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Service desk is a communication tool where users can request help and receive support. It provides service internal to the company. For example, an employee is locked out of a tool they use for their work and requests to have their access restored. Service desk also provides support to external customers. For example, a user of GitLab might need help troubleshooting a CI/CD pipeline that is not quite working the way the user expected it to. In short, service desk facilitates the request for help between the support organization and the user community.
We view service desk as an integral part of GitLab. GitLab is used to create, launch, and operate software products. When there is feedback from users of the product, often times that feedback is critical to improving the product. As such, we want the feedback loop to be efficient and seamless.
The GitLab Service Desk aims to be the primary medium which connects customers to product support staff.
The GitLab Service Desk allows your organization the opportunity to provide an email address to your customers. These customers can send issues, feature requests, comments, and suggestions via email, with no external tools needed. These emails become issues right inside GitLab, potentially even in the same project where you are developing your product or service, pulling your customers directly into your DevOps process.
In 2023, GitLab is renewing the investment in Service Desk category.
Why are we investing in Service Desk now?
First, we are ramping up our investment in service desk because it is long-term defensive play.
GitLab, without a mature service desk offering, will not be able to close the DevSecOps loop. This becomes increasingly risky as more ITSM players push into the DevOps market.
Second, investing in service desk helps accelerate adoption of two strategic investment areas.
Service Desk is closely related to both the plan stage and the monitor stage. Here are some examples of how they relate:
As we invest in service desk, some of the needed features and capabilities implemented for service desk are also usable for other use cases in Plan and Monitor. This cross-stage, cross-feature acceleration will enable GitLab to grow adoption of the Plan stage and incident management.
Our goal is that in 1 year's time, GitLab uses GitLab Service Desk to respond to user and customer's support requests.
We plan to do this by implementing the key features that are needed by our support team in order to dogfood GitLab Service Desk. This means we are focusing first on serving users external to the company. We are specifically not starting with internal use cases, such as IT support and asset management.