I was recently asked what I thought the most important outcome of service management was for an IT environment. My answer was simple and came to me instantly – operational stability.
It made me think, in today’s business world, the trend of customer experience is widespread. And rightly so. Delivering an exceptional customer experience should be the goal of every business, in whatever form it takes for their industry, and it is important to winning and retaining customers. As we strive to deliver these kinds of experiences, however, we can’t lose focus on operational stability. Without it, a great customer experience cannot exist.
In the ICT industry, specifically for managed services providers like AC3, we are seeing these two things converge. Operational stability is as much about the people as it is about the technology. They go hand in hand to achieve business continuity because the reality is, as well architected as the technology is, there is always a chance something will go wrong. It could be an unexpected event like a rush to your website, or it could be a cyber security attack, or you could simply yet unexpectedly run out of storage. It’s important to recognise that these things are likely to happen at some point, and that, most of the time, they are a result of humans rather than technology.
But how do we use technology to minimise the likelihood of instability in our IT environment, while maximising our customer experience? First, it’s about considering who your customers are. You may know exactly who they are; they may be well defined by your marketing team. But what about internal customers? Most CIOs or IT Managers spend a great deal of their time working with internal teams, so these colleagues need to be considered customers. Simply changing the language here can change the perspective of your team in how they treat these customers.
Once you start considering your internal customers, you can start to build their IT journey and look for gaps on how to best solve their issues.
We worked with one customer recently on a project to implement ServiceNow as their ITSM tool. During the requirements gathering process for the project, we uncovered that the HR team was one of the largest internal customers of the IT team – and they weren’t having the best customer experience. This was a case of the people doing the best that they could with technology that wasn’t built with user experience in mind. Once we understood that this was a problem, it made it simple to workshop the ideal user journey and use technology, in this case ServiceNow, to implement it. The technical tool supported the user in delivering ideal HR engagements, and improving the internal customer experience, while ensuring operational stability.
Developing processes must be done in partnership with systems and tools, so your people know how to leverage them to keep your business running. This can sometimes be easy to overlook, but is key to ensuring your technology is doing its job. My advice is to enable the easy sharing of this knowledge, once it’s been documented. Consider an internal knowledge base so your team can easily access information. This limits your risk when a key resource or subject matter expert is unavailable. At AC3, we leverage ServiceNow to deliver an internal knowledge base across all of our systems. We’ve been able to create dashboards and use metrics to understand how that information is being used, and constantly optimise it to help us deliver for our customers.
Developing a great customer experience is an ongoing process but, most importantly, it needs to be done in partnership with keeping your ship steady and delivering on the promises you make to your customers – whether they are internal or external customers. Once you have a solid foundation in place, start innovating, learning and looking for ways to get better, so you can keep ahead of your market and keep delivering great business outcomes.