In today’s highly competitive IT landscape, customer experience matters more than anything else. By providing exceptional service delivery and customer experience at every touchpoint, your business can not only attract new customers from competitors but can also retain your existing customer base. In fact, you can turn your existing customers into loyal fans and brand advocates by meeting the highest standards of service delivery.
This will have a positive impact on your revenue and profitability. How would you achieve service delivery excellence? That is exactly the question we are going to answer in this article. In this article, you will learn about ways you can use to achieve IT service delivery excellence.
How To Achieve IT Service Delivery Excellence?
Here are some of the ways businesses can use to achieve IT service delivery excellence.
Take a Proactive Approach To Service Delivery
There is nothing worse for a customer than to wait long for their issues to be resolved especially when they need your help the most. Instead of being reactive, you should be proactive when it comes to catering to customer requests and service delivery. Make sure the IT service you deliver is fully tested and there are no issues.
Implement tools that help you detect issues with your service and fix them before the customer can even complain about them. This is called a proactive approach to service delivery. This frees your IT team from falling in the trap of repetitive support processes. You should also emphasize with the users and listen to what they are saying.
Make them feel that you can feel their pain and you are doing your bit to relieve them of this pain. Tell them how long they will have to wait before the issue is resolved instead of keeping them in the dark about the progress. Avoid over or underestimating the problem and give them a clear picture about the gravity of the situation.
Structure Your Service Catalog
Streamlined operations and processes are critical to service catalog but a well structured service catalog is even more crucial. Your service catalog should clearly outline what each service is all about and how the service is going to be delivered.
More importantly, your sales and customer service teams must have a clear understanding of what each service is all about so they can respond to customer queries and assist customers in troubleshooting issues associated with their dedicated server hosting in a more efficient manner. This allows you to achieve much better results than businesses who have an unstructured catalog.
Set and Track The Right Metrics
Which metrics to track when it comes to evaluating the quality of service delivery is another question. Most businesses end up chasing the wrong metrics and could not get a clear picture about how good or bad their service delivery is working. Metrics like time to restore service, lead time to change and net promoter score are crucial indicators of your service delivery excellence.
You should not only rely on metrics. Instead, you should do your own research and employ techniques like value stream mapping to identify and fix inconsistencies and issues in your process. This will help you improve your service level instantly, which would translate into better customer experience.
Streamline Process To Cater To Specific Business Needs
Creating processes is one thing and streamlining them is another. IT leaders should not only develop service delivery processes but also optimize it. Make sure your service delivery process aligns with organizational goals and cater to specific business needs of a particular functional unit.
Business leaders can also create a distinction between decision making processes and infrastructure or operational processes so you can focus on each in a much better way. You can also leverage cloud models for particular workloads to reduce the load from your on premise infrastructure such as semi dedicated server.
Put Users First
Continuous improvement and user feedback are at the heart of achieve IT service delivery excellence. Create teams that focus on delivering new features. These new features should be designed according to the user feedback so it can surpass their expectations. Make sure that your leader team acts like a scrum team, providing continuous support and ensuring end to end delivery.
Your service delivery process must accommodate for the diverse needs of every stakeholder whether you are an external customer or an internal employee. The key to success is to spend time studying customer needs and pain points and you will get a clear idea about what’s causing the problems for your customers.
Document Everything
Every service delivery activity needs to be planned well in advance so you don’t end up rushing through it not knowing what to do and how to respond. The plan should include everything from methods you will use for service delivery to resources allocated to team members designated. Create a standard operating procedure and stick to it.
Once you have a clearly laid out plan in front of you, your service delivery team knows exactly which action to perform first and how to perform it. Develop a corrective and preventive process to fix issues and prevent the same issues from occurring repeatedly. Document how the correction was made so it can be reused to fix similar issues in the future.
Conduct Root Cause Analysis
Achieving service delivery excellence is not an overnight endeavor. It can take a long time to fine tune your service delivery processes. You need to understand the root cause of the problem via root cause analysis. This will tell you what’s causing this issue. Once you know the exact cause, it is much easier for your service delivery team to fix the problem.
By addressing the root cause, you are not only fixing one issue but closing the doors on chances of similar issues occurring in the future. Businesses can also do SWOT analysis to know areas they need to improve and areas where they are already performing well. You should adopt an agile approach as it brings continuous improvement and develop a governance plan.
How do you achieve IT service delivery excellence? Share your process with us in the comments section below.
