The Customer is KING

As service suppliers, no matter what we think about our customers, the customer is King. Without a customer we have no reason to exist. They pay for the service, they consume the service, and they need support for the service. A service is not a service until there is a customer. IT can produce IT services with many capabilities, but if there is no customer for the IT service, no relationship exists between customer and supplier and no value is realized. IT services that have no value are just hobbies of the IT organization. Value must be delivered from the customer perspective.

Value delivery, customer and user satisfaction can be improved by formally managing customer engagements and experiences. Organizations can have benefits, such as increased customer loyalty, service brand establishment ,and overall differentiated value from the competition.

Customer interactions with the supplier organization should be understood and managed, and each engagement should have a strategy and be purposefully designed to support it. Virtual self-service, physical self-service, service desk, specialized support desk, telephone, mobile are just a few examples of engagement models. Each engagement should have a designed experience related to the business/IT service engagement, and the products or technologies should be designed to support the service for each engagement and the expected experience.

When engaging a customer/user many organizations want the customer to have a great experience within their services. Organizations should want the customer to have a consistent good experience with their services. Let’s remember, the Customer is King! The key to the delivery of great, or even just good, services is to not have abnormalities in the experiences that the supplier delivers. A customer that experiences an exceptional service judges all services based on the exceptional service. So, exceptional services compared with great or good services in the same supplier organization is not good for the organization. This could create an impression of a not so good service from the other services that are delivered. Compared to their peers, organizations also want to ensure that they deliver a better service experience through all engagement models.

When a supplier designs services for exceptional and great experiences they can increase their success by using the formal processes of experience and engagement management, enabling coordination and collaboration across the organization for a “good” customer experience for all engagements.