team leaders and analysts receive no surprises
• Customers never complain about being kept informed – Marval MSM does this automatically.

It’s a myth that it takes an endless amount of time and effort to create outstanding customer experiences. In reality, it takes people with the right culture, a can-do attitude, and the right tool to do the job. That tool is MSM.

The moment a customer calls the Service Desk, your agent will instantly have all the relevant information about the caller, their VIP status, call history, how their last call was handled, and what services and equipment they have. Incidents, advice, workarounds, and solutions are instantly presented, based on the classifications entered. If a suitable answer is found, MSM will then classify and auto-close it, with a request asking for a customer satisfaction star rating along with any feedback. You can also automatically or manually request a focused-customer satisfaction survey to be completed at leisure.

MSM’s proactive approach enables you to remain in control of the user’s experience at all times. Other software features to improve customer experience and satisfaction rating include:

• Customer are kept informed throughout the request’s lifecycle
• Automated service reminders and email notifications
• Access via the MSM web self-service portal to:
  • Raise, query and close your own requests
  • Search knowledge base articles and attachments
  • Check service status
  • Approve or reject any change approvals
  • Make standard requests for service (e.g. order phone)
  • Open a chat with a live agent or use integrated chatbot
  • Access documents (e.g. contracts, instructions, etc.)
• Real-time graphical reporting
• Customer SLA escalation and notification of any possible service breaches
• Dynamic customer checklists

We may not be aware of them, but we use standards every day in all aspects of our daily lives – in communications, media, healthcare, retail, food, transportation, construction, energy, etc.

With the adoption of quality standards:

• Organizations can become more competitive
• Service providers can become more responsive
• You enable your team to actively support the business strategy
• You demonstrate commitment to quality

If you want to adopt or utilize standards in IT or Enterprise Service Management, then Marval MSM will help you manage and collect hard audit evidence to show your business is delivering true value, and is agile and adept in its support of organization’s objectives and outcomes.

As MSM has been designed by one of the co-authors of both ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000, it automatically supports the collection, process support, audit evidence and reporting requirements to achieve accreditation. Using MSM will provide you with a competitive edge, the ability to demonstrate your visible commitment to quality and the provision of IT and business services, and the attainment of operational excellence. Benefits of using MSM include:

• Standardized approach to service delivery
• Provide economies of scale and increased value
• Ability for suppliers and partners to work together
• Ability for suppliers and partners to be benchmarked
• Mitigate risk and cost when changing suppliers
• Reduced operational and training costs

Marval MSM will also support many other industry good practices and standards, including ISO 27001, Lean Six Sigma, SOX, IT4IT, CMMI and SDI service desk standards.

Customer expectations have evolved over time, but never as rapidly as they have in the past couple of years with social media interaction and customer satisfaction surveys playing a major role. Customers today are demanding service faster than ever before, so having a clear picture of what they really think about the service you provide is key.

With MSM, providing a consistent and personalized customer experience is a strategic priority. Customers can quickly find answers to their questions using the MSM self-service portal, or expect the right person to handle it at once and be kept informed as to what is happening. Simply keeping in touch with your customers will help reduce costs, while boosting satisfaction and revenues.

MSM provides a number of approaches and features to help you manage the customer expectations and experience while increasing first time fix rates:

• Use MSM survey results to make decisions and grow your business
• Tailor your surveys to provide you with useful data on the performance of business services and initiatives
• Maximize response rates with attractive, user configurable and user-friendly surveys
• Receive a notification whenever a customer leaves negative feedback
• Call closure customer satisfaction and star ratings
• Get useful insights to improve your business with easy-to-use reports and dashboards
• Maintain data safety (data is transferred securely over HTTPS and is TLS/SSL encrypted)
• Measure employee satisfaction to increase motivation and retention
• Use surveys to plan your event and for real-time and post event feedback
• Get feedback from customers on your performance

With the increasing number of contracts, suppliers and partners, service level agreements (SLAs), operational level agreements (OLAs) and underpinning contracts (UCs) are essential components to setting and managing customer expectations.

Our customers need to know that:

• Their expectations are managed and communicated
• They are being kept informed
• We know, we care, and we are willing to go the extra mile when it is most important (i.e. during critical business periods)

When it comes to our suppliers, we need to know:

• If our service providers are capable of meeting future business demands and challenges
• Whether our service provider delivers value for money
• That we are making the best use of our resources and investments
• That they are delivering a quality and accountable service, based on agreed targets and outcomes
• If we are confident in their auditability and conformance to corporate IT governance

With such a diverse range of requirements, MSM’s Service Level Management (SLM) provides you with a method to manage customers, internal support teams and 3rd party supplier expectations when receiving or delivering a service. With industry leading features, MSM will provide you with the information and analytics you need to help you eliminate breaches of any service agreement in place.

Other Marval MSM software features include:

• Class leading Service Level Management
• Innovative SLA breach monitoring and alerts
• A clear picture of supplier performance and target achievement
• Rapid identification of areas for SLM improvement

Today’s service desk is required to manage a plethora of requests, ranging from general customer enquiries, raising an incident, investigating and solving a difficult problem, to checking on the progress of a change request and giving a customer an update.

Support analysts also have to be knowledgeable about what services are available and the underpinning IT Infrastructure. Managing this resource is challenging, whether you are managing a team of 5, 50, or even 100 support analysts.

MSM provides a range of features and functions to assist you in effectively maximizing the investment in your team, their workload planning and scheduling:

• Automatic assignment to the right person or team, based on their current workloads
• Identification of staff with the right skills set and their availability status
• Reporting on workload estimates versus actual time spent
• Using the skills matrix to identify skills gaps and areas for improvement
• Using team performance and SLA results to help make decisions on staffing levels to grow your business
• Getting useful insights to improve your business with easy-to-use reports, dashboards, and trends
• Measuring employee satisfaction to increase motivation and retention
• Graphical dashboards highlighting possible service breaches to be addressed before agreements are breached
• Bulk transfer of requests to other teams or individuals

Supplier and contract management now consists of a multitude of teams often involved with a significant amount of contract traffic (e.g. finance, legal, sales, and executives) who would be approving contracts. Multi-level change approval is a must.

Contracts have to be centraliszed, capturing and cataloging both contracts and partners to manage them holistically. To make decisions on amendments and revisions, and to manage risks and rewards, is more than ever a real challenge.

MSM supplies you with everything you need to manage partners and contracts effectively:

• A central repository and an enterprise-wide, structured process to manage contract creation and execution
• The ability to effectively manage contract milestones via automated email alerts and reminders
• Automated workflow for contract review and approvals
• Obligations management capabilities and key performance indicators to improve contract compliance and performance

MSM features include:

• Centralized storage of contracts
• User configurable contact workflows and approval
• Email notifications to responsible manager
• Calendar for important dates
• Financial value recording and reporting
• Import and export functions
• Search for contract-related information and file attachments
• Standard and user configurable management dashboards
• User configurable contract attributes (provider, vendor, client)
• Multi-level role based security

MSM helps you improve service performance by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s key IT service, infrastructure, and support operations. MSM software can help you if any of these items reflects your situation:

• You want to reduce complexity by standardizing and simplifying the business model for service delivery in the organization by using industry standards and best practices
• You wish to establish an integrated and accountable governance framework
• You need to understand the business impact of critical services, their underpinning dependencies, relationships and value
• You need to support and drive a culture of continual service improvement, transitioning your service team to being service centric and KPI aligned
• You wish to improve management information to align internal reporting to the way the organization, stakeholders and customers view the business

Using MSM to manage your IT and service Infrastructure, configurations, and assets will result in a single recording system with improved  transparency and system consolidation, underpinned by process standardization, using industry standards and best practices.

Key benefits of using MSM include:

• The limiting of unplanned downtime as a result of having a single consolidated service asset and configuration database
• Easing the burden of maintaining audits, using automated validation controls and record traceability
• Increased productivity by speeding up service requests, fulfilment processes, and change approval
• Enhanced process standardization using industry standards and best practices
• Operational efficiencies and staff productivity gains, due to process automation and increased agility

Financial benefits include:

• IT staff productivity gains: IT operations will become more efficient as a result of standardization and repeatable processes, increased staff productivity and process automation with improved visibility and reporting
• Minimizing burden of risk: Reduced service downtime and outages, with fewer resources being used to meet audit requirements
• Higher employee productivity: Line-of-business employees become more productive as processes in several areas (service requests, incident management, procurement, on-boarding, etc) are improved with automation, repeatable processes and improved operational visibility
• Lower IT infrastructure costs: By leveraging use of Marval MSM to reduce datacentre and service availability related costs, as well as license and maintenance costs

Disruptions (known as incidents) to services happen, whether it’s your wifi down, your app crashing, your car not starting, or the light in the kitchen failing. If any of these issues keep happening we need to investigate the problem, identify the cause of it and make changes to prevent recurrence of the incident. In order to diagnose the underlying problem we need to investigate it thoroughly, but going through the incident history and any related information can be both very labour intensive and time consuming.

MSM provides you with all you need to quickly identify the root cause and create a change request to solve it permanently, avoiding any more outages or disruptions, lowering costs and improving the reputation of IT  or business operations.

With innovative, easy-to-use features, and underpinning problem management process, MSM will help:

• Quickly identify, monitor, report upon and resolve problems – dramatically reducing outages and downtime
• Provide useful insights to improve your business with easy-to-use reports, trends and dynamic dashboards
• Reduce costs, boost customer satisfaction and help IT teams focus on delivering business solutions instead of fighting fires
• Rapidly cross reference and match new or previous occurrence of matching incidents
• Quickly and easily display high risk and business impact areas
• Dynamically associate known problems with related incidents, promote problem records to change records, log problem records against appropriate Configuration Items (CIs)
• Quickly isolate pain points and areas for investigation

MSM Problem Management fully integrates with all the key ITIL lifecycle elements, helping to achieve IT and business operational excellence and customer satisfaction.