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Top 10 Service Management Trends for 2025
Opportunities for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
Buckle up for 2025 – it’s going to be a wild ride! With global competition heating up and cost pressure mounting, mid-sized businesses need to get their strategy in gear to stay ahead of the game. And that’s not all – political and economic uncertainty in international markets is also demanding that management teams think outside the box to come out on top.
But here’s the silver lining: new tech and smart service management transformations hold huge potential for SMBs to boost efficiency. In this article, we’re counting down the top 10 trends shaping service management in 2025 – and how mid-sized businesses can cash in.
Trend 1: The Next Level of AI Tools
2025 is all about advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and it’s a game-changer for service management. With AI, businesses can gain deeper insights and boost efficiency like never before.
For instance, AI-powered chatbots can take care of responding to customer inquiries, minimizing manual processing time and freeing up staff from tedious tasks. Right from the get-go, incoming requests can be automatically classified. As the conversation unfolds, AI suggests context-based responses that speed up support and improve the quality of customer communication.
This means small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can make the most of their limited resources, scale their processes more efficiently – and gain a crucial competitive edge.
We’re already testing an Large Language Model (LLM) at OTOBO to prep for integration into our software.
Trend 2: Elevating Experience Management with Real-Time Feedback
Another key trend is experience management – it’s not just about performance, but about delivering a seamless customer experience. By collecting continuous feedback throughout the entire service process (not just at the end), small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can gain valuable insights and make targeted improvements to build trust and strengthen customer loyalty.
A simple example is incident management: when an issue arises, the goal is to resolve it quickly and efficiently while keeping the user informed about the progress every step of the way. A good experience management system ensures users receive timely updates on the status of the issue and are notified when it’s successfully resolved.
Similarly, with service request management, users who submit a service request expect a smooth, hassle-free experience. Experience management systems help fulfill requests faster, such as through self-service portals, and keep users in the loop about the status of their requests.
Trend 3: Sustainability as a Core Component of Service Processes
Many companies are striving to reduce their environmental footprint by adopting greener IT solutions and processes. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), this poses a dual challenge: implementing sustainability initiatives while keeping costs in check. Cloud-based services and energy-efficient hardware can help curb power consumption and minimize environmental impacts.
Open-source software also makes a positive contribution to sustainability. By enabling the creation of a cost-effective, flexible, and energy-efficient IT infrastructure, open-source solutions benefit not just individual users but the entire community. The ongoing development of new improvements by this community yields energy and resource savings that trickle down to all users.
Trend 4: Expanding Service Management Beyond IT
Service management systems are increasingly being adopted across departments such as HR, facilities management, after-sales support, and logistics. Enterprise service management (ESM) enables a more centralized and unified approach to managing services, targeted process control, and improved communication with internal and external stakeholders.
The benefit for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is a company-wide boost in efficiency and improvement of internal workflows. Service-based workflows across all departments ensure a consistent service experience for employees and customers alike. A nice side effect: as service quality improves, so does employee satisfaction.
Trend 5: Service Integration and Management (SIAM) for Orchestrating Multi-Provider Environments
In today’s cloud-first era, managing services and providers has become increasingly complex. That’s where Service Integration and Management (SIAM) comes in – to tame this complexity.
A critical aspect of SIAM is multi-provider management, which enables the coordination and monitoring of multiple vendors. But how can mid-sized businesses ensure they have a complete overview of all services and providers? The answer lies in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). A CMDB is a central repository that collects and manages all configuration and asset data for an organization.
By integrating SIAM and multi-provider management with a CMDB, companies can create a single source of truth for all services and providers, gaining a better understanding of their IT landscapes and optimizing them for improved control.
Trend 6: Prioritizing Data Privacy, Risk, and Security Management
Given the growing threats and regulations, managing IT security and risks remains a top priority. Especially small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are vulnerable to cyber attacks due to limited expertise and tight budgets for security technology. As such, they need to focus on built-in secure IT service management (ITSM) systems that seamlessly integrate with existing processes. It’s not just about minimizing the direct, negative impact of security breaches on daily operations, but also about protecting sensitive business data and meeting legal compliance requirements.
Automated security checks and integrated technologies for encryption, identity, and access management within service management solutions can mitigate risks and ensure compliance requirements are met.
Trend 7: Accelerated Adoption of Cloud Technologies and Hybrid Cloud Architectures
Cloud technologies continue to transform service management, particularly through the flexibility they offer. Cloud-native solutions and hybrid clouds enable small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to rapidly scale and adapt their IT infrastructure without having to make significant hardware investments.
The flexibility and availability of cloud services support SMBs in quickly adapting to changing market conditions and ensuring business continuity even during crisis situations.
For organizations with high security requirements that need to maintain full control over their data, hosted managed service solutions from service management providers remain a viable alternative, allowing them to save on infrastructure investments and focus on their core business.
Trend 8: The Integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
In light of the escalating complexity in IT, the integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB) maintains its prominence on the trend charts.
It empowers organizations to consolidate decentralized IT and non-IT assets, including their interdependencies, into a unified platform, facilitating centralized monitoring and efficient management.
Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) reap the benefits of a consolidated and transparent view of their IT infrastructure, as well as higher-quality data across processes – both essential foundations for informed decision-making, automated workflows, and rapid issue resolution.
From a service management perspective, this translates to maintaining control over individual service components, known as Configuration Items (CIs), and their interdependencies. This enables early detection of disruptions, assessment of impact along the value chain, expedited solution delivery, or swift restoration of disrupted services. Concurrently, service processes such as incident management, problem management, and change management can be automated based on real-time configuration data, freeing up resources and further increasing efficiency.
Notably, this also enhances the customer experience – as communication regarding the current status of service requests or outage notifications naturally benefits from higher transparency and automation of processes. Timely and ongoing communication about progress ensures customers are well-informed and satisfied.
Trend 8: The Integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
In light of the escalating complexity in IT, the integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB) maintains its prominence on the trend charts.
It empowers organizations to consolidate decentralized IT and non-IT assets, including their interdependencies, into a unified platform, facilitating centralized monitoring and efficient management.
Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) reap the benefits of a consolidated and transparent view of their IT infrastructure, as well as higher-quality data across processes – both essential foundations for informed decision-making, automated workflows, and rapid issue resolution.
From a service management perspective, this translates to maintaining control over individual service components, known as Configuration Items (CIs), and their interdependencies. This enables early detection of disruptions, assessment of impact along the value chain, expedited solution delivery, or swift restoration of disrupted services. Concurrently, service processes such as incident management, problem management, and change management can be automated based on real-time configuration data, freeing up resources and further increasing efficiency.
Notably, this also enhances the customer experience – as communication regarding the current status of service requests or outage notifications naturally benefits from higher transparency and automation of processes. Timely and ongoing communication about progress ensures customers are well-informed and satisfied.
Trend 9: Data-Driven and Analytical Decision-Making
Data is key to informed decision-making, and that holds true in service management as well. The ability to make data-driven decisions is crucial for continuously improving your service processes.
Integrated analytics and reporting tools must enable this capability. In other words, incident, problem, change, and configuration management data should be easily evaluable without requiring extensive programming knowledge, allowing you to identify trends and problems early on, allocate resources strategically, and sustainably improve service quality.
Furthermore, connections to the artificial intelligence (AI) trend theme also facilitate predictive pattern recognition within the data, which can serve as early warning indicators for impending disruption scenarios.
Trend 10: Self-Service Portals for Boosting Employee Satisfaction
Self-service portals and automated tools for employee experience will remain in focus through 2025, as a positive employee experience is increasingly recognized as crucial to a service organization’s performance.
These self-service portals provide access to the IT service catalog or, in the case of more mature service organizations, even enterprise services from various departments. By empowering employees to handle everyday requests on their own, such as accessing the knowledge database, companies can offload their IT teams and increase employee satisfaction, since solution times are reduced and waiting for the service team’s response becomes a thing of the past. This is particularly attractive for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), allowing them to optimize their IT capacities and enhance productivity.
Our Takeaway
In light of current challenges, optimizing service management offers mid-sized businesses a wealth of opportunities to streamline operations and simultaneously boost employee and customer satisfaction.
Flexible and user-friendly service solutions enhance the customer experience, enable data-driven decision-making, and make companies more agile and resilient.
Open-source software is a significant advantage: it’s continuously developed by an active community, boasts innovation power and high adaptability, and comes with lower licensing costs. It reduces the environmental footprint and helps SMBs achieve their sustainability goals. At the same time, open-source software empowers SMBs to maintain independence and build a flexible, future-proof IT infrastructure.
