Every company knows that in order to be successful, it must put the customer and their needs at the center of everything they do. This not only means offering high-quality products or services that solve specific customer problems, but also efficiently supporting him or her with all challenges and concerns.
The question is: How can customer-facing teams do this in a structured and methodical way?
It is obvious that the service concept plays a central role. But its systematic realization and anchoring is a completely different question. Classic business teams often have to grow into this role because they often lack the tools, processes and experience of a strictly service-oriented approach.
The good news is that there are good, shining examples internally that other teams can learn from! In many companies, the concrete implementation of the service concept emerged and grew from the technical teams. Structured, well-functioning IT service management provides inspiration for other teams across organizational areas.
ITSM as a role model and inspiration
Successful ITSM teams rely on processes, workflows and tools that support the frictionless, end-to-end delivery of standardized IT services while driving the company’s business processes and goals. The foundation of the ITSM approach is formed by methods, concepts and solutions such as service level agreements and systematic service level management to ensure consistently high quality, effective incident and problem management, digital service desks for the complete tracking of customer inquiries and workflow management. Automations.
The intention is clear: ITSM teams strive to achieve fast, reliable and high-quality service delivery to customers through leaner processes that are automated as much as possible, better control, visible workflows and modern technologies, while at the same time relieving the burden on standard activities to reach.
Good customer service management: The customer is at the center
The focus of IT service management is the customer who uses the services of the ITSM team. The ITSM basic principles include striving to achieve the highest possible customer satisfaction, i.e. to fully meet customer expectations.
Isn’t that exactly what business teams strive for in their relationships with external customers?
IT service management and customer service management – at first glance, these two approaches seem quite contradictory. ITSM concerns internal (IT) processes and their smooth operations. The CSM, on the other hand, is externally directed; This is about interaction with external customers, who initiate processes that are in turn processed and solved internally.
But are ITSM and CSM really that far apart? After all, both approaches are about meeting the needs of a group of customers and helping the executing teams become more efficient. To this end, processes should be developed, provided, managed and continuously optimized in order to ensure the best possible service and achieve the goals of customer satisfaction, increased quality and operational excellence.
And if the ITSM teams manage to continuously deliver high-quality services and always satisfy their internal customers at a high level, it makes sense for other teams to take a look at the established ITSM toolbox in order to adapt proven recipes to scale.
Digitale Service-Desks
ITSM uses digital service desks to demonstrate how processes can be uniformly designed, harmonized, digitized and structured, and how silos and different input channels can be broken down. More and more customer service teams are following this example and adapting modern help desk solutions in the form of central customer portals.
Software like Jira Service Desk is suitable for forming the heart of problem-based customer communication. On the one hand, it enables structured tracking of customer inquiries across different communication channels. On the other hand, the connection to an article-based knowledge base also helps to make frequently asked inquiries obsolete, to offer help for self-help and to significantly relieve the workload on the service team.
Service-Request-Management
Successful ITSM teams offer plenty of illustrative material for efficient process organization in service request management. Recommendations for action such as the eight tips in the article What is Service Request Management? are also valuable and helpful for business teams with external customers.
They help to establish clear workflows for processing service requests that create visibility for customers and the team, and to shorten turnaround times with meaningful automation to solve customer challenges and requests efficiently and satisfactorily.
The service catalog
A prerequisite for professional service request management based on service desks is a carefully developed and tested service catalog. It must describe and map the most important customer concerns in a structured, transparent and comprehensive manner. This includes the categorization of individual services, details about availability and the owners of the service, service-specific SLAs and information about internal (and, if applicable, external) costs.
Experienced ITSM teams know how to build such a catalog iteratively – from capture, description and synchronization to prioritization and classification. CSM teams can benefit from these experiences and thereby overcome initial hurdles in order to set up a functioning service portal more quickly.
Service-Level-Management
Achieving and ensuring consistently high service quality (and therefore consistently high customer satisfaction) requires unambiguous agreements and measurable criteria. These are the subject of service level management, which provides a process for continuous quality assurance.
The focus is on service level agreements that are agreed with customers, as well as the regular measurement of success based on clear metrics that follows this process: Agreement and definition -> Provision and delivery of services -> Measurement and reporting. Sharing service level management best practices across teams can help CSM teams take their services to new levels of quality.
Continuous improvement
Companies want satisfied, happy customers. And in this context, in our fast-moving times, nothing is more dangerous than maintaining the status quo. Successful service teams know that they must continually work to improve their services and that changes should always focus on customer value.
However, this rarely happens “on the fly”, but requires structured optimization initiatives, as suggested by the continuous improvement approach from the ITIL framework. Here, too, a practice from the technical area can have an impact in business teams and ensure that changes always focus on customer benefits.
A toolbox also for business teams
The ITIL framework for ITSM teams describes a total of 34 practices. Some of them are aimed at very technical aspects, but a good part of them have potential for scaling beyond the ITSM area.
For ambitious CSM teams, it can only be an advantage to take a close look at the ITIL toolbox and build cross-functional bridges to the established ITSM teams in the company, because service-oriented business teams can also benefit from their wealth of experience and tools .
Atlassian tools for professional service teams
In order to be able to offer their customers excellent services, teams need powerful and flexible software solutions that can digitally represent as many service practices as possible – from ticket-based help desks with individual workflows to service level agreements and systematic service request management extensive automation.
Jira Service Management from Atlassian has, among other things, the official certification as PinkVERIFY Certified ITIL 4 Toolset and thus fulfills all functional requirements for professional service management in IT teams and beyond them.
Would you like to learn more about Jira Service Management? Can our team show you some key use cases and practices in an in-person demo? Or do you simply want to know more about the transformation towards professional (IT) service management? Then get in touch with us! Our current incident management manual, which you can download free of charge, also offers you valuable tips.
Further information
The virtual agent in Jira Service Management and other AI-powered features for ITSM teams
10 IT Service Management (ITSM) Best Practices
Modern ITSM as inspiration for organization-wide Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
The Confluence integration for Jira Service Management: How ITSM teams process service desk requests efficiently
Service level management in ITSM teams: Targeted control of the quality of IT services