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It would appear obvious that, in order to prosper, a business organisation should have Customer satisfaction as its prime objective. Unfortunately, until recently, many IT departments have been too obsessed with technology and flashing lights to recognise that they have Customers at all.
In recent years pressure has been put on IT service providers to become more aware of their role in supporting the business and to be run as accountable business units. This pressure has come from many quarters:
The days when staff in IT departments regarded their 'Customers' as a necessary evil or just difficult colleagues have (hopefully) passed. There is a growing awareness that in order to retain the in-house IT department they have to stay close to their Customers, understand and predict their requirements and satisfy them. IT departments are now raising the priority of Customer satisfaction from being merely 'nice to have' to 'essential'.
The provision of quality IT services with high levels of availability and performance can be achieved with the correct hardware, software and underlying support disciplines. This level of service may satisfy, but may not delight, the Customer! Extra effort is needed for the Customer to enjoy the experience and want to come back for more. The way in which the service is delivered is dependent on the people delivering the service. Customer delight will only be achieved if the people involved are responsive to their Customers' needs, are attentive, reliable, and courteous, delivering the service in the way they themselves would like to receive it.
We all know what a Customer is - someone who deals with a trader and habitually purchases from him. Similarly, we are all familiar with service - an act performed for the benefit or advantage of a person, institution or cause. Customer service therefore is concerned with performing acts that will benefit the Customer in a way that will encourage him to purchase service again and again.
It is important that all staff involved in delivering service are committed to the concept of Customer delight. This can only be achieved if the organisation's culture demands it. The prevalent culture within any organisation is a product of a variety of factors: the age and history of the organisation, its size, the technology in use, its objectives, the market as well as geography and the personalities and backgrounds of people employed.
There are many influencing factors and it is not reasonable to expect all organisations to have, or adopt, the same culture, organisational structure or systems. Despite the growing literature on the culture of organisations there is no textbook formula for organisational culture.
The term 'culture' is used in this context to refer to the values and beliefs of the organisation - the normal way of doing things. Component parts of the culture include:
An organisation's culture can be immediately recognised by an outsider by the staff's attitudes and morale; their vocabulary - the phrases and buzz words they use and the stories and legends they tell of the organisation's heroes.
Most often, responsibility for creating and maintaining an organisation's culture should rest with its leaders. The prevailing culture will dictate the shape of the organisation's structure and the nature of the systems and procedures used.
In their best-selling book In Search of Excellence, a study of the best run American companies, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman noted
Procedures, therefore, should support the culture and not govern or influence it.
In order to achieve business success the culture of every organisation should embrace the concept of service and Customer care.
The satisfaction of Customer requirements should be the number one priority - for everyone, whatever their role in the organisation. The concept of service should permeate through all layers of the organisation - from staff in the front line responsible for delivering service to those in a supporting role - either as managers or in the back room.
Service delivery should ensure that Customer requirements are met in a way that makes them feel that they are valued and respected - they should be made to feel good at every transaction. The aim should be to exceed Customers' expectations (not in what you deliver but in the way you deliver it) and give them confidence in your ability to satisfy all their future needs.
By taking the time and effort to listen to the Customers it is possible to understand the service being provided from their perspective. The key point about providing service is attention to detail; to go that little bit further to delight the Customer.
Achieving a service culture in an IT organisation should, in essence, be no different from achieving a service culture in a bread shop or a carpet wholesale business; the technology used and the product delivered may be different but the end result is the same - Customers receive service. Customers of IT services have come to expect the same levels of service at work as they receive at their local shopping mall - and they use the same criteria for choosing it.
If we accept that the quality of our IT service delivery is important then we should agree that the way we treat our Customers is an important part of service delivery.
Having recognised that IT departments are now in the business of service provision they should now adopt a whole new way of thinking and embrace the same business concepts as those used by all service providers. There is a lot of catching up to do.
Before any business goes into production of a new product or service it should perform some market research to find out what the Customers actually want and will buy.
So, what do Customers want?
Popular misconceptions about Customer careMany people are cynical about the concept of Customer care and, in many cases, they have good reason to be. The following paragraphs describe areas of Customer care. 'The Customer Is King posters' (and other clichèd campaign material)Allegedly witty and amusing posters proclaiming the virtues of Customer care can be a decorative addition to an office or corridor, on their own they achieve very little. If the same slogans are used continually on posters then they become part of the wallpaper and are ignored - be prepared to change them and beware of empty slogans that can be misinterpreted. Ensure that all staff are aware of the nature, scope and intention behind any Customer care promotion otherwise the material will be greeted by cynicism if it arrives unannounced. A by-product of ITIL/BS5750/ISO9001/TQMA service culture will not develop unaided. The adoption of the best practice in IT service delivery described in ITIL will help improve service quality. Improving the quality of procedures and obtaining quality certification will certainly focus the mind on service quality but these alone are not enough to ensure the IT department is truly Customer focused - a structured approach to cultural change is necessary. Customer Charters and Service Level AgreementsPublished guaranteed levels of service (such as SLAs) are worthless if the supplier consistently fails to meet the targets. The payment of recompense through penalty clauses is unlikely to satisfy the purchaser in the long term. These agreements tend to set targets for the tangible elements of service - availability, response times etc. and ignore the intangible elements, which are so crucial to Customers - the way in which service was delivered. (Another) Management initiativeIf Customer service is placed high on the agenda one month and then allowed to slip back, people will think that 'the management have been on another training course and have come back with some bright ideas and this actually has nothing to do with us'. Staff should be made to realise that Customer care is not management or technology driven - instead it is Customer driven, and that it makes sound business sense to adopt a Service Culture. Someone else's responsibilityWhere organisations have Customer Liaison departments or Customer Service Managers, staff may be tempted to relinquish the responsibility for Customer care, thinking it is someone else's job. The concept of Customer service should permeate throughout the whole organisation. Something newAlthough the concept of satisfying Customers' requirements is only now hitting some IT departments, it is nothing new. Man has been trading ever since he came down from the trees and learned how to make a surplus. Those men and women who produced something that wasn't marketable starved to death! |
Most of the Management Gurus preach what is little more than 'common sense' - to treat your Customers as individuals, to ask Customers what they want, listen to them and then provide what they want, to wander around amongst your Customers and staff and engender a feeling of trust. It sounds easy. So why do so many organisations still fail to provide consistent Customer satisfaction? Some of the common excuses include:
Aiming to "exceed Customers' expectations" sounds very expensive. Indeed, if we promise to visit a Customer within four hours to fix a printer and we turn up in ten minutes with a brand-new replacement, we will certainly incur extra costs. The manpower overhead of having staff sitting around waiting for a call, the cost of having spare printers on-site etc. The Customer may very well be delighted with this level of service and will expect the same service every time - the Customer will certainly be disappointed if you take four hours next time.
Exceeding Customer expectations does not, therefore, mean 'giving away service'. In the example given above the Customer may have been quite happy with the four hour target and a ten minute response may actually in this case have been inconvenient to him - having arranged to do something else for the next four hours. The Customer may have been happy with the old printer and not want a new one - particularly if it is a different model or takes you some time to configure it.
The IT supplier could have delighted the Customer without incurring unnecessary cost by:
Getting the job done in accordance with the Customers' wishes, correctly, first time, actually saves the cost of a potential repeat visit.
Implementing a Customer care programme will cost money - staff time, training, changes to operating methods, promotional material etc, but the cost of doing it should be weighed against the cost of not doing it - and the risk of losing dissatisfied Customers to a competitor. It will cost a lot more to find new Customers than to retain existing ones, so any money spent keeping existing Customers happy is going to be money well spent.
Whatever the motivations behind the move towards a service culture the end result will be increased profitability:
It is vitally important that the concepts of the IT Infrastructure Library are well known and understood in the Service Management function. ITIL foundation and management training is now widely available leading to an internationally recognised qualification developed by the EXIN and ISEB examination boards. At the turn of the Millennium, over 10,000 people now hold qualification in IT Service Management world wide, and many more have received training.
In addition it would be beneficial for the organisation to receive business-related training covering the broader aspects of infrastructure management. Far too often IT is accused of not knowing enough about the business and its needs; ITIL the business perspective series of books should be referred to for more information.
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