itSMF Bulletin November 2017 Bulletin - November 2017 | Page 9

5 STEPS TO A
CUSTOMER-
CENTRIC CULTURE
A Guide for IT Service
Delivery Teams
Your customers want the same thing as you. And it’s not a new set of ITIL manuals. Or another SLA review meeting. They just want
technology that makes their life easier. And when it breaks, to have a pleasant experience while it gets fixed.
As a Service Delivery Manager (or a Manager in Service Delivery) you want that too. That’s why you’ve upgraded your ITSM software,
made sure everyone’s done their ITIL Foundation certificate, and championed all those process improvement initiatives. Your SLAs are
all green and your customers should be happy. And yet they’re not. You’re still getting ambushed in meetings. And every IT expense is
getting put under the microscope (that is when the business isn’t off buying their own IT solutions). You’re running out of ways to drive
service improvement. What to do?
Service delivery teams with the highest levels of IT customer satisfaction, foster customer-centric thinking in their teams. They make
decisions based on what their customers tell them they need. This involves continually collecting and acting on customer feedback.
Feedback provides the insights to make improvements, and promote behaviours, valued by customers. Not improvements based on
what ITIL says, or on what an ITSM tool can do, or on what we assume customers want. This is outside-in thinking. This is customer
centricity.
This article outlines five steps to becoming a customer-centric service delivery team. When you have these in place, you’ll improve
support staff engagement, increase IT customer satisfaction, enhance IT’s reputation, and even reduce your IT support costs.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER CENTRICITY? WHAT IS ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE?
Being customer centric means putting the customer at the
heart of everything you do. Culture is like love. We all know what it means, but there
seems to be no consensus on the definition! For the
purposes of this article, let’s use a simple definition…
Organisations that are committed to customer centricity,
focus on what the customer actually wants and needs, and
design products and services around that. They always
carefully consider the customer when making decisions.
From simple decisions like deciding the priority of an
individual ticket. To big ones, like deciding what
improvement initiatives to work on.
And customer-centricity is not just for the Service Desk. It’s
about all IT teams working together to provide customers
with a consistently positive experience.
9 itSMF Bulletin—November 2017
Organisational culture is the set of assumptions, values, and
beliefs that have a strong influence on how employees
behave. Culture results in consistent, observable patterns of
behaviour, such as how employees dress, act, and perform
their roles. In other words, acceptable “norms”. The way
we do things around here.
Culture is rarely consistent throughout an organisation.
There are many factors that drive internal variations,
resulting in diverse cultures across business units, such as IT
and marketing. Micro-cultures even differ from team to
team in the same business unit.