它山之石，可作ITIL攻玉
发布时间：2005年02月04日点击数：
作者：Alastair Trower 来源：本站原创
As businesses, we like to think our customers are our greatest asset. After all, they are 'the ones who pay our wages'. And there is no doubt that, as a recent survey undertaken on behalf of my company confirmed, the number of staff recognised as directly providing customer service and support is steadily increasing.
This should come as no surprise. As markets become increasingly global and competitive and products more commoditised, real differentiation must come from the level of support and service which companies provide their customer base. Just as companies made a distinction between front and back office staff a decade ago, so today they must differentiate between revenue generating and customer facing staff on the one hand and non-revenue generating and non-customer facing employees on the other.
In a tough, competitive world, something is clearly amiss if the majority of your staff are not driving the business forward, either through direct involvement in revenue generation or customer interaction. If this is the case, what can you do? The first step is to learn from those parts of your business that are operating efficiently and introduce these successful concepts enterprise wide.
For example, you have an efficient, service management-oriented IT service delivery process, take the same principles and apply them to HR, finance, reception and any staff supporting revenue generation and customer service. Yet how do you recognise and analyse which parts of the business are working well and why? It is not easy and the issue becomes even more problematic when trying to identify how your competitors seem to be getting it right.
This is where best practice in general, and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in particular, come into play. ITIL for example offers a set of best practice principles which provides organisations with a straightforward method of putting in place service management processes and a streamlined way of managing the IT infrastructure. It helps any business, large or small, to establish a benchmark of where it is today, where it wants to be in terms of corporate objectives and formalises the steps needed to get there.
In the face of growing competitive and regulatory pressures, understanding of the value of best practice is growing - nearly 60 per cent of UK CIOs have heard of ITIL or are already using it - though there is still a long way to go, especially in smaller and distributed enterprises. Yet those who have adopted ITIL have identified measurable improvement in service levels and customer satisfaction and, as work competence has increased, so has job satisfaction, according to recent Help Desk Institute research.
As a result, more than two thirds of respondents believe investment in ITIL to be 'worth every penny', and fully 88 per cent of adopting companies would recommend it to others. Yet the research also underlined that ITIL is not a universal panacea, as more than three-quarters of adopters were realistic in their assessment of its capabilities and limitations, confirming that ITIL does not have all the answers and cannot be regarded as a 'silver bullet'.
In fact, there are two principles which must be borne in mind if ITIL adoption is to be fully effective. First, it should be seen as a set of guidelines and not as a set of rules to be followed too rigidly. A balance must be struck between the value of building up key IT processes and the need to maintain flexibility and responsiveness within the broader business.
Second, businesses today do not just operate IT help desks, but provide similar support for other functions such as operations, finance and HR - even if they are often no more than a single person at the end of a phone and may not be recognised as a help desk or a call centre.
Companies are moving increasingly to a 'one-stop-shop' approach, where a unified service centre can deal with any internal issue and a separate point of contact dealing with external customer queries. ITIL provides an excellent model for IT service management, but in itself does not encompass these additional elements increasingly seen as mission-critical.
No two best practice implementations are alike. Yet in embedding ITIL, BS15000, TickIT or any other exemplar of best practice, two common elements underpin any successful application. First, best practice is not just about technology and process but about the need for staff to have a fully customer-centric approach.
Just as when the concept of 'customer as king' first hit the corporate radar, it may require a fundamental shift of attitude - so called 'culture change' - in some cases, but the process of change itself is relatively straightforward. Put simply, it is a case of understanding who your customers and suppliers are, both internally and externally, and then recognising how what you do impacts positively or negatively on their ability to do their jobs effectively.
Access to data is also key. Another common corporate mantra is that a business lives or dies by its data, yet many companies fail to spend much time integrating or presenting data to other parts of the business. Presenting a simplified and unified view of data across the business will thus improve both processes and the speed and quality of decision making.
From this it is clear that there is no mystery or 'black art' around best practice. Rather, it is about learning from others' mistakes and applying the lessons. In short, it is the common sense aggregation of those things which are seen to work in having the right person armed with the right skills and information to deal with business problems as they arise.
Finally, if one of the identified goals for organisations is to achieve a unified, 'one-stop-shop' approach to customer service, based on best practice principles, does this mean physically relocating customer-facing staff within a single, centralised call centre?
In a limited number of cases this may well be the outcome, as the solution best suited to the broader needs of the individual business. However, as long as the right processes and technologies are in place and delivered to the desktop, I do not believe that physical co-location is especially important.
As the concept of the service desk has evolved, it is much more likely that calls will come into the contact centre and, once logged, will be passed on to the relevant department depending on the nature of the issue. The individual dealing with the query will then access the same applications, utilise the same processes and meet the same SLAs as every other customer-facing employee, providing a consistent, high quality service to both internal and external customers.
This virtual one-stop-shop has become especially important in the context of the distributed enterprise and with the steady growth in remote and home working in both the public and private sectors. Now, more than ever, the ability of customer facing staff to function effectively irrespective of location has become an important service differentiator.
FrontRange Solutions is exhibiting at The Helpdesk & IT Support Show 2005, the most important date in the calendar for helpdesk professionals across Europe. The Show features over 80 exhibitors and a stimulating programme of free seminars on a wide range of Technical and People & Process topics. The Helpdesk & IT Support Show runs from 26-28th April 2005, at the National Hall, Olympia, London.
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This should come as no surprise. As markets become increasingly global and competitive and products more commoditised, real differentiation must come from the level of support and service which companies provide their customer base. Just as companies made a distinction between front and back office staff a decade ago, so today they must differentiate between revenue generating and customer facing staff on the one hand and non-revenue generating and non-customer facing employees on the other.
In a tough, competitive world, something is clearly amiss if the majority of your staff are not driving the business forward, either through direct involvement in revenue generation or customer interaction. If this is the case, what can you do? The first step is to learn from those parts of your business that are operating efficiently and introduce these successful concepts enterprise wide.
For example, you have an efficient, service management-oriented IT service delivery process, take the same principles and apply them to HR, finance, reception and any staff supporting revenue generation and customer service. Yet how do you recognise and analyse which parts of the business are working well and why? It is not easy and the issue becomes even more problematic when trying to identify how your competitors seem to be getting it right.
This is where best practice in general, and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in particular, come into play. ITIL for example offers a set of best practice principles which provides organisations with a straightforward method of putting in place service management processes and a streamlined way of managing the IT infrastructure. It helps any business, large or small, to establish a benchmark of where it is today, where it wants to be in terms of corporate objectives and formalises the steps needed to get there.
In the face of growing competitive and regulatory pressures, understanding of the value of best practice is growing - nearly 60 per cent of UK CIOs have heard of ITIL or are already using it - though there is still a long way to go, especially in smaller and distributed enterprises. Yet those who have adopted ITIL have identified measurable improvement in service levels and customer satisfaction and, as work competence has increased, so has job satisfaction, according to recent Help Desk Institute research.
As a result, more than two thirds of respondents believe investment in ITIL to be 'worth every penny', and fully 88 per cent of adopting companies would recommend it to others. Yet the research also underlined that ITIL is not a universal panacea, as more than three-quarters of adopters were realistic in their assessment of its capabilities and limitations, confirming that ITIL does not have all the answers and cannot be regarded as a 'silver bullet'.
In fact, there are two principles which must be borne in mind if ITIL adoption is to be fully effective. First, it should be seen as a set of guidelines and not as a set of rules to be followed too rigidly. A balance must be struck between the value of building up key IT processes and the need to maintain flexibility and responsiveness within the broader business.
Second, businesses today do not just operate IT help desks, but provide similar support for other functions such as operations, finance and HR - even if they are often no more than a single person at the end of a phone and may not be recognised as a help desk or a call centre.
Companies are moving increasingly to a 'one-stop-shop' approach, where a unified service centre can deal with any internal issue and a separate point of contact dealing with external customer queries. ITIL provides an excellent model for IT service management, but in itself does not encompass these additional elements increasingly seen as mission-critical.
No two best practice implementations are alike. Yet in embedding ITIL, BS15000, TickIT or any other exemplar of best practice, two common elements underpin any successful application. First, best practice is not just about technology and process but about the need for staff to have a fully customer-centric approach.
Just as when the concept of 'customer as king' first hit the corporate radar, it may require a fundamental shift of attitude - so called 'culture change' - in some cases, but the process of change itself is relatively straightforward. Put simply, it is a case of understanding who your customers and suppliers are, both internally and externally, and then recognising how what you do impacts positively or negatively on their ability to do their jobs effectively.
Access to data is also key. Another common corporate mantra is that a business lives or dies by its data, yet many companies fail to spend much time integrating or presenting data to other parts of the business. Presenting a simplified and unified view of data across the business will thus improve both processes and the speed and quality of decision making.
From this it is clear that there is no mystery or 'black art' around best practice. Rather, it is about learning from others' mistakes and applying the lessons. In short, it is the common sense aggregation of those things which are seen to work in having the right person armed with the right skills and information to deal with business problems as they arise.
Finally, if one of the identified goals for organisations is to achieve a unified, 'one-stop-shop' approach to customer service, based on best practice principles, does this mean physically relocating customer-facing staff within a single, centralised call centre?
In a limited number of cases this may well be the outcome, as the solution best suited to the broader needs of the individual business. However, as long as the right processes and technologies are in place and delivered to the desktop, I do not believe that physical co-location is especially important.
As the concept of the service desk has evolved, it is much more likely that calls will come into the contact centre and, once logged, will be passed on to the relevant department depending on the nature of the issue. The individual dealing with the query will then access the same applications, utilise the same processes and meet the same SLAs as every other customer-facing employee, providing a consistent, high quality service to both internal and external customers.
This virtual one-stop-shop has become especially important in the context of the distributed enterprise and with the steady growth in remote and home working in both the public and private sectors. Now, more than ever, the ability of customer facing staff to function effectively irrespective of location has become an important service differentiator.
FrontRange Solutions is exhibiting at The Helpdesk & IT Support Show 2005, the most important date in the calendar for helpdesk professionals across Europe. The Show features over 80 exhibitors and a stimulating programme of free seminars on a wide range of Technical and People & Process topics. The Helpdesk & IT Support Show runs from 26-28th April 2005, at the National Hall, Olympia, London.
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