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Service management

Say goodbye to chaos with AI powered service operations

Rebecca Noori 14 min read

Marketing manager Karina needs to upgrade the office’s conference room video system for an important client presentation she’s hosting two weeks from now. She logs a service request that bounces between IT, facilities, procurement, and finance teams, each with separate systems and approval forms more complicated than the last.

Frustrated, Karina wastes her prep time chasing updates and liaising between departments who aren’t talking to each other. Despite escalating to her VP, the equipment isn’t installed in time, and she’s forced to use her laptop webcam for the client meeting. The presentation goes poorly, the client is unimpressed, and a potential six-figure contract is lost.

This scenario could have been avoided entirely if her employer had committed to service operations management (SOM.) Our guide explores this business-critical function in more detail, including how service operations management software provides visibility into every cog in your organizational wheel.

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What is service operations? 

Service operations is the practice of managing all the processes and activities involved in delivering services to your customers. The processes you’ll want to track are specific to your company but often include:

  • Customer-facing services like support desk functions
  • Internal services such as HR and finance processes
  • Professional services like legal or consultancy workflows
  • Digital services, including cloud-based and online platforms

Each of these service types contributes to the smooth running of your business. And bringing each strand of your service operations together under one roof keeps everything aligned so you can maintain a high quality of service across your entire organization.

What is service operations management software?

Service operations management software is a digital solution that’s integral to SOM. The right platform enables you to manage service workflows within a single environment, giving teams tools to receive requests, assign work, collaborate across departments, and track performance in real time.

The easiest way to make the case for service operations management software is to imagine life without it. In companies where service management is decentralized, different teams have preferred workflows and tools that don’t speak to each other.

For example, an IT team might track requests in a ticketing system, while HR handles theirs through email, and procurement uses spreadsheets. Each process works in isolation until it doesn’t. Requests stall at the boundaries, information is duplicated, and service quality takes a nosedive.

6 benefits of consolidating service operations in a central platform 

Software built specifically for your service operations strategy removes any hint of fragmentation. It creates a shared workspace that aligns each team’s processes. Here are the benefits you can expect when you unify your key enterprise services.

  1. Clearer ownership: When service work is centralized, accountability is front and center. Teams know who owns each request, what actions are expected, and how their role connects to others.
  2. Enhanced efficiency: In the MSP Success survey, 71% of managed service providers reported using automation for core service tasks like patch management and backups, with 58% automating ticketing workflows. These pre-built sequences reduce manual overhead and accelerate service delivery.
  3. Better collaboration: Cross-functional requests often span several departments. A central system keeps everyone working from the same source of truth, reducing redundant effort and instances of “well, nobody told me.”
  4. Reliable reporting: With every service request and resolution tracked in one place, leaders can monitor real-time performance. This improves decision-making and allows service metrics to reflect actual operations rather than estimates or incomplete data.
  5. Successful scalability: As your organization grows, service complexity increases. A centralized platform adapts to new teams, workflows, and compliance requirements, helping you scale without breaking your operating model.
  6. Greater compliance: Consolidated platforms make it easier to enforce process controls, document service activity, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards. As operations leader Kiryae Underwood puts it:

One thing I’ve learned managing operations for over a decade: success is in the details. Whether it’s coordinating a complex freight order or making sure government compliance is handled ahead of deadline — it’s the little things that drive trust and results.

Business use cases of service operations 

Service delivery happens in many corners of enterprise organizations, often in departments that don’t describe their work as “service.” Yet, every business function shares a common operational need: timely responses, defined workflows, and internal accountability. Service operations management brings structure to that work. Here’s how it shows up across teams.

Service desk

Employees, customers, and partners turn to your company’s service desk for help. The expectation is simple: someone will take ownership of the request and provide regular updates on what’s happening.

Service operations make sure the help desk runs on a defined process, which is often a variation of this common workflow:

  • The help desk team receives requests and triages them
  • They route issues to the appropriate team or individual
  • They track ownership, status, and response times
  • If resolution slows, they escalate any complex cases

It’s a structure that gives your service desk team the capacity to deliver consistent support, even under pressure.

monday service dashboard and overview

IT operations

IT teams are responsible for your company’s most critical systems, including networks, infrastructure, applications, and access controls. When one of these crucial systems collapses or behaves unexpectedly, your response should be rapid and well-defined.

IT service management provides a way to manage both urgency and volume by creating set processes for every eventuality. Each request, incident, or event moves through a defined path, with service agents adding context along the way. This approach addresses recurring problems more effectively and prevents new ones before they spread.

Human Resources

HR departments in enterprise organizations oversee large headcounts, often in offices spread across multiple locations or even continents. Understandably, they need service operations that connect with all relevant departments.

For example, employee onboarding workflows link talent acquisition with payroll, benefits administration, IT, and managers. Each of those steps depends on the last, and a minor hiccup in one area means the employee doesn’t start with everything in place. The same applies to offboarding, internal transfers, and policy updates.

Service operations give HR teams a way to keep complexity manageable. Workflows are mapped in advance, so requests move through clear channels. The result is a smoother employee experience and fewer operational surprises for the team managing it.

Finance

Finance plays a crucial role in service operations, but their workflows often get bogged down by scattered tools and inconsistent handoffs. A simple vendor payment might require involvement from project teams, procurement, legal, and budget approvers, but delays stack up fast without coordination.

When service operations are streamlined, requests are submitted through a shared system, routed automatically based on thresholds or departments and tracked end to end. Documents, approvals, and status updates all live in one place, with no more chasing emails or duplicating data.

monday service workflow

Facilities

Your facilities management department oversees your company’s critical assets, checking that everything stays in working order. Facilities teams are commonly pulled into everything from urgent repairs to overcrowded workspaces, expected to find quick resolutions to the day-to-day running of operations.

Clear service workflows give facilities leaders visibility into where demand comes from and what’s slowing down resolution.

Partner requests

Partner requests may be initiated from vendors, contractors, or other third parties beyond the walls of your company, such as:

  • A software vendor requesting system access to complete a patch or perform maintenance
  • A contractor submitting an invoice that needs approval from both finance and project teams
  • A distributor reporting a shipping issue that involves customer service and logistics
  • A legal partner submitting a contract that needs review and countersignature from multiple internal stakeholders
  • A marketing agency requesting brand assets requiring sign-off from brand and compliance teams

In any of these cases, it’s important to know the point of contact who’ll deal with the request, which can be challenging if external requests look different every time. An effective service operations model includes customizable intake forms and workflows, bringing consistency to how partner requests are logged, routed, and resolved. The result is a frictionless partnership.

Security

Security work moves on two tracks at once. On one side, it’s operational, processing access requests, tracking devices, and closing incidents. Meanwhile, the strategic side evaluates risk, enforces policy, and maintains trust across the organization. Most teams can’t afford to pick one over the other.

Service operations provide balance with defined processes, so when someone requests access to a system, there’s a set of steps to validate and approve it. Similarly, when a breach is reported, it follows a documented path rather than relying on memory or personal initiative.

Take charge of your processes in a service operations workspace

Nothing improves service operations more than access to a shared, intuitive space to manage every stage of your teams’ work, from intake to resolution.

That’s exactly what you get with monday service — an enterprise-grade service management platform, powered by AI, that brings operational clarity to cross-functional teams.

Built on the monday.com Work OS, monday service transforms fragmented processes into coordinated systems, with full visibility into what’s happening now and what needs to happen next. Here’s the value it provides your service operations management.

Gain visibility into service metrics with collaborative dashboards

Service teams need full visibility into crucial data so they can act on it. As Adi Dar, Chief Operations Officer at monday.com puts it:

Transparency is about maintaining one clear message throughout the organization – ensuring the direction is understood and actionable at every level.

monday service provides the perfect base to visualize your service operations, with customizable dashboards made up of your choice of 72+ integrations, 36+ columns, 25+ widgets, and 27+ views. You can track request volume, resolution time, SLA compliance, and agent workloads — all from one interface and all in real time.

monday service dashboard analytics copilot AI

Speed up response time with AI-powered ticket classification and routing

Manual effort can slow service teams down during triage, especially at scale. But with no-code AI blocks built directly into monday service, incoming requests are automatically categorized and routed to the right teams based on their type, urgency, or sentiment.

ticketing feature in monday service as an ai copilot

Prevent SLA breaches with intelligent automations and alerts

When service volumes rise, teams may not notice a service level agreement (SLA) was breached because no one flagged the risk in time. monday service builds safeguards into the process itself with intelligent automations that trigger alerts as deadlines approach or prompt updates when tasks sit idle. You can also pause or restart timers as required, removing the need for agents to manually monitor each moving part.

drag and drop SLA workflow builder in monday service

Reduce duplicate work with structured, cross-functional workflows

Instead of building isolated request processes with different tools, monday service lets every department map and run service workflows in one connected system. For example, HR onboarding links to IT provisioning, while procurement aligns with finance approval chains. And nothing falls through the gaps because every step and handoff is accounted for.

Scaling service excellence company-wide

Deliver consistent service with centralized request intake and knowledge sharing

Requests enter the system through standardized forms that gather all the necessary details upfront, reducing the risk of misrouted service tickets or unnecessary back-and-forth. monday service also supports knowledge base articles and shared documentation, so teams aren’t reinventing responses or relying on word-of-mouth knowledge to resolve recurring issues.

A screenshot of the knowledge base feature as an AI copilot in monday service

Deliver exceptional value to your customers with monday service 

When service operations break down, it’s rarely because people aren’t trying — it’s because the systems around them can’t keep up. Each company and team within a company has its own tasks, subtasks, dependencies, process owners, and intake forms that shape their services. The more complex your service delivery model is, the harder it is to maintain a high quality of service at the speed your customers and end users expect.

monday service changes that. It gives every team a shared workspace to manage service requests with clarity, accountability, and scale. Get a free trial of monday service to see how it fits your workflows and where it removes friction from your service delivery.

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FAQs

Service management focuses on delivering value to customers through services, while operations management covers the broader oversight of all processes that produce goods and services.

In other words, service management is a subset of operations management that deals specifically with service delivery, including request handling, support, and customer experience. Operations management includes both service and production workflows, supply chain coordination, capacity planning, and more.

The 7 key functions of operations management are:

  • Operational planning
  • Finance
  • Product and service design
  • Quality management
  • Forecasting
  • Strategy
  • Supply chain management

Each function keeps your operations running efficiently and allocates resources thoughtfully. It also ensures your service or product output meets organizational standards.

A service operations manager is responsible for overseeing all the processes that support service delivery within an organization. This role typically includes managing workflows, improving team performance, ensuring compliance with service level agreements, and coordinating across departments to resolve service requests efficiently. Service operations managers must work closely with IT, HR, finance, and facilities teams to maintain smooth internal operations.

There are several examples of operations management software, each varying in scope and focus, from general project workflows to deep IT service operations capabilities. These include:

  • monday service, used for end-to-end service operations management for cross-functional teams
  • ServiceNow, used for IT service management
  • Zendesk, for customer support
  • Jira Service Management for issue tracking and Agile service operations
  • Asana for workflow management with light operations tools

Field service operations refers to the management of off-site service activities, such as maintenance, repair, installation, or inspections performed at customer or remote locations.
This function involves tasks like coordinating field technicians, scheduling appointments, and tracking equipment.

Rebecca Noori is a veteran content marketer who writes high-converting articles for SaaS and HR Technology companies like UKG, Deel, Nectar HR, and Loom. Her work has also been featured in renowned publications, including Business Insider, Business.com, Entrepreneur, and Yahoo News. With a background in IT support, technical Microsoft certifications, and a degree in English, Rebecca excels at turning complex technical topics into engaging, people-focused narratives her readers love to share.
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