Customer Centric Service Management
As managed services become the norm in the corporate business environment, telecommunication companies have to move away from networks and connectivity to customer service. The challenge for individuals providing the various discrete parts of the service is to understand that they are part of a much larger ecosystem.
For each managed service, all of the constituent parts must be understood. The customer doesn’t care if the network is working fine, but the email server is down and they can’t access their email. There needs to be a shift in thinking so that the people supplying the service understand service delivery from the customer’s point of view.
This is a big change. Traditionally, individuals are responsible for keeping individual pieces of equipment running. Today there needs to be people and systems that can see the entire ecosystem for delivering a service. New quality of service and key productivity indicators need to be created and monitored for all parts of service deliver. Equally important the interaction of those parts has to be measured. One or two missing pieces of the puzzle mean that the customer isn’t getting the service that was promised.
The TM Forum’s Service Framework calls each sub-service a service component. Individual service components need to be managed as they form the building blocks of the entire service being delivered to the customer (just as pieces of a puzzle join together to make a complete picture). In some cases, individual sub-services may be provided by third-parties. It’s critical that each component be indentified and the organization responsible for the components delivery need to be managed.
As a modern web service, it’s easy to make our scheduling platform be a component in the service offering. Whether it’s invoked via a web browser where customers do self-scheduling or by a manager reacting to a service outage, we’re there to schedule the people that keep all the services running.
David Greer