CIOs and their IT teams build loyalty among internal clients with a service strategy that enables them to be seen as a top provider of service.

How do you define good service? At an abstract level, it’s the sense that the people involved with the transaction are fully engaged in meeting the expectations you have for the experience they’re providing. At a hotel or a restaurant, for example, this means the surroundings are clean and well decorated, your needs are met promptly and courteously, and you’re treated with respect, and if you ask for something that’s not within the usual range of offerings, the staff works to accommodate you as best they can.

Now think about the characteristics of good service as it pertains to the work your own IT team does every day, maintaining, supporting, and building technology systems to enable clients to carry out business initiatives.Are downtime and upgrades planned at times that are most convenient for your clients?—or for the IT organization? When a client approaches someone in the IT organization with a request, does the IT employee tell the client it’s not his area, or does he look up the name of the person who can best help the client and then walk the client to that person’s cubicle? Or when a client explains a problem to the help desk, does she get a gruff ‘‘What operating system are you on?’’ or a reassuring ‘‘I’m sure we can get that resolved—let’s start with what operating system you’re running.’’

"The best way to build client loyalty is not by proving IT’s technology prowess, but by building a service strategy that enables internal IT to be seen as a top provider of service."

Service is in "How" You Deliver

From what I have seen, being a service provider is a new idea for many IT professionals. A remark I often hear from people who participate in the workshops I facilitate on this topic is "Isn’t what we deliver more important than how we deliver it?" For anyone who feels this way, it’s time to think about the job and career in a different light.

I’ve watched IT leaders and staff make or break their reputations with service missteps, thinking that their client base is secure and has nowhere else to go. An even bigger fallacy I’ve observed is the belief that if the outcome of the work is good, it doesn’t matter how difficult you were to work with. As a result, the IT staff is unappreciated and undervalued and seemingly blind to the minor (and major) service irritants that hurt their reputations.

Be Seen as the Top IT Service Provider

Whether or not your staff believes it, the best way to build client loyalty is not by proving IT’s technology prowess but by building a service strategy that enables internal IT to be seen as a top provider of service. In fact, a well-developed and well-communicated service strategy is critical in today’s IT organizations. Clients demand service to be immediate and proactive, and if they don’t get it internally, they’ll find it elsewhere, by hiring either their own staff or external vendors. Indeed, good service is no longer just a 'nice to have'; it’s the make-or-break factor that determines whether clients choose internal IT or someone else to deliver the solutions they need.

What's Your IT Service Strategy?

Unleashing the Power of ITIn too many IT organizations that I encounter, a good service strategy means being all things to all people. In other IT organizations, the service strategy seems to be to provide service only to the people who scream the loudest and have the most clout. This leads to a tremendous amount of frustration on the part of IT, as well as the clients who don’t have the same level of clout.

I also see IT organizations that have created service strategies that are interwoven with their governance practices, in which a committee makes decisions about what’s best for the organization at large. This strategy can be great, but I notice a lot of confusion among both the business community and the IT staff about how this strategy actually operates. That’s usually because this strategy requires a lot of communication about how decisions are made,especially since the lag time between meetings can be months.

Most of the time I see no strategy at all, or sometimes I see strategies that are well thought out but haven’t been communicated well to those providing the service. Having a clear communication plan is the key. 

For all these reasons, the development of a service strategy has to start at the top of the IT organization, with the IT leader. These strategies require cultivation and have to be planned and led by the IT leadership team. The strategy has to be consistent across the enterprise, and it must permeate every project, not be something that ‘‘only Joe’’ provides. After all, good service is not defined by good relationships with individual clients. The purpose is to look out for the enterprise, not to make ‘‘my friend in accounting’’ happy.

At its best, service is a mentality, an attitude, and a glue that holds together the entire department. It can’t spring from a negative environment. The turnaround can be difficult and costly, but it can also turn your internal IT group into a must-have resource for clients.

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