So you are scheduled to meet with that really tough customer who has issues with your overall service desk or incident management performance.   My experience in running an incident management organization of over 100k problems per year supporting Fortune 500 customers may help with an approach that almost always facilitated a healthy and productive (although sometimes painful) customer outcome. Key Mantras:  

• Do your homework

• Listen

• Open your Kimono…Commit to improving your customers life

• And do what you say you’ll do.

I was never big on Homework in school, but found the value in real life.  The quote “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” fit’s well in these scenarios.  Demonstrating you know your customer is a key ingredient to constructive relationship management and overall service improvement.  Try following these guidelines:

• Drill down in to your standard service desk & incident/problem KPI’s from a customer perspective.  Take a deep dive into the  trend of incidents and problems with that customer, or department/organization in relationship to your overall KPI’s.  What do you see from those trends?   How do you stack up with this customer?  Was the call response timely?   How many incidents did they report per period?  Is that trend higher than normal?  How many are still open and how does that relate to your overall trends?  How long have they aged?   Do any customer specific patterns related to root cause appear obvious that you can learn from or that the customer can learn from. 

• Can you assess whether you are following documented process?   Was each action planned and action taken well documented?   Was relevant diagnostic data needed captured and analyzed in a timely basis?   Were expectations set and followed through with the customer?  Did a high percentage of calls result in some sort of escalation? 

• How was the tone of the incidents & how were our customer care skills?  

• What’s the history regarding service level performance? 

• Is there any funding or revenue dependent upon performance or known issues? 

 While looking at a single customers’ incident management experience doesn’t always offer trends, I always found that a little bit of research always facilitated two key areas of improvement:

1. how can we do better at resolving the incidents faster, more effectively and with customer focus

2. how can we help the customer help themselves (ie training, better diagnostics, expectations, etc…)?    

You can add these approaches to some standard root cause analysis and gain a wealth of insight.  At a minimum,  the customer you are meeting with will certainly understand that you’ve taken time to know him better.