Your application should always be ready to serve the requests received. The measure of the degree to which your application is available to serve all incoming requests within an acceptable amount of time is the topic we are going to focus on: availability. Obviously, achieving a 100% availability sounds too good to be true. There are various problems that may occur. This is why your application should define a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for availability and work to meet the SLA.

You want to provide customers with a great customer service experience. But what does that mean exactly? Let’s say a customer has a complaint about a recent purchase. Will all of your support agents handle it the same way? Maybe one agent feels that the situation warrants a refund while another doesn’t believe it requires follow-up at all. It’s important not to leave “good customer service” open to the interpretation of individual employees.

In the 2020 edition of PMI’s Pulse of the Profession, one of the top three factors that executive leaders attributed to project success was investing in the right technology (32%). However, what’s the right technology for you? This can vary based on your industry, role, type of organization, and nature of work. But the one factor that wins uncontested is the ability of a tool to be adopted by people. In other words, how easily can software be adopted or implemented by your organization?

There’s a wide variety of ways to view all of the endeavors your organization is working on, but viewing all of the work within your company’s wingspan can be quite daunting, and perhaps even meaningless, as it lacks the context and actionability of how your initiatives unfold on a day-to-day basis. Clustering your projects into Portfolios will help your company’s leadership contextualize your efforts, as well as sharpen the focus of those tasks with carrying out the daily driving.

Industry research has shown the increasing popularity of self-service from both company and customer perspectives. One report from Software Advice validates that self-service really does have a positive and measurable impact on both quality and quantity of customer service issues requiring an agent’s attention. Over 75% of respondents confirmed that First Level Resolution, First Contact Resolution, Cost Per Contact, and Cost Per Incident were improved.