Operators from Heaven: 5 Steps to Reach IT Service Excellence

Exceptional IT Service Management requires good processes, advanced technology tools and the right culture.  

By Scott Pointon, Digital Marketing Professional

As the market becomes more competitive and the customers become more demanding, many organizations have included service management in the list of their business success indicators; one that has to be measured, recorded and following specific standards.

While a critical factor, though, service is not about figures. Actually, it’s all about people. Whether in IT or any other market sector, whether it’s businesses or consumers, it’s always about people. Service is delivered by people, aka your team, and it’s aimed to satisfy other people, aka your customers. Here’s a list of five important steps to improve your ITSM operations and deliver outstanding services:

1.      Engage your customer. Most people tend to rate their experiences based on emotion rather than reasoning. Your customers get in touch because they are struggling; and they want to know that you actually care about their situation. Build a rapport with them, ask for details and record not just the incident, but its impact too. Keep and retrieve any previous communication to facilitate future discussions.

2.      Personalise your approach. Sure, it’s just another customer. But their request is unique. Their relationship with your organization is unique. And their value to your organization is unique. Some customers might be of higher value and importance; some others might need a more attentive approach. Make sure you understand each customer’s history and personalise your approach to address their particular needs.

3.      Be consistent. Customers don’t care about your work overload, your limited resources, your reduced headcount or cut budgets. They don’t care if members of your team are on holiday or on training, or just occupied otherwise. All they care about is their incident and how it could be resolved as soon as possible, with the minimum involvement by their side. Whether it’s a good or bad day for your team, your customers expect to receive the same high level of support; and rightly so.

4.      Explain and document. Whatever your response or approach might be, the customer has a right to know why you dealt with it the way you did. Explain the procedure and use documented processes to justify your decisions. Keep your customer informed about any developments and updates. Communicate with them frequently and promptly. A well-informed customer is a satisfied customer.

5.      Evaluate your performance. Ask for customers’ feedback, run satisfaction surveys, measure and compare your response times and fix rates. Frequent evaluation will help you recognise areas of improvement and optimize your service.

While processes are important, so is the culture of the team who deals with customer requests. Advanced technology tools can help you improve IT Service Management, by infusing the right culture. Marval MSM is one of them: with its rich features, it supports frequent communication with the customer, personalisation, consistency of service, documentation and comprehensive reporting and evaluation. It also provides a user-friendly environment and a functional framework that enables operators to collect and actually use all available information and resources, to accelerate response and fix rates. Marval MSM was designed to eMSM the teams and help establish new processes and the right culture: one that brings people in the centre of your service. And that’s exactly what it does.