Improved Service Support

At the point organizations are judged based on the quality of their service support, businesses need to assess how their IT services meet the customer and business requirements. Where a support service already exists, an organization needs to ask the following questions:

  • Does our support team log and understand the technical nature of customer difficulty at first point of contact?

  • Do they respond relevant to the degree of urgency stipulated by the customer?

  • Does the support team communicate with the customer regarding the follow-up activity?

  • Do they meet the expectations outlined to the customer?

  • Do they complete work with the minimum disruption to the customer, and in a positive and professional manner?

  • Is customer follow-up action taken? For example, ensure the issue is resolved and the customer is happy.

Organizations need to know that all service requests are handled in a consistent manner and with good communication as business confidence is gained when customers know that a support service is managed in this way. Confidence is lost when service requests appear to go into a “black hole”. That is, a customer service request is dealt with using an unpredictable and inconsistent process.

The inconsistency may be due to the support team having no formal processes or standardized procedures. This means the staff cannot rely on their colleagues for assistance, as no-one really knows what is expected of them. In this situation, the service staff have no real idea how their role affects the organization as a whole.

To successfully differentiate an organization within any market, high quality and predictable IT service is required to drive increased business and revenue. However, this requires the IT service support process to move from an ad-hoc, chaotic process to an ideal of value-add service.