Often part of the broader Service Integration and Management (SIAM) practice within an MSP, those drawn to the role are IT minded ‘people people’ who are passionate about the customer service experience, who are open and truthful with their customers, and love to build a strong rapport. They will also excel when it comes to attention to detail, which is vital for ensuring they understand their customers’ contracts inside and out, including the key SLAs and associated service level performance metrics on which the managed service provider is measured.

I refer to my SDMs collectively as the ‘HIT team’, as Honesty, Integrity and Trust are the team’s fundamental guiding principles for delivering true ‘value add’ that our customers expect when considering our services.

Customer perception is reality in any service experience. A quality Service Delivery Manager (SDM) will focus on driving actions to mitigate any gaps in service or help to educate customers where a realignment of expectations or an uplift in the contracted services may be required. The SDM is therefore well-versed on the MSP’s service catalogue, and the associated service descriptions.

Some other key responsibilities of an SDM include

  • providing comprehensive service management reports, including detailed service level performance reporting
  • holding service management reviews and other governance meetings with they customer stakeholders, as specified in their contract
  • focusing on continual service improvement of customer processes, initiatives and service levels, ensuring collaboration within both technical and non-technical teams, and
  • being typically engaged at the start of a new or existing customer’s onboarding project, working closely with the Project Manager to drive ‘service enablement’, and ensure a smooth transition from project to ‘go live’.
Benefits

The SDM acts as the customer’s advocate within the MSP, working closely with the other internal practices (particularly the system operations/engineering specialists) to drive meaningful progress for the customer.

The primary focus of an SDM is to ensure the customer obtains maximum benefit from the products and services they have purchased.

The SDM forms a strong relationship with the customer’s key contacts (particularly the operational and service management peers), by building an understanding of their requirements and business drivers.

The SDM is also the trusted service management escalation point for operational service and support, complementing the Major Incident Manager where required, to ensure timely communications and high priority issue resolution for their customers. This extends to the delivery and presentation of detailed post incident reports for any major incidents that have impacted customer services.

Making the most of a SDM

Customers should think of their SDM as their relationship manager for any matters relating to their ongoing service and support experience. The SDM has close ties with the assigned Account Manager and Technical Account Manager, to maximise the customer’s engagement experience overall.

And if something should go awry? Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect word! If you feel that your service expectations are not being met, or you have a business reason or circumstance for something to be expedited, the Service Delivery Manager is your management escalation point to facilitate the resources for urgent attention.

At AC3, our Service Delivery Managers are also ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certified. Speak to your SDM around the adoption of and adherence to ITIL best practices in general. They are part of the SIAM practice within AC3, which means the ITIL service managers and process SMEs (subject matter experts) are all part of our wider team!