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| Stage | Service Management |
| Maturity | Viable |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2023-06-01 |
Service desk is a point of contact between users and service providers. It captures the demand for incident resolution and service requests.
We view the service desk as an integral part of GitLab. Developers use GitLab to create, launch, and operate software products. When there is a demand service requests, questions about the software, or other forms of feedback from users of the product, we want the feedback loop to be efficient and seamless. GitLab Service Desk is responsible for bringing these requests directly to the developers all within the same platform.
Furthermore, beyond shortening the feedback loop for developers, in alignment with GitLab's 10-year vision, we want GitLab to be a general service desk for all users of the platform.
Provide a complete, yet lightweight and customizable customer support solution that seamlessly integrates with the GitLab ecosystem and brings customers, support staff, and developers closer together.
Service desk solutions should be able to solve the following problems:
GitLab Service Desk is built on top of existing GitLab capabilities, including work item types, CI, Quick Actions, Analytics Dashboards, and more. We intend to leverage the capabilities built for DevOps use cases and add enhancements to efficiently address the needs of a service desk solution.
We plan to focus initially to introduce a new work item "ticket". This will enable us to differentiate from generic GitLab issues, streamline the UI by removing unnecessary elements, add useful enhancements, and create the corner-stone to build additional capabilities. After establishing the new fundamental service desk work unit, we will move on to build out other essential Service Desk capabilities.
Service desk, in the software context, provides value to software teams large and small. We currently have the following segmentation:
We ultimately plan to offer a delightful service desk experience to all three segments. We hypothesize that as we are building out the missing essential service desk capabilities, GitLab Service Desk is a better fit for SMBs and potential enterprise teams with internal customers. We can begin to target enterprise users once GitLab Service Desk reaches complete maturity.
Below is our 4-Quarter Rolling Roadmap
| FY24'Q2 (May-Jul 2023) | FY24'Q3 (Aug-Oct 2023) | FY24'Q4 (Nov'23-Jan'24) | FY25'Q1 (Feb-Apr 2024) |
|---|---|---|---|
| MVC for Service Desk Work Item | Improvements to Service Desk Lists | Triggers | Automation |
| SLA | Real-time collision detection | Custom Meta Data |
Please note, this table only includes thematic epics or major features. It is not meant to be a precise, or exhaustive list of work we plan to do. For planning details, please reference our planning issues.
In addition to various value-adding features, the main focus for us in FY24'Q2 is to establish the Service Desk Work Item. To do this, in 16.1, we are spiking on what it takes to build on the work items framework and how we might iterate towards a production Service Desk ticket. The outcome of this exercise is to create an iteration plan that we will execute on in 16.2 and 16.3.
TBD
Atlassian very successfully pivoted Jira project management and issue tracking into Jira Service Management. We view them as the exemplary case of having transitioned from a software planning tool to tackling the much larger market of ITSM. The way Atlassian started was to implement service desk on top of existing Jira capabilities.
Zendesk is a powerful service desk tool with broad market appeal. It is the feature complete service desk tool that we also use at GitLab for external customer support.
ServiceNow is a dominant player in ITSM and offers a comprehensive enterprise solution with service desk, along with other management and workflow tools built in.
Service Desk is currently available in the free tier.
TBD
TBD