Service delivery is a vital part of running a business. It invites the opportunity to impress your customers and show them the value you offer. It can help to create a great relationship with clients and secure retention.
By creating value and engaging with your employees as well as your customers, you can develop a service delivery culture that ticks every box. But what is service delivery? What are some examples of service delivery? These are the questions we’re asking today as well as discussing how service delivery can be improved.
Ready to learn more? In this guide, we’ll dig deeper into:
Use the links above to skip ahead to the sections on service delivery you’re most interested in.
WHAT IS SERVICE DELIVERY?
Service delivery is a business idea and framework, the main goal of which is to provide services from a vendor to a customer. This includes the regular interactions between the two parties throughout the entire process of the business supplying the service and the client purchasing it. This includes the initial interaction, onboarding, set up, and any follow-up interactions.
WHY IS SERVICE DELIVERY IMPORTANT?
When a business has neither the capacity nor the skills to perform a certain service, they outsource this work.
Service delivery is so important because it helps to bridge the gap between a business or an individual not having the means to perform a task, and a service provider looking to sell their product. Companies can tailor their service delivery to meet the needs of each customer either through price or function. Companies who engage in efficient, customer-focused service delivery may also be able to distinguish themselves from the competition by providing a higher quality service. Read our guide on what you need to know about service delivery in 2023.
TYPES OF SERVICE DELIVERY EXAMPLES
There are a wide range of industries that provide a multitude of service delivery that cover many products. Some of these service delivery examples are shown below.
Consultancy / Professional Services Delivery
A consulting service that businesses provide could be anything from business turnaround to IT consultancy. They help a wide array of businesses that need it, and can bring in unique expertise and skills that the customer does not usually have access to. A key benefit of a consultant is that they can often provide a view from the outside of the company, and give unbiased advice, two things which the customer may not see due to the fact that they are too close to the business.
Support Services Delivery
An effective customer support service involves assisting customers during both the pre and post-sale journey. Any issues customers run into or any questions they have, your support team will be on hand to provide answers and help them understand your product better. While your support team is crucial to the success of your customers with your product, the way in which your support can be delivered can go beyond your team.
Video guides, FAQ’s, and knowledge pages all serve as support materials your customers can use to get the most out of your software. Concise, easily digestible support content at your disposal can sometimes be just as crucial as your actual team because much of this external support can be used at any time, completely eliminating office hours or long virtual queues. Ensuring this content can be accessed easily by your customers is another important step, as delivering these services should be as easy as possible for those who are looking for it who may be facing existing issues with the software, and need no further hassle when looking for the material to aid them.
Onboarding Services Delivery
Onboarding is the first opportunity to create a great and truly memorable customer experience. You only get one chance to make a good first impression and this is that chance!
Unfortunately, many companies don’t instill a solid onboarding into their culture. In many cases, just one person will cover multiple roles, aiming to satisfy the demands of Support, Account Management AND Customer Onboarding. This is not a future-focused strategy and will eventually succumb to the weight of demand. Keeping customer success at the heart of the business goals will allow onboarding to take its rightful place in your organization’s strategy.
How an effective customer onboarding strategy is delivered can have many steps to it. A dedicated onboarding team is where you should begin. No more thinly spread team members who are trying to do three jobs at once. An onboarding team will be able to guide each new customer through the whole process, with a more personalized approach.
Another key aspect of delivering a great onboarding service is to utilize onboarding playbooks. This provides you with a repeatable process that the team can follow for every new customer, guaranteeing consistency and creating the ideal customer experience.
Here's an example of an onboarding template in Precursive. You can see the clearly-defined stages that one would expect in any service delivery process.
Management Consulting Service Delivery
Effective service delivery is at the heart of any management consulting firm. The question on all of their lips will be how they can structure their processes to be successful in service delivery. This can be broken down into five key areas:
Realistic and measurable milestones
Clear and consistent communication
Quality assurance
Timely reporting
Effective collaboration
Only with the above in place can they deliver their client promise and provide the best service possible. With management consulting firms, testimonials and positive customer feedback will be the backbone of their strategy to increase their customer base and by extension, their own business.
IT Services Delivery
IT service providers can offer a wide range of services, some of which include standard IT support, which can be anything from password and network management, cloud transfers, and regular backups. IT specialized skills are another big part companies can offer, such as software development, AI services, cyber security, and website management.
WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A GOOD SERVICE DELIVERY MODEL?
Service Culture
Service culture surrounds the leadership principles, vision, and values of a service provider. Controlling these aspects is done by the management team, and a basis for operations is set clearly throughout the whole organization. Maintaining and developing these components helps to develop and expand a company’s social processes which helps to achieve the long-term success of the company.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement looks at the people within an organization who are involved in service delivery. Employee attitudes can be nurtured by human resources and other leadership teams, who can shape their purpose so that they align with the service culture of the business. This creates an important link between the service delivery design process and the excellence model experienced by the customer.
Service Quality
Service quality is the sum of all of the strategies, systems and processes that are involved in service delivery. All of these parts help dictate the management model that allows the customer to reach their desired outcome within the service delivery process. This component lays the groundwork for the service provider and client partnership.
Client Experience
The main focus of customer service is to provide the customer with the resources and knowledge they need about their service delivery product, including features such as account management and continuous improvement. Something that is required at this stage is an efficient review and collaboration process so the service provider can fully understand how customers view their service delivery, and what steps can be taken to improve this process. This is working best when the client is involved in the creation and delivery process.
TIPS ON HOW TO STREAMLINE YOUR SERVICE DELIVERY
Use these tips below to impress you clients with high quality service delivery and shine above your competitors.
Effective Communication
At every step of the way, service providers can and should discuss reporting with their client. Keeping customers informed with the data they want to hear about at a pace that best suits them is a great way to form a good relationship with each and every one. Some customers may want to hear about progress in different ways, some for example may want daily reports while others prefer a thorough summary on a monthly basis. Good communication is concise, clear and timely.
Managed Expectations
As we’ve just established in the previous point, it’s best for clients that they stay up to date with their service, but they should also know what to expect from their service provider. Key details such as how much the service costs, what services are included, and the frequency of which these certain services are provided. It should be practically mandatory that a good service provider brings in-depth and clear explanations to all customers and keep them up to date with any changes.
Automation is Key
If you’re wondering how you can optimize and streamline certain tasks, automation is the way forward. This can eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks from the to-do list which can free up your team to focus on the bigger, more important tasks. If it also means cutting the delivery time because of this, then that’s great for the customer as well, as long as they’re kept in the know.
Precursive PSA is able to automate your businesses such as timesheets, which normally take hours. With Precursive, we pre-populate your timesheets in mere minutes.
WHAT NEXT?
If you didn’t before, you should now have a much more in-depth understanding of service delivery, its many different forms, and best practices to improve service delivery in 2023 and beyond.
Precursive is the only Salesforce native task management to PSA solution for professional services delivery. We help to maximize revenue and profitability by optimizing all elements of services delivery. If you’re looking to accelerate time-to-value with more consistent services delivery, book a demo today to see how we can improve your service delivery.
