Your customer experience is your business growth driver. Unfortunately, the gap between what companies think they’re delivering and what customers believe is wide; 87% of companies believe their customer experience is excellent, but only 11% of customers agree. So, if you use your customer experience as a growth strategy, you must address your customer service management system first.
Integrations are critical to a strong customer experience because they help your software connect and become a unified service platform that shows a full customer journey. This can provide insight that helps you continuously improve.
A customer service management platform is a software platform that provides a variety of tools, information, and workflows relating to customer service and the customer experience. It goes beyond the functions of a more basic ticketing system while still offering the vital functions that those systems provide. A CSM platform will enable you to manage better relationships, boost productivity and improve the customer journey.
ITIL 4 establishes the service value system (SVS) to show “how all the components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation.” This is comprised of five elements: It’s vital to understand the core principles before you can relate them to customer service, as they all play a role in the customer journey.
To improve the customer experience, business leaders should lean on proven best practices. While there are many proven ways to give customers a better impression of a business, we recommend doing the following three first: ITIL best practices haven’t historically been utilized in CSM operations or improvements. Still, frameworks like ITIL and COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology) have a lot of innovation and efficiency to offer within the customer experience.
B2B Customer Service can make or break a company; at the center of that service lies the customer experience (CX). But while 87% of companies believe they provide a strong customer experience, only 11% of their customer base agrees. For B2B companies, that disparity can be particularly damaging. Business customers tend to have a higher standard when it comes to service. They’re typically spending more and coming to the table with more clout than the average consumer.
The concept (if not yet the realization) of a single view into the enterprise has existed for some time. In the realm of ITSM, thought-leaders at AXELOS envisioned how systems across an enterprise can integrate to provide comprehensive visibility into virtually all data that touches any part of the Customer Journey.
So we have looked at what ITSM is and the best practice frameworks available to support the implementation of ITSM tools within an IT team. Equally important is how these concepts, processes, and frameworks can support teams outside IT, from HR, Finance, Facilities, and Customer Service, and for internal and external end customers.
ITSM is a collection of concepts and processes. How those processes are implemented and adopted can vary. This is where IT service management frameworks come into play and, based on the needs of the business, also help determine what frameworks are best for implementing those ITSM concepts and processes. IT service management frameworks focus on services rather than systems and support the full scope of the practice of service management.
The above definition of ITSM is an excellent basis for introducing what ITSM is all about. How do end users, be they external customers in a B2B or B2C environment, internal employees using IT systems, or even wider through the organization employees interacting with HR, Finance, and Facilities, gain value from the products and services offered?
