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What Is Incident Management Software?
Build trust with customers by responding swiftly and effectively to unavoidable customer service incidents – power outages, security breaches, shipping delays and more.
Build trust with customers by responding swiftly and effectively to unavoidable customer service incidents – power outages, security breaches, shipping delays and more.
Incident management software (IMS) is a crucial tool that helps businesses manage and resolve incidents efficiently. Whether the incident is a power outage, a security breach, or a bug that affects many customers, this software ensures that incidents are handled promptly and effectively.
How your company responds to crises – including how it communicates with customers throughout the incident – is a big deal. In fact, our research found that 90% of customers say how a company acts during a crisis reveals its trustworthiness. Handling a disastrous situation well can go a long way in building that trust.
IMS helps you respond more quickly and efficiently, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity. Let’s explore what exactly incident management software is, as well as how it can help your organization.
What Is Incident Management Software?
How Does Incident Management Software Work?
Deployment Options for Incident Management Software
7 Benefits of Using Incident Management Software
Key Features of Incident Management Software
Incident Management Software vs. Ticketing Software vs. Helpdesk Software
How to Choose the Right Incident Management Software for Your Business
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Incident management software is a specialized application that helps organizations identify, track, manage, and resolve incidents. These incidents may be IT issues, security breaches, shipping delays, natural disasters, service outages, or other operational disruptions.
When a customer contacts customer support, they expect an answer or a resolution. But customer service teams are not set up for success. Without incident management software, teams often can’t explain what is happening, because the details of the incident live across multiple applications and systems. Service reps either don’t have access to this information (like engineering software data), or don’t know how to interpret it. Meanwhile, back office operations teams, like DevOps, engineering, and IT, don’t have access to customer and case data that may contain key information that could help them resolve the problem.
A good incident management software application connects teams across the company, so they can collaborate to rapidly solve the issue. It connects disparate systems, giving everyone involved the information they need to do their jobs. And it provides a central way to communicate, so that there’s no delay or information gaps between teams.
The goal is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible, minimizing the impact on business operations and ensuring high levels of service quality and availability.
Typically, incident management software operates on a structured framework designed to streamline the entire incident lifecycle. The process usually includes several key stages:
By automating these steps, IMS helps teams respond faster and more effectively to incidents.
While the above steps outline the basic framework for IMS, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have now made it possible to significantly uplevel the efficiency of your incident response. With Customer Service Incident Management from Service Cloud, service and operations teams work together seamlessly, with access to all the incident, case, and customer data in a unified workspace. Even better – Service Cloud allows you to proactively address incidents before customers realize there is a problem. (See Key Features of Incident Management Software for more.)
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Organizations have several deployment options when it comes to incident management software, each with its own advantages:
Each deployment option comes with unique considerations, including budget, compliance, and organizational needs.
Implementing incident management software offers numerous benefits:
Now that you know why you might use incident management software, what should you look for in a vendor? A robust incident management software should include the following key features:
While incident management software, ticketing software, and helpdesk software share some similarities, they serve different purposes:
Choosing the right tool depends on an organization’s specific needs and the complexity of its operations.
Selecting the right incident management software for your business involves considering several factors:
Incident management software is essential for organizations wanting to resolve incidents quickly and efficiently. The right software helps you respond to incidents faster, so you can deliver better customer service.
Connect teams across your company and give everyone access to key information with incident management software. Resolve issues faster and deliver the proactive, efficient service that customers expect.