What can replace email and chat for employee requests to accounting and facilities?

A shared service portal where each department has its own service catalog: the employee picks a service and fills in a form, and the request gets an assignee and a due date. The department's email and chat are switched off step by step, with an announcement and a date after which they stop accepting requests.

What the options are

• A shared inbox with rules and folders. Emails don't get lost in staff members' personal mailboxes, but there are no due dates, and the employee can't see who took their request.
• A spreadsheet or task tracker that staff copy emails into. You get some tracking, but logging stays manual, and some requests never make it into the spreadsheet.
• A chatbot in a messenger. It feels familiar to employees, but if the bot isn't connected to request tracking, it's the same chat with a different interface.
• A separate system for one department. You get tracking and due dates, but the employee gets one more place to go, and IT gets one more system to support.
• A shared portal for all departments: ESM platforms such as SimpleOne ESM. One entry point for the employee: accounting, facilities, and IT all work on it as service providers.

The core problem with scattered channels is visibility. At ITG Corporation, before the service transformation, it was impossible to track the status of a request or get objective metrics of service quality.

What to check when choosing

The main question is what happens to the old channels:

• with a shared inbox or a spreadsheet, a person logs each email;
• with a system that has a portal, the employee picks the service themselves.

Manual logging has a cost. Employees forward long email threads without any explanation, approvals arrive by email and have to be attached to requests by hand, and the department spends its time sorting mail instead of doing the work.

While the department's email is still open during the transition, decide who logs emails in the system and how employees will learn where to order the service now. How to prepare the catalog and announce the cutoff date is covered in the answer on moving department requests off email and chat.

The other criteria, such as one entry point for all departments, due dates per service, and access control, are covered in the answers on choosing a system for requests to non-IT departments and software for employee requests to accounting.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Each department is a service provider on the shared portal:

• due dates for services are set in service level agreements (SLAs);
• indicators help assess the risk of a missed due date in advance.

How due dates are configured is described in the SimpleOne ESM documentation.

If the company uses SimpleOne ITSM

SimpleOne ITSM is an IT service management system. If it's already in place, the department joins the same instance. For IT requests, SimpleOne ITSM has additional entry points:

• email: a message sent to the email processing address becomes a user query in the system, as described in the documentation on creating user queries;
• a Telegram bot: employees can create incidents and user queries, leave comments, and approve or reject requests, as described in the documentation section on Telegram bots;
• the SimpleOne ITSM AI assistant on the portal: the employee describes the request in their own words, and the assistant searches the knowledge base, lists matching standard requests from the service catalog, and offers to fill in the right form. It works through the integration with SimpleOne Ainergy and is configured separately, as described in the SimpleOne ITSM documentation.