You’ve Planned, You’ve Built, Now Use It – The Customer Success Journey Using, Delivering and Supporting Value Streams

Involve all stakeholders from a customer, business outcome and end-user perspective.  Work in various mediums such as in person workshops, virtually via collaboration tools, surveys.  This allows you to document any potential points of failure, blockages and risks within the value streams. 

A good visualization representation provides full transparency to either move forward or stop and readjust.  This will save you time, money and blindly working on numerous iterations.

Consider the following:

What Practices Frameworks, Approaches are required?  ITIL, COBIT, Waterfall, Agile, DevOps. Are you going all out with a big bang approach or phased?  These need to be clearly outlined and documented.

What Resources do you need by way of people, tools, technologies.  Look at the roles and responsibilities of each of these resources.

Inputs, Triggers, Outputs – How will the value stream start? When?  Why should it exist? What outputs and outcomes does the process need to create and is it of value for the service provider, stakeholders, customers and end-users?

Stakeholders will include the Board, the organization, senior management, service level managers, partners and suppliers, customers and users.  There should be clear and present support for the governance accountability of the whole or part of the value chain at the top level.

Managing the Work

Centralized, decentralized

Local, within same country, offshore (one or more countries)

Service Desk support locally, remotely, follow the sun, allocated hours of operation with third party support for after hours

How mature are your Incident, Service Request, Problem and Change Management policies and procedures?

Do you have clear processes for 2nd and 3rd level support?  Are your vendors and partners clear on their contractual and support obligations?

Understand the risk of any potential service disruption, business process loss, revenue, safety and whether plans for each are in place.  Will the organization or business reputation suffer, if so, is your plan A, B or C sound enough to recover from this?

Demand/Capacity

Use differential charging such as discounts for specific times, planning ahead (7, 14, 21, 30 days).

Demand with policy such as the number of times a user can reschedule their trip.

Increase demand acceptance such as elastic cloud platforms, outsourcing, bandwidth, backend processes are scheduled for low peak times/after hours

Using shift left techniques – when implemented such that the difference encountered is minimal from connecting to live person, will allow resources to be concentrated in other areas of higher priority to the organization and the services it relies on.

Customer/User Experience

Keep your customers informed and involved on service disruptions.  Keep timelines truthful, even if it is lengthy.  Explain reasons for the delay.  The more information your customers/end-users have the more they will likely accept the disruptions being encountered.  Any deviation from the truth and transparency will result in loss of customers, revenue and more sweat and teams to keep and acquire new customers.

Prioritize Work

Using the triage concept is used by organizations to take care of the most urgent incidents or request to the least urgent.  For high priority incidents and requests, there are typically separate procedures and work activities that need to be performed in sequence.  It’s important to note that if you continually are working on high priority items, you are left with the low priority ones not being dealt with.  Triaging at each Tier should be in place to keep your customers and users productive, and overall keeping the lights on.

Intelligent Swarming – typically used in high priority situations by having cross-functional collaboration, flexible teams, cross-pollination of skills and experience is an effective approach as different areas and people come together without the roadblocks of structured tiers of support or escalations. 

Whilst the benefits include dispatch swarms meeting frequently on a daily basis to review incoming tickets, backlog swarms who convene on a periodic basis (by produce or service) who require input from specialist members or groups, or, drop-in swarms who are readily available to support front-line staff – the challenges should also be weighed as it can increase costs for skilled staff, individual contributions are difficult to evaluate, the mix of people may have differences and likely not get on and requires executive support to ‘loosen the rules’ and move away from inflexible processes and the reliance on teams.