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.

While all this historical self inspection and assessment is good stuff – it doesn’t relieve you of possibly the most important rule of thumb and that is: “listen to your customer”.   My mom used say: “take the cotton out of your ears & put it in your mouth”.  Sometimes I hate it when mom is right.    I’ve found that customer perception and expectations can be managed, only in so far as I understood them.  

 Listening carefully enables me to find out what makes my customer tick, what drives that manager/executive’s success, where their pain is and how my service execution affects their business outcomes.  One lesson I learned this way is that multiple open low priority incidents can equal customer perception of low service value and high business impact.   

Bottom line:  Customer perception trumps service providers interpretation of the facts – add one layer of scar tissue… “thank you, can I have another”.Understanding the facts and listening to the customers viewpoint help open the partnership to a mutually beneficial, open and honest discussion    If a real inventory of your performance and the customer view uncovers  a few “cockroaches” … “it’s all good!   Continuous Improvement is all about exposing those little buggers, finding their food source ( ie.. getting down to the real root causes in your activities,  isolating  work instruction flaws  and/or execution improvement) and then shining the light on the next set of the little buggers (sound like plan do check act?)  Open your Kimono to your customer where it makes sense… It develops trust in the partnership.  Hiding your warts & playing the roach only degrades the relationship and you’ll ultimately lose their faith and honest appraisal (right before they replace you.   As you find real root causes in your area, that causes their pain, be honest and tell them what you found and what you plan to do about it (even if you it means you aren’t going to address it at present).  Invariably though , these scenarios will drive you to constantly improve the activities and work instructions within your incident and problem management process and the honest approach with the customer increases the level of partnership.    

I’m sure none of this is new to may of you…and of course your mileage may vary.  To me,   In the end, It’s all about showing your customer – Big C & little C that you have insight into their world, that you care about their pain are serious about continuously improving and executing a process they depend upon to deliver their business success.

Keep up the good work!

Scott Davis

Evergreen Process Consultant

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