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The service management life cycle essentially begins by defining a service delivery model (Step 1) that can be a combination of following options, which we discuss in subsequent sections:

· Outsourced or in-house desk

· On-site, phone-based, or Web-based support model

· Multilingual options

· Generalist or specialized queue-based support

Call (ticket) creation, categorization, assignment, and resolution are the activities of the transactional service delivery (Step 2) as managed by the support analysts. In subsequent sections we review the service delivery steps from call assignment until the resolution of the call.

Organizations striving to provide a service delivery differentiation over time need real-time engagement with customers and must consistently measure performance, identify opportunity areas, and enhance the service delivery mechanism through experiential learning.

Engagement also requires periodically taking the pulse of service delivery by monitoring calls and interactions. Monitoring provides a greater understanding of the challenges in providing a great customer experience and insight into other opportunities for enhancing the service. Often customers request real-time escalations when their service delivery expectations are not met immediately. The ability to handle escalations, including the number of escalations and the associated resolutions, is a critical element of service delivery process.

Customer engagement through account managers, especially if the service delivery organization is off-site, helps customers understand the process, culture, geography, and knowledge barriers to providing effective service. In addition, receiving feedback based on resolved or unresolved calls using surveys provides a greater understanding of the delivery landscape. We discuss the feedback process in detail as part of the performance measurement process.

Larger service desk operations have specialist roles for managing customer communications. They provide updates on outages, performance measures, and larger process changes in the service delivery model.

Performance measurement (Step 4) of service delivery is closely connected with the culture of the organization. Process-driven organizations strive to pay more attention to hard measures of service desk performance. These include the number of tickets managed in a given period of time, ticket handling time, percentage of first-contact resolution (FCR), and the overall resolution percentage.

Higher handling time leads to increased FCR percentage as it gives the customer a greater opportunity to understand and resolve the problem at hand. However, it also increases the cost of service delivery and will increase the hold time of other customers in the queue who are waiting to be serviced. Increased FCR will certainly lead to a greater customer satisfaction.

Organizations driving purely for superior customer experience measure feedback on relatively softer measures. Softer measures include customer feedback surveys, internal assessments from real-time monitoring, and feedback from internal quality audits.

Customer experience feedback typically is gained through a formal survey process. In order to ensure that a fair survey is conducted, larger organizations outsource the feedback process to a third party. Others have an independent audit function that reaches out to customers independently. In either scenario, customers are asked to provide feedback on how their problem/query was resolved. They are also surveyed to understand how the call/service was handled behaviorally.

If the sample of customers surveyed is too large, the cost of feedback will increase and if the sample is too small, the analysis can lead to skewed interpretations. Selecting the right distribution of counts and variants of customers to be surveyed is a critical success factor of the measurement process.

Most service delivery organizations have a quality and audit function that measures solutions and behavioral elements from a review of sample calls. Quality processes, on a real-time or off-line basis, can track process adherence as well as etiquette followed by the service delivery organization in its interactions with customers. With this approach, many service improvement opportunities can be identified internally, well before customers get to experience them. Quality checks and input also enable coaching of the IT analysts with the appropriate process knowledge and specific conversational improvements.

Service enhancement (Step 5) opportunities identified through soft and hard performance measurement processes provide the input into iteratively evolving the service delivery model, thus representing a complete and continuous cycle. Here are some examples of how the performance process can loop into identifying improvement areas:

· Recognition of those interactions where customers have had a better experience can be used to role model conversations.

· Resolutions on new call types should be fed back into the knowledge base. These will increase the internal knowledge and improve the FCR rate.

· Service delivery training programs built to provide initial and incremental training should directly correlate to the findings from the audit and quality processes.

· Automation and self-service opportunities should be pursued for those call types that are predictable and high in occurrence. Whether it is an IT system or access to Web systems, password resets should be driven through a self-service process rather than being manually reset by the service delivery organization.

Additional system-based enhancements can be provided, from tight integration of back-office systems leading to increased accuracy of customer profile information. The following examples illustrate integration possibilities in the back-office systems:

· Structured information management using a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-like setup provides a strong integration with business systems and account management.

· Single sign-on access to multiple systems using a single password reduces end-user frustration from managing multiple accounts.

Additional enhancements certainly can be driven following ITIL or a similar framework that includes:

· Configuration management to identify, control, and validate all physical assets, service-level agreements, and knowledge. This is also referred to as a configuration management database.

· Effective management of disruptions in the standard service offerings and restoration of the offerings to standard working expectations within the service-level agreements. This is referred to as incident management.

· Proactive management to prevent incidents from happening. This is referred to as problem management. It requires deeper understanding of known issues— expected failures, disruptions, and degradations—with the aim to have a plan to attack the root causes.

· Following a change management methodology to manage changes in the infrastructure using standardized methods and procedures. This provides an assurance that the changes will be made per previously identified schedule while reducing any reworking or duplication of efforts.

· Ensuring that the IT infrastructure is available based on service and cost expectations that organizations are willing to pay.

· Release of new changes to IT infrastructure software and hardware without disruptions.

· Qualification and quantification of IT service management as expected by the customers.

· Continuous communication through reports on performance, trends, assets, and compliance.