This article was contributed by Claudio Pastori and Rosario Percannella from European Central Bank.
Communication is a key element for the implementation of any service level management (SLM) strategy. Meeting regularly with your customers, listening to their voice, taking note of their expectations and pain points, and establishing a presence are regular activities that should be performed by any SLM team. By establishing a proper communication channel with your customers it will allow you to better ‘listen to their voice’, understand their requirements, and increase their satisfaction.
Inappropriate communication channels, media, and language used when communicating to IT users are often the reasons for misunderstandings and poor management of customer expectations. The following questions are therefore key for any IT service provider:
- Is your communication strategy appropriate for IT end-users and customers?
- Are you satisfying your customer needs as far as the establishment of a continuous dialogue is concerned?
- Are you targeting the right audience when talking to your customers or stakeholders?
The role of Millennials
Millennials are more and more often part of your end-user community. Technology is essentially backed into Millennial’s DNAs. Therefore standard communication approaches are no longer suitable to convey messages.
According to a recent study, more than 85% of Millennials expect to get information through social media, in digital form with interactive content, and that’s easy to share. As such, the way that internal providers communicate with them has to be adapted accordingly.
- Is your company adapting its communication strategy to meet Millennial’s expectations?
- Has your way of communicating to them changed over the past 3 years?
- Which tools/media are you using to approach Millennials?
An Innovative Dialogue
At the European Central Bank, SLM has successfully piloted an innovative way of meeting with our stakeholders. The regular service review meetings have been replaced by ‘events’ which are run in the form of stand-ups, and get together conferences where customers across different units meet with the team in order to discuss service performance and improvement opportunities. These sessions are interactive and comprise of video sessions, live dashboard reviews, and open table question/discussions on improving service performance. During these events we make sure that customers get meaningful information by using Service Performance Dashboards, and powerful analytical tools providing reports with all the relevant data for a comprehensive and near real-time view of the service performance. SLM dashboards are portable, accessible by different devices and can easily be customised. This approach fosters a continuous dialogue with our customers and a transparent relationship.
At ITSM18
At the annual itSMF UK conference (ITSM18) this coming November, my colleague Rosario Percannella and I would like to show you the benefits of this approach, how much we value customer feedback, and how we put customers at the centre of our SLM strategy. The session would be particularly useful for internal service providers.
As part of our renovation process we would also be interested in exchanging views with delegates on how internal service providers communicate with their customers, how regularly service review meetings are organised and conducted, and which are the real benefits of establishing a continuous dialogue with internal customers in your organisations.
Please share with us in the comments the way you approach your customers and run service review meetings, or come and discuss with us at ITSM18. We hope to see you there.
Claudio Pastori
Claudio has more than 15 years of experience at the European Central Bank. He is an IT Expert in the Governance and Transformation Services Division in the Chief Services Office. He is the Service Level Management Process Manager serving the Directorate General Information System, with focus on process improvement activities and the Service Level Manager for a number of business and technical applications across the ECB. Contributing to fostering collection of non-functional requirements from business areas, Claudio has also been in charge of conducting ECB's ISO standard IT internal audits and responsible for coordinating IT procurement activities in the Directorate General Information Systems. Claudio holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Methodological Statistics.
