The pressure for IT organisations to be customer-focused is rising. It originates with your customers and the power they now yield, and is gradually penetrating through the layers of the organisation, from the obvious customer-facing departments deeper into the operations and capabilities that underpin your organisation's success. Despite this pressure, IT organisations are finding it challenging to adapt to this new mindset and way of working.
There is evidence of how customer-focus can be embedded within IT organisations, and the solutions to it can be applied at micro and macro levels. The outcomes this solution generates are clear:
Clarity on how well current BAU services are meeting internal customer needs and expectations
Opportunities for refining organisational models to align to internal customer segments
Identification of areas for possible automation and cost reduction
A continuous improvement capability that, once set-up, is self-sustaining, shifting behaviours, mindsets and culture to become customer-centred
Improved relations between technology and the business
A customer-focused IT organisation will have a knock-on effect, delivering value more effectively and efficiently to its internal business customers, which then drives improved value delivery to the paying customers at the end of the value stream. This in turn will make a contribution to the customer’s experience and impact key measures such as satisfaction and loyalty.
The rising pressure to focus on customers
The pressure for IT organisations to become more customer-focused is on, and it comes from a variety of sources:
As we know, customers hold most of the power these days and can churn if they don’t receive the value they expect in the way they want it.
The business units IT serves, and who are closer in the value stream to the paying customers, are adapting to this pressure by embedding more customer-focused paradigms to deliver value to their paying customers, such as being product-led, human-centred, or design-led, and this is impacting how you work with them.
Similarly, IT standards such as ITIL’s latest, ITIL 4, are incorporating many of the methods from long established design disciplines such as user experience, user research and service design, recognising the importance of customers in the role of co-creating value.
The narrative across senior leadership, from the board and in digital and technology, is changing, with declarations about the importance of customer-focus. Often followed by explicit principles and objectives on customer-focus which then must cascade down into the organisation.
Your employees are also consumers, and expect their employee experience and the internal services that underpin that experience to reflect the consumer-quality they receive outside of work.
Yet despite this pressure, it appears most IT organisations are not making the shift. Why is that?
How come customer-focused change is not happening within IT organisations?
In established IT organisations, with 10’s, 100’s or even 1000’s of existing IT services running business-as-usual, the following problems stand in the way:
Customer-focus has rarely been a priority for IT leaders, or in the measures of success for IT organisations, and traditionally ‘customer’ is not a language IT speaks.
Everyone is so busy delivering BAU IT services, there is no time to lift up heads to think and act for the internal customers.
IT professionals have a reasonable conceptual understanding of what being customer-centred means but they are not able to describe it in terms of their IT services.
There is a desire to be customer-focused but a lack of understanding of how to be, and this is evidenced by the absence of key customer-centred artefacts and activities such as:
A clear definition of the customer segments consuming the IT service and any archetypes of them,
A blueprint that shows how the service is delivered - the interdependent parts that come together to deliver value through interactions with their customers,
Customer measures defined and being collected,
Customer feedback mechanisms in place (when they are in place they are often manual, sporadic and rarely represent the end-to-end customer lifecycle),
Continuous improvement actions derived from customer insight and analysis
Investment decisions and strategic plans explicitly considering customer needs and expectations,
Customers being engaged in the design and optimisation of services.
All this can be overcome, and the will to do so, at least at the ground-level, is there. But how?
Customer-focus can be embedded within IT organisations…here’s how
The are 4 steps to embedding customer-focus within your IT organisation:
Identify the key internal customer segments IT serves, and the major propositions being consumed by them and how.
Conduct an IT service customer maturity assessment of these key services to understand to what extent the customer is currently integrated in the development and operation of the services.
Use the output of the assessment to drive activities to increase maturity. This often will include activities such as:
helping service owners understand who their direct customers are
how their service is currently delivered, and
applying customer insight to measure current performance and drive improvement initiatives.
These activities can be done at scale or at a team-level using standardised workshop templates, artefacts and the IT Service customer playbook.
Finally, embed a customer-centred operation within IT services as part of BAU. This can look different for each organisation, but primarily focuses on making customer-related activities part of continuous improvement, including using your ITSM platform as a mechanism for capturing customer-related artefacts and measuring maturity over time.
Your next step starts here….
To recap, there is a sense of inevitability that customer-focus will impact IT organisations and their leadership as pressure to focus on customers gradually penetrates the layers of the organisation. There are clear reasons why customer-focused change is not happening within IT organisations. However, it can be done using a tried and tested maturity model, playbook and associated tools.
Ask yourself the following:
Are you seeing some of the signs that customer-focus is something that will impact your IT organisation?
Do you know if your IT service owners and their teams have created the key customer-centred artefacts and conducted the activities listed above?
If you don’t do anything about this, what happens/where does it lead for your IT organisation?
If you would like to discuss any of this further, or are interested to understand how to apply this to your business, please contact us at hello@itsmpeople.co.uk and we will put you in touch with one of our Enterprise Customer Experience Specialists.
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