Celebrating National Customer Service Week (Part 1)

Times are tough and many organizations are looking for ways to reduce costs. However, even in difficult times, investing in the people, processes and technology used to serve customers is sure to reap a positive return. National Customer Service Week (NCSW), held October 5-9 in 2009, provides an excellent opportunity to explore ways to better serve your customers. It is also an excellent time to let the employees who serve your customers know how important they are to the success of your organization.

Always the first week in October, NCSW is designed to raise awareness of customer service and the vital role it plays within an organization. It is also an opportunity to say thank you to those who work in customer service for a job well done. Organizations take part in NCSW by hosting events in their workplace. These events can be large or small, serious or fun, they can be held all through the week or just on one day…. it's up to each organization to decide how to celebrate.

Many organizations use this week as an opportunity to provide training and refocus the efforts of their staff on the needs of their customers. In IT, a common misconception is that the Service Desk is responsible for customer satisfaction because of its role as a single point of contact. However, every team in IT is part of the value network that creates value for customers, and each team must understand the importance of its contribution.

Celebrating National Customer Service Week doesn’t have to cost a lot. It really just takes a little creativity. For example:

Begin each meeting or training class with a review of team goals and how they contribute to customer satisfaction.
Celebrate achievements such as an increase in your customer satisfaction rating. Food is always a fun and easy way to celebrate!
Send a daily email with positive customer feedback and inspiring customer-related quotes.
Offer a “lunch and learn” series focused on the soft skills needed to deliver excellent service such as listening skills, communication skills and customer service skills.
Launch a project aimed at creating better relationships between your Service Desk and second- and third-line support teams by creating Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) that clearly spell out roles and responsibilities.
Review your policies and processes and ensure they are not standing in the way of excellent customer service. Begin with a review of recent customer satisfaction surveys and complaints to ensure changes fully address your customers’ needs and expectations.

Best practice frameworks such as ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000 are aimed at ensuring the focus always stays on customer needs and expectations. In fact, customer satisfaction by definition is “the difference between how a customer expects to be treated and how the customer perceives he or she was treated. Achieving high customer satisfaction begins with understanding customer requirements. It also involves determining how best to manage expectations in terms of the service levels that can be delivered given existing capabilities and resources.

Join me next week for a look at how to ensure your processes are “customer friendly.” In the mean time, get planning! National Customer Service Week is two weeks away and so you’ve got plenty of time.

What have you got planned?

Four Service Characteristics

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.” Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL 4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group. As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions 1. Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. ...

The New Four Ps of Service Management

By Donna Knapp For years, people , process , and technology (PPT) was a widely recognized framework for balancing and integrating the components needed to achieve optimal performance and outcomes. In the ITIL v3 Service Design publication, this framework was expanded to the four Ps: people , processes , products , and partners . ITIL 4 has further expanded and evolved this framework to the four dimensions of service management. These four dimensions are collectively critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other stakeholders in the form of products and services. The four dimensions of service management are: Organizations and people Information and technology Partners and suppliers Value streams and processes. These four dimensions represent perspectives which are relevant to the whole service value system (SVS), including the entirety of the service value chain and all ITIL practices. Each ITIL practice is a set of organizational resources base...

Search