10 steps to creating a service-based culture

A recent Meta Group global survey states that the majority of businesses believe that their IT departments are "high cost, low quality".

"The reason they say this is that most of the time they find it too difficult to do business with IT," comments Meta Group.

However, Meta also comments that this is usually more perception rather than fact. But, to overcome this perception IT organisations and workers must change their image to "value-added" - a culture shift therefore.

The key is to beef up IT employees` consulting skills, empowering them with know-how on how to set customer expectations, how to find customer requirements and, importantly, to meet them.

In this article we take a closer look at the 10 most important steps to creating a service-based culture within an organisation.

The first thing is to make sure that your organisation has a clear vision of where it wants to go and how IT fits into this.

Increasingly organisations are implementing IT Governance processes that enable them to "pragmatically" work toward aligning business and IT. Gone are the days of "motivational team-building" where everyone gets into a room to sort out their differences. It just doesn`t work anymore.

The key is to build the right foundation - setting-up the relationship between business and IT right from the start.

The reality is that IT teams are charged with enabling business outcomes, and therefore need know how the enterprise works.

IT has to agree on what is a reasonable expectation that makes business happy and whether it can be delivered at a reasonable rate. If you go "over spec" it leads to under-delivery and customer dissatisfaction.

For instance, business may demand 365 X 24 response time, when in actual fact very few businesses operate 24 hours - more like 20 hours.

There are, obviously, the dangers if IT and business units got straight to an SLA (service level agreement) without a consultation process, thinking that it will fix everything.

A viable option would be to set-up individual SLAs for business units, which is consultative and tailored to their unique requirements.

It is vital that users across the enterprise are aware of what IT does and doesn`t do.

Indeed, there should be rules and strategies for the working relationships between business units and the IT team. These should be established through the orientation of staff, training involving different units, and the Intranet.

This brings us to the previously mentioned need to supplement technical background with some consulting skills.

"The operational model is in place and is communicated to the general users. But what if there is a perception of a paucity of service-orientated skills among the IT staff users have to deal with?" comments Meta Group.

In these cases, the IT teams need supplement their technical background with "soft skills".

Says Meta: "Management must acknowledge there`s a skills gap - and train people."

The ability to combine technical skills with "soft skills" like being able to deal with customers - on an internal and external level - is crucial in developing good relationships across business.

Yes, there`s a huge need for highly technical people within the IT industry, but where these individuals lack the "soft skills", they are perhaps better suited to second tier support roles, where particularly complex issues are escalated to them.

So, getting the right people is a good start - looking at their backgrounds when recruiting them will give you a clear indication on whether or not the individual will able to fulfil a consulting role as well.

A key part of offering customer service-excellence is to establish the mindset that employees should imagine how it would feel if they were in their customers` shoes.

Therefore, encourage you staff to think like a customer. The bottom line is for every one of your transactions there`s a real customer behind it.

Understanding service delivery is an important part of the IT team`s overall delivery model.

One way of motivation people is to assign an IT account manger or service function manager to sit with other business partners during strategic decision-making.

These meetings will help build a partnership among the different units, and provide a vital learning forum for the IT team. It is crucial to expose technical staff to the realities of the customer experience.

It is important that your organisation encourages customers to provide feedback, therefore, telling you what needs to be improved and what works.

This in turn will enable you to get a "snapshot" of your service delivery, providing you with information as to where you`re meeting expectations and where you are failing.

The key to attaining and sustaining good relationships with your customers is a combination of accessibility, expectation management and competency.

If your support staff are accessible, of the right calibre and can solve a good number of issues on first contact, half the battle is won.

When a customer has a support issue, all it wants to do is make contact with someone who can assist in resolving it and know that the problem is being taken seriously.

By only offering feedback when something`s gone horribly wrong will definitely demoralise your support staff.

A simple "thank you" e-mail or other rewards can make a huge difference. Again, the bottom line is that most people genuinely want to do the right thing and deliver their best work. This will happen naturally if their working environment encourages it.

Building a service-orientated team does not require huge capital outlay - just a commitment to establishing an IT team that is able to work with host of business units across the enterprise.