Service delivery managers are a vital part of any organization. They are the core units that are in charge of keeping clients happy using their customer services. These professionals are assigned such responsibilities and also have the required skills for doing them. Service delivery management is one of the core concepts that these people know about their tips. These management tips can help service delivery managers to be able to carry out their responsibilities in the most efficient manner.
As the name ‘service delivery’ suggests that this is all about the delivery of services to clients from a accompany or an organization. This is done with the help of managing projects, correcting reliability problems. Tracking progress and KPIs, managing budget, and ensuring that proper delivery of services is done by professionals who are in charge. An overall duty or responsibility of a service delivery manager may be different based on the type of company they are working for. For example, the service delivery manager that is in charge of retail logistics may be dealing with inventory checks and the analysis of supply chains.
On the other hand, an IT Service Delivery Manager may be in charge of troubleshooting all of the basic technical problems, dealing with service agreements, and assisting with contracts. No matter which company or organization is the service manager working for, his core duties will always include the ability to be able to maintain a positive and meaningful tie with team members and with the clients.
Service delivery management is something that assigns a few responsibilities to the professionals for this task. These responsibilities are:
- to provide a service plan to companies that manage relevant services, being a team leader of the service delivery department, manage conflicts and ensure the team is carrying out tasks efficiently
- honing and leading improvement team to build a delivery infrastructure
- manage finances and budgets
Generally, people involved in service delivery management are not only limited to service delivery, meeting support, technical service and performance, and quality. A service delivery manager ensures that his clients and the end-user of the services are destined to be successful so that this success can be a fate of the service delivery management company. A few best practices to build a strong service delivery management is to follow the best practices that are being adopted around the world by professionals. Those are given below.
1. Having A Clear Understanding Of Your Role
This is one of the core best practices that just cannot be ignored or looked past in any situation or any role. If you want your team to carry out their duties effectively, every member will have to know what their duties and responsibilities are. The project manager will have to develop a clear understanding of the roles and objectives. This will mainly be dependent on which organization the team is working for, its strategic goals, and the position of every team member within it. The team should also know about which customer base it is doing to produce a product for and what customers they are going to be dealing with. Customers will dictate a lot about your role fulfillment. The customer service agent and service delivery manager will be at the forefront of the organization.
The team members, including the support engineer, the call center team lead, or manager, must all be aware of how their responsibilities map on other teams in the organization and their roles. For their role to be effective, every team member will need to be clear what roles are assigned to them, and others should also understand each other’s roles. If you don’t have all this clear description, then most probably, you will be dragged in things that aren’t even yours to do. This will help in the overall service delivery management of the company.
Alternatively, you can focus more on your role if you entrust your IT needs to an expert. You can even gain benefits from excellent business IT support services, including network efficiency and improvement of cyber security measures. By doing so, you can think of better ways to improve your service delivery, which is the core of your business
2. Use the CRM to Improve Service Delivery
CRM is a Customer Relationship Management that is an approach to allow a company to manage and analyze its interactions with the past, current, and future customers. CRM can be best used to improve service delivery as well. a CRM specified for this cause will allow you to manage the inquiry in different channels without losing track of where they are sourced from. It also will give sales, service, and marketing to a single view of the client to update and inform of their activities. By the use of extensions and add-ons and also by creating processes to support your goals, a CRM can help improve the communication levels with current and prospective customers. As a result, better sales experiences are acquired for the customers and also improved performance for your company is achieved.
The following are the features you must look for in a CRM software program:
- Contact Management: A common but must-have CRM feature is a contact searchable database that includes names, addresses, social media accounts, and other relevant customer information.
- Interaction Tracking: With this feature, you can track document conversations and interaction history that would be useful for customer engagement.
- Lead Management: This feature can help you identify, score, and move leads through the complex sales pipeline.
- Email Integration: You can integrate your CRM with your email campaigns so you can manage and segment contact lists in a centralized place. So, when choosing a CRM software program for your business, make sure it can be utilized in your email marketing efforts as well.
- Document Management: You might want to consider having a CRM platform that allows you to gather, upload, share, and store documents for easier and more secure access.
- Quotes Or Proposal Management: Does your business need to create contracts and proposals from time to time? If yes, then you need to consider having this feature in your CRM software.
3. Bring Customer Engagement Into The Organization
Customers are an integral part of your organization, and they must be treated like one as well. High levels of customer engagement in any organization can ensure its success and can let the organization work and produce products that are required by the consumer base. Any organization can use customer engagement to measure how well their products are and how well they can be made in the future. To engage customers, you can arrange meetings and present their SLA, have regular workshops to build a strong relationship with the customers and get their feedback, conduct surveys, and measure customer satisfaction level. This is one of the best practices of Service Delivery Management as it is directly connected to how customers are feeling about the services delivered by the organization.
4. Ensure You Have the Backing Of Support Providers For Your Services
You need to make sure that you have availed the backing of those who provide the support for your services that your front. You don’t only need mortal support by them but also real technical support. Service provisioning is a team challenge and an understanding of the internal organizational support capabilities of the service providers. It is also required to balance the capabilities against the business’s service level requirements.
So, in addition, to make sure that we have SLAs in the place of documenting service level requirements, we should also make sure OLAs are in place. They must be in place to monitor and report on internal support capabilities and also service delivery. Service delivery management will require you to be in line with these things so that you can do your job the best.
5. Use KPI for Customer Service Agent
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. It is defined as the metric for measuring performance that is used by customer service teams and also by customer support management to examine, visualize, analyze, and optimize customer relations. This is done by taking advantage of a 360-degree customer view. KPI also gives the call abandonment metric measures that are the number of callers that hung up disconnected before they could be connected to one of the customer service agents in organizations. This is a metric that is closely related to Service Level KPI and also customer satisfaction metrics. Whereas the call resolution KPI is also used to measure the outcome of each call that is handled by a customer agent to monitor how good the customer issues are resolved. The objective must be to quickly resolve calls to meet the service level agreements.
6. Utilize Customer Complaints about Your Good
How many times have you tried to avoid a whining or high Maintenance customer? Too many times, right? Well, these customers where seem the biggest issues to deal with can also be turned into your biggest advocates. If you try handling them correctly with your service delivery management skills, you have a great chance to make them your supporters. A sticky situation can be turned around and made to suit both parties only through your way of dealing with customer complaints. All you will need to utilize is your honesty, openness, transparency, and relationship building skills. And ah yes, don’t forget your excellent communication skills as well. This last skill might be the reason you were employed in the first place, so bring it in use.
7. Make Suppliers A Part Of Your Value Network
If suppliers are a part of your service supplier, then they can be a great fit to be a part of your value network. The service interfaces should be seamless and transparent to the customer end. This is essential because, after all, it might have been you who subcontracted part of the service and not your consumer. To make sure this seamless interface happens, you will have to ensure that the contractual agreements are underpinning your SLAs and must not contradict them.
If you already have a supplier management function on hand, you will have to build a good relationship that involves the understanding of their goals and challenges.
8. Manage To Operate Tactically And Strategically
This management of operating both tactically and strategically will be a challenging job to do. This will mainly happen if there is no presence of SLM and BRM posts. How are you going to maintain customer satisfaction at the time when you are failing the SLA targets? Once again, the key tip is to remain open, honest, and transparent. If targets have been breached or there are near misses, then discuss setting up a SIP that is a service improvement plan.
This plan must be in collaboration with your customer and internal supporting staff. Now, who will be sending the service improvements will mainly depend on what is in place between your customer and you. Is it a legal contract or an internal company agreement?
9. Your task isn’t To Fix Infrastructure
Knowing this will help you focus on what you are in the company for. Firefighting is only of firemen and not for SDMs. Being a service delivery manager, it is not your job to be fixing infrastructure or software. It still isn’t your job if the company is small and you are multitasking. In the case of a major incident, the role of an SDM is to converse with the customer, keep them updated on the progress, and manage their expectations. To be able to do this, you will need a working relationship with the internal support teams or anyone who is managing the external supplier if that is where the root cause originated form.
10. Be The Key To Driving Operational Effectiveness
The role of SLM and BRM are clearly and mostly unambiguously defined. These positions currently exist and are also filled. In such a case, the role of a service delivery manager will be between them and will tend to be one of day to day contact for support and supply challenges. This role will even be operating in the operational space in the service desk and the SLM. You will be instrumental in having strong communication with the customer keeping them updated on progress with problems and incidents, and service requests.
You are the key to making operational effectiveness a possibility. This type of SDM role, your experience and knowledge are very important in supporting both the BRM and SLM roles.
Conclusion
These were the best practices that service delivery management will be very important to keep maintaining your role. You will have to follow these practices that are accepted worldwide to ensure that you are best at your service delivery management. Service delivery is the name of managing projects, correcting reliability issues, managing budgets, and making sure that professionals do proper delivery of services.
To be able to fulfill all these duties as a service delivery manager, one will have to follow the top ten best practices of carrying out the service delivery management job. These positions often need people to have a suitable business-related degree and experience of 5 years in customer service, logistics, and leadership. They are also expected to have an ITIL certification. The best way to handle this role is to have appropriate knowledge of what you are assigned for and what your duties are in the organization structure.
