ITSM educational program: How to meet customer expectations

I present to your attention another article by Stuart Raines. This time, he shares his experience on how to successfully conclude a Service Level Agreement (SLA).



The original see. “How to Meet Customer Expectations” was published on 12/13/2016 in the blog.sysaid.com blog.



The complexity of the material - the initial level.

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The material may be interesting for understanding the approach that ITSM is preaching to work with Customers and Users, and may also cause irreparable benefits to those who have just become familiar with the theory of the Service Level Management process and want to put it into practice, or to those who have unsuccessfully tried and done Now looking for something new in this.



But again I urge you to be careful in your conclusions. The article described is an ideal situation when both the Supplier and the Customer of the Services are genuinely interested in cooperation for the sake of the value of the Service. In practice, this occurs, so to say, not always, and from both sides.



Hereinafter, translator's notes are indicated in italics.



Service Desk Expectations



One of the biggest problems we face in IT Service Management is the failure to meet the expectations of our customers and users. No matter how good the Service is, and no matter how well we support it, it is important that when we do not meet people's expectations, they feel unhappy.



I have worked with many IT organizations that regularly failed to meet expectations and who did not accept their responsibility for this. And they always had an excuse for this, for example:

• “Their expectations are not reasonable”
• “We are forced to do this because Business does not give us resources”
• “We have provided what the user is entitled to under the Service Level Agreement (SLA)”
• “We did not raise the priority because the user did not say that this is important”
• “We cannot implement new functionality as quickly as you want, since we are already heavily loaded with similar tasks”
• “We cannot make this change, because it is so risky. They can wait ”

You may have heard such things in your organization, or even said something yourself from the above. In that case, maybe now is the time for some major changes. If you want to provide excellent services to your users and customers, explain why you cannot do this well enough. This is why the most effective IT organizations take responsibility for managing customer expectations. And, of course, it is easy to say, but not easy to do. This article contains my suggestions on how to do this.



If you want to boost the ability of your organization to reliably meet expectations, then you need to fulfill four points:

1. Understand what customers and users expect
2. Combine “What can be done” with “Try to influence expectations”
3. Manage Services to provide what customers and users are waiting for
4. Report on your achievements to make sure that customers and users know that you have provided them

All four points are equally important and you can meet the expectations of your customers only if you pay attention to them all.



In the remainder of this article, I will discuss these points in detail. But first, I will start by conveying the thought of one important difference (see User and Customers - Who is behind these words? ). ITIL distinguishes between the customer (who negotiates, agrees to the conditions and pays for the service) and the user (who actually uses the service). If you are not too familiar with this difference, imagine a toy store. Parents pay for toys, but their children use them. When I talk about customer expectations, I mean the expectations of both these groups. It is a mistake to consider only the needs and expectations of users, since they do not coincide with the expectations of the customer, and this is what he pays for the Service.



Understand what customers and users expect



If you want to understand the expectations of your customers and users, then you need to talk to them. And you have to do it on a regular basis, because needs change over time and expectations along with them.



Many IT organizations rely on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that tell them about the needs of customers and users. Unfortunately, these agreements can be agreed upon months or even years ago, and in some cases even written by the IT organization itself, to a greater extent than the customers. You may know and understand SLA, but what about the customers?



If you are using an SLA to plan and provide services, then you need to regularly discuss it with customers AND USERS.

• Do they understand the purpose (why the service)?
• Are the objectives formulated in explicit business terms or are these technical IT objectives little related to something else?
• Do these goals still fit their needs?

If you have not yet developed the habit of talking to customers, please do not wait for the next scheduled annual review. Do it now, until you happen to be at the epicenter of managing a significant incident, talk with customers about their expectations from you.



Combine “What can be done” with “Try to influence expectations”



Sometimes customers really have unrealistic expectations, and we cannot provide them with what they expect, simply because it is too expensive. For example, they may believe that you can provide a service capable of reacting for less than 1 second with thousands of transactions a minute and with an incident resolution time of no more than 2 minutes. And what to do with this amazing statement ?!



If you know what you expect from the Service and you really cannot provide it, tell about it right away. Do not wait until this happens. Be honest, explain why you cannot do what you expected, show the potential price of providing current unrealistic expectations, comparing with the size of the potential benefits. Sometimes this will be enough to help customers understand that they need to change their expectations. In other cases, you may be surprised to find out that the customer really needs this level of service and confirms that he is ready to pay for the required level. One customer I worked with told the IT department that he wanted a Service that would be restored instantly. The IT department, on the other hand, believed that rebuilding a RAID array in 20 seconds would be enough for it. After clarification, it turned out that the customer was ready to pay for the possibility of restoring the Service in a quarter of a second, since with longer recovery time the losses for his business became unacceptable.



In any case, you need to agree on what you can truly achieve. When you have agreed, write it down, preferably using the words of the customer himself. Do not hide behind obscure technical goals. For example, many IT organizations specify a target value for service availability as a percentage. This may be 99.5% or 99.9%, only this makes sense for IT staff, and customers are unlikely to understand what this means for them. It is much better to ask how often the Service may be unworkable and how long it will be restored. For example: “The service may be completely unavailable no more than 4 times a year and must be restored within 4 hours”, this will be more useful than “99.82%”.



Manage Services to provide what customers and users are waiting for



There is no need to coordinate with Customers target values ​​of indicators that you can not provide them. You need to be sure that you have taken all the necessary ( and sufficient ) measures to say that you will do it. Let's go back to the example that we just looked at. If you are sure of the possibility “The service may not be fully operational no more than 4 times a year and must be restored within 4 hours”, you need to think about how you will manage both of these values:

• What can cause a complete loss of serviceability of the Service and how, most likely, it can happen?
• How can this be made less likely?
• How will you restore the Service after such a blockage?
• How long will it take?
• What can you do now to reduce this time?

All this is absolutely standard activity within the framework of Risk Management, but if you are not able to register risks, you do not manage risks, but simply wait for problems to arise.



Report on your achievements to make sure that customers and users know that you have provided them



Finally, you need to tell your customers what you really did. And again this should be done in terms that Customers will consider useful for themselves. You shouldn’t provide a 200-page report every month, if Customers just want to know that their expectations have been met, but if something went wrong, it’s not enough to say so. The most important thing is a regular report telling you what you are doing to improve. Explain what you will do to improve their impression of the Service next week, month, year. Discuss these improvements with them. Are you focused on the right things? Would the proposed improvements really make their perception of the Service better? Do they want to make suggestions?



Finally



What do customers think about the Service you provide? Do you have a good feedback mechanism to really understand how they feel? Interactive customer surveys can be used, but they will never replace the results obtained from a live conversation with customers AND users. If you want to be sure that you know what they want and that they understand that you are supplying them and that you work together to provide the best value from the IT Services that you manage on their behalf, then you should not have any problems managing expectations customers.



Learn more about working with customer expectations. You can read my work “Back to the basics of ITSM.” Maybe you don’t know what they expect (“Back to ITSM Basics” Might Not Be What You Expect)



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