Service delivery, as you and I know it, is currently in transition. Many innovative companies looking to ‘future-proof’ themselves are moving towards a new approach that reimagines how service delivery works. This desire has largely been introduced as a necessity for many businesses facing recession fears and a bigger focus towards increased profitability as the market landscape changes and competition becomes fiercer.
You may be familiar with the term “outcome-based service”. If not, then it offers a whole new way service delivery can be viewed. Change is of course intimidating, but also necessary and sometimes far more beneficial than maintaining the status quo.
So with all of this in mind, let's look at service delivery in 2023 and beyond.
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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.
THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SERVICE DELIVERY
If you’re looking to redefine your service delivery, then you need to acquire deep insight into how to meet customers’ needs. Service providers need to develop a strategic way to discover general assumptions about how a service is delivered and seize the opportunity to take this and achieve much better results.
If this potential shift feels like the perfect fit for your business, then this next part is for you. Below are some strategies you can use to evaluate your current service delivery, and help them evolve with a future focused outlook.
Engage with your customers, don’t just communicate
Wouldn’t it be great if your frontline service providers were able to not only use tools and expertise to tackle issues at hand, but also had the communication skills to make every interaction an opportunity to gain valuable insights into the deeper needs of each customer, so you can better understand their long-term goals.
The ‘big picture’ will be different for each customer, but most will include a range of common objectives varying from short to long-term, including:
Productivity
Efficiency
Growth
Cost saving
Competitiveness
By training your service technicians (e.g. those delivering professional, implementation or managed services) to have advanced communication skills and allowing them to develop a deeper understanding of every client’s big picture, you don’t just get the job done and move on, you’re engaging with your customers in a more interpersonal way from the very start.
Precursive allows you to keep customers in the know from the very start by sharing your onboarding plan. No longer will you experience delays from waiting to receive a spreadsheet.
Develop a culture of continuous learning and improvement
Creating a culture in which continuous learning is encouraged means you are constantly looking for ways you can enhance your service delivery. This could include gathering and analyzing feedback from customers, trying out new processes and technologies, or promoting employee involvement and innovation. Customers will always want the best service, and will happily move to one of your competitors if they feel the service is better. It is in your best interest to keep ahead of the curve, always innovating and trying new things to see if you can increase efficiency and improve your service.
Identify the actual needs of your customers
One of the first steps in looking to improve service delivery is to truly understand the wants, needs, and expectations of your customers. Many forms of customer feedback can be useful here, such as surveys and focus groups, but the biggest impact will come from simply talking to your account contacts.
By having a better understanding of the specific requirements and preferences of each customer, you can tailor both new and existing services to meet their expectations more effectively. It’s important to prioritize existing customer needs as this means you can focus your time and resources on the areas that will have the biggest impact for new business in the future.
Streamline your processes
If you want to maximize efficiency in your service delivery, you need to identify and remove any steps or processes that add no value to the delivery process. These are unnecessary and eliminating these inefficiencies enables far quicker and more efficient service delivery.
Ask yourself now at which steps along the customer journey are there frequent hurdles cited by your team. How can these be overcome and turned into opportunities?
Going forward, schedule some time for your team to examine your delivery in greater detail. Have a brainstorm session and reshuffle steps to see what works and what doesn’t. With the whole team focused on the end goal, you will come up with a solution to reduce pain points, and a process which breathes efficiency on both sides, for your team and your customers.
Visibility is crucial, and we ensure company-wide understanding when it comes to project and service delivery.
Tackle barriers head on
If you’ve ever come across problems which could affect the quality of service you provide, don’t you wish you could tackle them from the front lines? By encouraging your service delivery team to constantly build a more comprehensive view of your customer’s profile, their goals and desires, you are collecting data from day one about how you can help them achieve their most desired goals.
This data can be used to develop new and improved ways to help them with tasks, or diagnose problems quicker. The opportunity to deliver an above and beyond service does not come without strings however, as you must be willing to put the work in to learn more about your customers, the industry they operate in, and their competition.
By doing this, you can not only identify the barriers to your internal service delivery woes, but allows you to showcase unique expertise to identify and eliminate barriers to your client’s success as well. The result of this is not just adding value, buy developing much more complex and beneficial customer relationships in the long-term.
WHAT NEXT?
This article has served as a useful guide to navigating you through the complex world of service delivery, and you can take all of these tips and use them to experience improvements in your own service delivery within your business.
Want to understand more about how you can productize your service offerings? Our new playbook, How To Productize Services Delivery, is the free, detailed guide to what you need to do. Whether you’re working in a SaaS environment or the IT consulting landscape, we have two versions of the playbook tailored to both of these industries. You no longer have to worry about a cookie cutter approach to learning material, we can provide you content for your specific use case. This playbook covers:
Frameworks to design, build and sell services packages
The metrics that are used to monitor success
Sales enablement toolkits and pricing strategies
Visit our Precursive Products page to discover how we can help you deliver a great productized service to your customers. Alternatively, book a demo today to see it in action for yourself.
