Service Please !
Despite all the work on process at the transaction level, many still struggle to deliver a consistent customer experience. Simple service management principles can help.
Traditional process improvement focuses doing what we are doing better. This is important but not enough. Often the business outcomes are being diluted or even undermined by blind spots, gaps between the formal processes and the customer can fall between the cracks.
No matter how effective the monitoring and management of the individual functional processes, this won't tell you what the customer is really experiencing, making it difficult if not impossible to find and close the gaps.
Effective service management applies the same skills as traditional process improvement (so you are not starting from scratch) but approaches the problem from a different perspective. The customer's perspective. So that any problems or proposed changes are evaluated from the impact on the customer experience not just the efficiency of the individual process.
Starting down the path to better service management may be no more complicated than creating a succinct statement of the objective. An objective matrix describes in everyday terms what things are important to bring that objective about. The hardest part may be getting the right five or six people in the room to define the problem and why it is important.
This simple framework can then provide a dashboard for communicating and improving service delivery effectiveness. Individual improvement initiatives can then be considered and evaluated in context.
Get The Big Things Right By Doing The Right Little Things.
