Services Management has come a long way. From ITIL (ITSM) to Customer and HR Services workflows, leading vendors have used the benefit of data driven technologies to make services and related decisions more effective. It is these vendors that I wish to address in this post. They have done an incredible job of living up to and even exceeding expectations, in some cases even defining the market. Now it is time to up the game in a way that the market gets what it needs, and your license revenue soars.
Let me start with a general concept before getting specific on other topics. It's time to re-orient services towards those served rather than functional domains. It is time to have Employee Services Management, Consumer (B2C) service management, Enterprise (B2B) customer service management and Vendor (tier 1, beyond tier 1) services management. Of course, there is more that need to be served, and more drill down within employee types (remote, hybrid, on site, SREs, etc.); but the purpose of this paragraph is only to highlight a unique perspective to building workflows that could introduce specificity, and in turn have a better win-win (license revenue for vendors, value for customers). Hint: As an example, in this era of "remote and hybrid work", do you provide anything in your workflows that provide confidence to both employee and employer that use of employee's home resources for work is safe? This sits at the intersection of IT and HR Services Management. Hence the need to serve by personas and not functions.
Many of today's services management products focus on "Mean Time to Resolve" (MTTR) or "First Call Resolution" (FCR) as their go to metric. This needs to be reexamined. For starters, analyze your own data and find the distribution of MTTR. You will see that some cases are solved over the phone/ chat / self-help, some take a couple of days, some get into investigation mode (sometimes from weeks to months) and others linger for ever. For the ones resolved over phone or some form of self-help, it will make sense to focus more on experience rather than MTTR. For the rest, re-engineering the resolution process is equally important. And focusing on resolution might help with addressing some of these issues over phone/ self-service rather than lengthy investigation, saving cost and improving quality of service. This is more surgical than just identifying intents that need more resolution time. This is about helping your customer design resolution paths keeping in mind intent, risk of faster resolution and reward in terms of customer lifetime value and NPS scores. Hence my use of the rod "re-engineering". And both (improving experience and resolution paths) can get help from better workflows and data / AI support. There is more to discuss on improvements to workflows, but to keep this blog concise, let me move to the next topic. I will conclude this paragraph by mentioning that Services Management Software can charge a premium for helping customers improve their experience and resolution, by helping with analysis and structured mining of re-engineering drivers. The "hints" for experience and resolution management are all there in the incident / case data. Time to mine that precious mineral!
I urge Services Management Software vendors to ask themselves some simple questions. Does my product help my customer understand the served persona better? For example, does my product help understand which customer (of your customer) is likely to complaint, which customer will opt for other vendors instead of continuing to use your customer's products and / or which customers will provide a low satisfaction score? There are many such questions that services management can help answer. But if you focus on the examples provided here, you will see that each one has implication on prime metrics of your customers - be it cost of servicing or customer retention. These examples can also apply to Employee services management. For example, can we increase employee satisfaction and productivity through proactive reach? Do I understand what kind of proactive support is required for new vs. tenured employees; or remote vs. onsite employees? This could be a mix of new workflows and data driven support to personalize understanding for each customer (install of your software).
There is much more to pen here. But let's conclude this blog. I have two main messages for the software vendors in this space: (1) Go beyond predicting MTTR, FCR and shift left, and provide data driven support for improving the quality of service and resolution. This goes much beyond process mining. This is about the risk of providing an early resolution in customer's favor vs. reward in terms of customer lifetime value. This can be done. Hint: Interview customers and classify them for processes and types of resolution. (2) Let's understand the persona we serve, match that understanding with the prime metric of our customers, and provide solutions across (a) persona life cycle (potential to onboarded to engaged/ churned), and (b) service life cycle (proactive to post service)
One last thought: This is a topic for another blog but let me send out a teaser. Your product will be stickier if you can measure your customer's success. If you can quantitatively demonstrate the benefits of your products in terms of the customer's prime metric (not MTTR or FCR), you will get more renewals and better customer recommendations. Ask yourself this: Does my product have in-built workflows and dashboards to demonstrate "business benefits"? Can you quantitatively demonstrate that your product helped improve quality and cost of service?
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