If you have been reading my blogs over the past few months you will know that I often emphasis maturing Service Management capabilities to improve service and customer satisfaction. The fact is by improving and investing in a formal maturity path you are adding depth to your service offerings and enabling you and your organization to become one step ahead of your competitors, and potentially opening up lucrative new revenue streams for your business.
IT Service Providers need to be thinking faster, smarter and focusing on their own unique value proposition. In an example of an RFP response how well do you think an IT Service Provider who is able to demonstrate and provide clear evidence of how they can exceed specific requirements is positioned? How high would your current Service offerings rank you?
Potential points of difference may include:
• Meaningful Service Level Agreements (SLA's) and reporting capabilities, that will provide a solid baseline for commercial contracts to be established
• A service culture of teamwork, responsiveness, depth and formality, with examples of how determined your organization is prepared to go the extra mile
• True end to end management of a services
• A solid Portfolio of services on offer via a Structure Service Catalog
• A detailed service cost breakdown structure
• The ability to resource your teams more effectively based on accurate data and proven performance targets
• The ability to guarantee availability and performance of services
There is always an opportunity to raise the bar, clarify your path for Service Management maturity and build on your own unique point of difference that will help to continue to set your organization apart - the secret is - how to do it! You need to have a vision, a plan and the commitment to achieve what you set out for. So often do I find organizations who have set out to build and mature their Service Management capabilities missing the basic steps, creating a vision, building a realistic plan to achieve the vision and most importantly implementing strategies to 'stay true' to the plan no matter what! Spending the time upfront in the planning phases will certainly enable you to create a solid baseline more effectively and the ability to build upon.
Next time you are contemplating an initiative to improve your service offerings, ask the following questions to help clarify if the outcome of this new initiative could open potential new revenue streams. What are the fundamental reasons for this initiative? is this initiative focused at one customer? or is easily leveraged across all your customers? How many other customers would be interested? Is there an opportunity to add further value to the offering to meet or exceed your customers' needs that they would be willing to pay a premium for?
