Service Request Management: Meeting Moved, Catering Didn't

A law firm we talked to once got a request for a podium at 4:55 for an event at 5.

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That’s a rare scenario, though. The more common one is when the meeting moves from the 12th floor to the 9th, and the food still arrives on the 12th. Nobody told the kitchen because the room change happened in Outlook, and the catering order was sitting in someone's inbox. Been there, done that?

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If you've gone looking for help, you've noticed that most of what you'll read about service request management comes from IT. But workplace requests are different because they're tied to a room and a time, and those change a lot.

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Here's what we'll get into here:

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what counts as a service request, and when it's really an incident or a work order
5 steps every request goes through, and what to do when the booking changes
a facilities request form template you can copy
2 numbers that tell you requests are slipping
which workplace apps do this

TL;DR

A service request is when someone asks for something your team already does.
If something's broken, it's an incident.
A work order is the actual job, and one request can turn into several.
Most workplace requests go missing when the booking moves and the order stays put.

What is a service request?

service request example — *Service request example (Source: elia)*

A service request is when someone asks your team for something that you already do. Setting up the training room, ordering lunch for a client meeting, a new monitor, an ID badge for a new hire… Access requests count too, like a new employee needing software access on day 1.

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ITIL (the framework most IT teams follow) says a service request is for something that's agreed to be a normal part of service delivery. “Agreed" is important here:

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once you team has worked out that room setups are their responsibility and how much notice they need, a room setup is a service request
if nobody ever decided that, it's a favor

And favors get forgotten because they’re nobody’s job.

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Let’s say someone sends a Teams message asking for the training room to be set up for 30 on Thursday. If room setups are already on your team's list, someone owns it and it gets done. If they're not, it depends on who saw the message.

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Quick naming thing

At universities and cities, a facility request usually means booking the gym or an auditorium. When we say facilities service requests here, we mean asking your facilities team to do something. Workplace apps call requests added to a booking meeting services, and the fix-it kind workplace ticketing.

How is a service request different from an incident or a work order?

Easiest way to tell incident vs service request apart is to ask if something's broken:

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Water dripping on your keyboard? Incident request.
Coffee for a board meeting? Service request (even if someone's acting like it's an emergency).

ITIL calls an incident an unplanned interruption, and incident management is all about getting things working again fast. Service requests you can plan for.

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A work order is the actual job someone does for either one. In workplace ops, one request can turn into a bunch of jobs for different people.

work order example — *Work order example (Source: elia)*

Imagine a partner books a client lunch for 14 in a U-shape:

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the kitchen gets a work order
so does the setup crew
so does whoever checks the meeting room tech before the partner presents
so does whoever clears the room at 1:30

4 jobs, 1 request.

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The request is what the partner asked for. Each work order is who does what and by when.

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Dimension	Service request	Incident	Work order
Who raises it	An employee or someone booking for them	Whoever notices the problem	Your team, whenever a request or incident needs hands on it
What sets it off	A planned need	Something broke	A job that has to be assigned
How urgent	Depends on the need, often a meeting time	Usually very	Same as whatever created it
What you track	Time to fulfill	Time to fix	Labour and parts
Example	Moving 6 desks to the 3rd floor for a new team	The badge reader at the main entrance stops working	The movers' job for those 6 desks

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Keep them in separate buckets if you can. Otherwise one boiler repair makes it look like your team takes a week to set up a room.

Who owns which request?

Usually it's split. IT takes care of anything with a plug or a login, and often has its own desk, like ServiceNow. Facilities and reception sort out the rest, from moves and repairs to catering and guests.

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But for everyone else, it's kind of a mess. Like, the screen in the meeting room is dead. Do you call IT or facilities? Nobody’s sure. Your employees shouldn't have to figure that out. Just give them one place to ask and let your teams deal with whose it is.

What does the service request lifecycle look like?

You'll see the same 5 steps: submit (someone asks), triage (someone owns it), assign (the work is split up), resolve (it gets done), close (the room gets put back). ITIL calls the back half request fulfillment.

In practice, the steps themselves are fine, but a lot of times things get lost in the handoff between them, especially when a booking’s involved.

Step 1: someone asks

For workplace requests, you need to know where and when right off the bat.

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Anything sent as a loose Teams message or typed into a meeting invite is basically gone. People use whatever's fastest, and if your form takes longer than pinging Dave in facilities, they'll message Dave. Whether you call it a self-service portal or an employee portal, it has to beat Dave.

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Stick a QR code on the meeting room door or add a nice, big "Report an issue" button on the booking, and Dave gets a break.

Step 2: someone owns it

Someone, or at least a rule, needs to claim it and give it a due time. Automated workflows can do most of that if the request came in with the right category. Then send a quick "Got it." Once people know you've seen their request, the update messages stop.

assignee example — *Assignee example (Source: elia)*

A firm we talked to also told us they really like that their own IT service desk has auto-escalation rules. If nobody picks up a request in time, it gets bumped up to someone else, and stuck tickets don't get left hanging.

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When it comes to anything tied to a booking, the due time is the start of the meeting. Work backward from there:

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setup done 30 minutes before
AV in the room 15 minutes before

Pick your own service targets and write them down. If your caterer or cleaning company has service level agreements with you, match yours to theirs.

Step 3: the work gets split up

If the request needs more than one team, break it down into work orders and give each one to someone.

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Keep the back-and-forth on the ticket. If the setup crew asks if it’s rounds or a classroom in a side chat, the kitchen never hears the answer. Let people reply straight from Teams where they are and keep those conversations attached to the request.

Step 4: it gets done

The work happens and the requester hears back. For a password reset, you're finished. For a catering order, you're maybe halfway there.

Step 5: the room gets put back

A catering order is done once the trays are gone and the room’s ready for the next booking. We know a law office where their service team keeps track of every order on a board until someone collects the trays and cleans the room. Delivered is only the first checkpoint for them.

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If nobody resets the room, your 2 o’clock meeting walks in on a table full of the last meeting's coffee cups. Resetting rooms is kind of a thankless job, and people only notice when it didn't happen.

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For long meetings some teams will drop the food at a pickup spot outside the room. That’s way better than someone wheeling a cart in mid-presentation.

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And give people a little bit of time to reopen the ticket before it closes, so they can catch the orders that looked done in the queue but weren't actually done in the room.

What happens when the booking changes?

*Requests linked to the meeting (Source: elia)*

A lot of the requests that go missing start with a booking change. And a lot of the booking apps make things worse. In some of them, if you move the meeting, whatever was ordered for it gets cancelled, and in others the order gets locked once it's submitted and you can't really change it. Then someone ends up emailing the caterer anyway, right?

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What works way better is letting the change go through and just letting the person who ordered and the person making it know that something changed. Blocking the change feels safer, but people get annoyed pretty fast and go back to email, and then you've lost track of the request at the worst possible time.

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And if the caterer isn't part of the company, make sure they get it too, because a lot of the time they only ever get that one first email and have no idea the meeting got moved.

What about recurring meetings?

They’re sneaky too. The Monday leadership meeting with coffee for 12 is really one request that repeats every week. Check that the order carries over to every meeting in the series because some apps only attach it to the first one, and some don't let you add services to recurring bookings at all.

Where does a service catalogue fit in the request process?

A service catalogue is a list of the available services your team offers, written down so people don't have to second-guess what your team does.

*Catalogue item setup example (Source: elia)*

A service catalogue can also cut out a lot of back-and-forth too. When people request services from a list and pick something like a room setup for an event, the whole thing is already sorted, with all the details the crew needs to know. Compare that to an email asking if the big room can be ready for Friday, followed by 3 rounds of questions.

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You don't even need a huge catalogue to start out with. Just write down the services your team is already doing. One room setup service and a short list of equipment will get you off the ground quick, and you can always add more as things come up.

What should a facility request form include?

If your form only gets one thing right, make it the room. After that you’ll want to know when it's needed, what exactly, who pays, and who wants updates.

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You've probably gotten at least one request that just says the light is broken. Which floor? Which light? Then someone has to write back, wait, write back again, and sometimes walk the floor looking for it.

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A few things on the form help a lot with that:

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Make location impossible to get wrong. A pin on a floor plan works so much better than a text box every time and removes a lot of human error. Nobody has to figure out which room is the “room by the kitchen.”

Link the room booking (if there’s one). It pulls in the room and the headcount for you, and if the meeting moves, the request moves with it.

Only show the fields that make sense. You only need a cost center or matter number for billable stuff, and an approver for bigger orders. If people keep seeing fields they can't answer, they start skipping all of them.

Give urgent requests their own lane. If someone checks the box for a leak or safety issue, it should go straight to whoever deals with incidents instead of sitting in the queue. Someone should be looking at it within minutes.

Separate who asked from who's in the meeting. Assistants book for partners all the time, and the assistant is who needs the updates. The partner definitely doesn’t want 6 notifications.

Here's a template you can copy and adjust for your office:

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Section	Field	Notes	Required
Requester	Requested by	Auto-filled from sign-in if you can	Yes
Requester	Requesting on behalf of	For assistants and coordinators	No
Requester	Best way to reach you	Phone or Teams	Yes
Location and booking	Building, floor, room or desk	Floor plan pin works best	Yes
Location and booking	Linked booking	Fills in room and headcount	If there's one
Request details	Request type	Picked from your list of services	Yes
Request details	What you need	Items and quantities, or a description	Yes
Request details	Needed by	For events, when it should be in the room	Yes
Request details	Setup or layout	U-shape, classroom, boardroom, theatre	For room setups
Request details	Photo	Handy for repairs and damage	No
Request details	Is anything unsafe or leaking?	"Yes" sends it to your incident process	Yes
Cost and approval	Cost center or GL code	Only shown for billable items	If billable
Cost and approval	Client or matter number	For firms that bill events back to clients	If billable
Cost and approval	Approver	Only shown above your threshold	If over threshold
Notifications	Who gets updates	Requester by default, the attendee if they opt in	Yes
Notifications	Notes for the team	Access instructions or dietary needs	No

What should you track to catch missed requests?

From what we’ve seen, requests get stuck in 2 spots: either nobody picks them up, or the booking changes and nobody updates the order. I’d split both by request type, since a new keyboard and a full desk move shouldn't have the same target. It also helps with resource allocation.

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Then there are 2 numbers I'd actually check every month:

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Off-channel share = requests that came in outside your form ÷ all requests. Every email or hallway ask that someone had to log later. If that number isn't going down, people don't trust the form yet.

Missed-change rate = booking changes where the order didn't follow ÷ all booking changes. This one catches the second spot. If it's above zero, look at where the update got stuck, because the next catering order on the wrong floor will get stuck in the same place.

And if your numbers look rough, you're not the only one. In an AXELOS survey of IT service management teams, 85% had adopted service request management, and 61% of them said it still needed work. And those are IT teams, who mostly have a real service desk.

Facilities teams working out of a shared inbox have it worse.

What about feedback?

If you want to improve service quality, I'd start with those 2 gaps. A quick thumbs-up after each request is a nice way to track user satisfaction, but keep in mind you'll only hear from people whose requests got logged. For customer satisfaction, employees just want to know if it showed up on time and in the right room.

If you're starting from zero

Pull the last 90 days of requests from wherever they're hiding, including the shared inbox and that spreadsheet at reception. Your 10 most common requests become your first services and your first forms, and it gets a lot easier to set your service request management priorities once you can see them.

Which workplace apps manage service request processes?

Most workplace booking apps have something like this now, but they’re not all the same. Some let people add services when they book a room, and others are more for reporting problems and tracking the fix. A few do both.

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For example, in elia, people can request pretty much anything from the floor plan, whether it's catering with their booking or a broken monitor at their desk, and every request is tied to the exact spot. The requests move with bookings, too. You can also set up automations for approvals and assignments, and people can reply to comments right from Teams.

elia service request management — *Source: elia*

Here are a few more tools that do service request management.

1. Services attached to a booking

Robin calls it meeting services, and people add catering or room setup while they book, from the web or from Outlook.

deskbird has catering & services, where admins set up items for each room and requests land in one dashboard.

YAROOMS does that too, and it also keeps track of what everything costs.

Clearooms has a room services module and gives the service team their own dashboard where they can accept or change orders.

Eptura and OfficeRnD have their own versions too.

2. Issue reporting and tickets

OfficeSpace calls it facility requests. People drop a pin on the floor plan and add a photo, and teams set response targets.

Tactic's workplace requests start from the office map too, and it keeps moves and room approvals in the same queue.

Envoy and Yoffix let people report issues from their apps.

3. IT side

If your IT team uses ServiceNow or Jira Service Management, a lot of these apps can pass tickets over, and elia brings the status back too. People still get one place to ask, and IT keeps working where they already are. ServiceNow also has its own workplace services catalogue, and some bigger companies use it for catering and maintenance.

elia automation module — *Automation workflow example (Source: elia)*

Whatever you pick, employees shouldn't need to know your org chart to get a light bulb changed.

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Features change a lot, and I'd test a few things before you pick one:

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Move a meeting to another floor and see what happens to the catering order.

Book a recurring meeting with services and check whether week 2 still has them.

Ask if an outside caterer hears about changes, or only gets the first order.

Report an issue from your phone and time it against sending a Teams message.

If you want to run those tests on elia, take a look at the request management software or book a quick demo with our team.

Tamara Zhostka

is a Content Marketing Specialist at elia. With 10+ years in content marketing, she writes about workplace trends and the tools that help teams work smarter. Part strategist, part storyteller, Tamara brings equal amounts of data, creativity, and a little Moon Prism Power to every piece she creates. 🌙✨

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