Wrike is targeting the lucrative enterprise service management market with a new template designed specifically for that use case. Whether the work management firm can provide a serious competitive alternative to ServiceNow and Salesforce is questionable. However, for those firms already using Wrike, it does open up a capability to extend its use to a new area, solving some of the challenges those teams face.
The Enterprise-Grade Service Management Template may find traction in those internal teams that need to improve collaboration. It will help solve complex challenges within the business, coordinating people from within and outside the business. Wrike is pitching the template to internal teams such as Finance, IT and HR. Of these, ITSM often provides service management for IT teams, and HRIS solutions provide case management for HR teams. Is finance where it might find the most traction?
Andrew Filev, Founder of Wrike, commented: “We understand companies of all sizes, but especially SMBs, face significant challenges around security, budget, and cross-functional work, to name a few. In a single swoop, Wrike brings to everyone the capabilities of expensive enterprise tools in a very accessible and user-friendly package.
“As their business scales, they will need a solution that can grow with them rather than having to take on the time-consuming task of seeking out multiple other solutions to meet new demands. Our customers have deployed the platform across all departments, covering a wide variety of their business workflows. In doing so, Wrike is bringing all work in the organisation onto one platform, simplifying the lives of millions of users and putting them in control of their work.
“According to our recent Dark Matter of Work research, teams are spread across 14 different applications on a daily basis, and send and receive an average of 295 work-related messages each day. This causes decreased productivity, as well as burnout and employee churn. When workflows are managed in one platform, by the user and for the user, it helps with onboarding, training, collaboration, and management, resulting in tremendous improvement in employee productivity.”
The enterprise service management template
The template has several pre-built features, such as specific custom item types that Wrike has built the feature around. They include support for Service Requests, Incidents, Knowledge Base Articles, Change Requests, Problem Records, Customer Surveys, and Meeting Minutes. Each is the building block to create a new service request within Wrike and process it through the work management platform.
Wrike has created several folders within the ESM space that retain the various information and processes for each use case. The service design folder contains the different process flows for each use case. It enables organisations to amend the existing custom item types and workflows and create new ones.
Each incident record can also be stored in the knowledge base management subfolder. It allows users to access previously provided answers to questions. Where common queries are identified, users can create articles for those queries. It enables users to self-serve answers or for service teams to respond rapidly to those queries.
The third folder, Service Desks, holds the information and statistics to manage and monitor the different service teams across the organisation. Business leaders can quickly identify incidents’ status and see whether SLAs are met. There are also dashboards that provide a visual overview of items such as Incidents, Service Requests, and Problem Records. Views can be changed to see tickets from different vectors, including description, location, team or others. Other stakeholders can also be updated with automated reports.
Email communications with non-Wrike users
Alongside the new template, Wrike also announced email communication with non-Wrike users. It enables external companies to contribute to the collaboration with Wrike licenses. For those organisations that have not installed the most expensive point solutions, this new template could be the glue to help issue management across the organisation.
This new feature supports the ESM template enabling HR, IT and Finance teams to solve issues with the support of third-party organisations. HR teams can leverage their external legal support using their ESM solution. External parties can also raise queries through web-based forms to the various internal teams using Wrike.
However, all communications from the solution to external stakeholders is an unbranded communication from [email protected]. They do not from the sender’s email domain. There is no indication that users can change this, but it would be a useful feature to at least brand the emails. Will Wrike give users the option of creating their own addresses even if within the Wrike domain? Users can change the email’s subject, but this starts a new email chain and support request.
Limited support for attachments
Attachments are supported but limited to 25MB. Email communication is only supported for regular tasks, including those from Blueprints and task- and project-based work items created out of custom item types. Disappointingly there is no support within the Wrike Mobile App at present. The new feature is available to Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Pinnacle users. It is also available to legacy business and enterprise accounts.
There are some questions about this feature. For example, the emails presumably will not appear in the corporate mailbox of the user and will be held in Wrike. For some IT functions, this could create challenges. Especially during an email discovery process when asked to review historical correspondence with customers. It will mean a search not just in their email platform but also within Wrike.
Alexey Korotich, VP of Product, Wrike, commented: “External email communication with non-Wrike users is one of the most demanded feature requests we’ve seen from customers. This reiterates workers’ desire to move away from disconnected email chains lacking proper workflows and streamline communications into a single source of truth.
“We’re thrilled to roll this new capability out with our Service Management solution template. It marks an important step in our journey to empower service teams with the tools they need to save work hours, shorten the road to resolution, and achieve better stakeholder satisfaction.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
For some organisations, this new template will provide a simple and quick-to-deploy service management solution. If Wrike is already in place, user adoption should be quick. The external email connectivity is useful for teams that need to leverage third-party support contracts. However, who will adopt the new template? Will it be preferred to other more established functional solutions such as HRIS and ITSM?
This is a big shift for Wrike from supporting project teams to service management teams. However, will it succeed? It may need to provide integrations to other solutions for firms to adopt the Wrike Service Management template. Could it integrate with an accounting solution using an API to provide the finance team with an integrated solution? This area is not well served but might provide some finance teams with useful functionality beyond email collaboration.
