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Quality Digest MagazineFebruary 6, 2020First WordIt Only Takes OneOne good customer-service experience can turn you around.by Dirk DusharmeVery often in this space (but mostly in my grouchy boss’s 'Last Word' column) you read horror stories about poor customer service. It often takes only one or two bad experiences to make us never want to visit a business again-unless we really need to.But as important as it is for business owners to recognize the customer-losing effect of poor service, it's just as important to realize the flip side: A positive customer experience can turn around, or at least dramatically soften, the effect of a poor one.I live in a relatively small city and if I need specialty computer supplies, I need to drive about 30 minutes to reach a store that carries what I want. Very often this means going to CompUSA, a chain store handling computers, peripherals and supplies. In the past, my experience at that store was rarely good. It usually took forever to find someone to help me, the clerks seemed bored and I once had a problem returning an item I had just purchased (the manager wasn't happy that the manufacturer told me I should return the product to the store). So I put that store on my 'do not visit' list and went anywhere else to avoid shopping there.A couple of weeks ago, however, I needed a particular kind of paper for my Epson inkjet printer.
The local Staples didn’t have it but I knew that CompUSA did. So I tightened my belt and headed over there.I walked into the store, quickly located what I needed and headed over to the checkout stand.
As usual, I picked the wrong line. It was the shortest at the time but the person in front of me was experiencing some complex problem that required the help of two clerks, the manager and, I think, a call to CompUSA CEO Larry Mondry.In the meantime, the adjacent checker quickly rang up everyone in his line. He was just ringing up his last customer when the manager told him to take his lunch break.The checker finished with his customer, but rather than take his break, he motioned me over.' I'll take you,' he said. 'I see you’ve been standing there for a long time.'
So I darted over and dumped my two items onto the counter. 'This will only take a minute, right? No need for you to wait,' he said with a smile.'
Bob, you gotta take your lunch,' his boss repeated.' OK, right after this guy; he's been waiting for awhile,' Bob called over his shoulder. I thought I actually saw his eyes roll.I declare, I actually felt all warm and fuzzy there for a second. Not only did Bob take the initiative to serve me when he didn’t have to, he did it after his boss had told him to do something else. A man after my own heart!Two events actually happened there. The first was that Bob was aware of what was going on at a checkstand other than his. The second was that the environment was such that he felt comfortable ignoring his boss's order to take lunch in order to do something more important serve me.Did all this suddenly make me love CompUSA?
Not completely, no. However, it did soften my view and make me more willing to go back.It only takes one.
Q: What are ITIL and ITSM and why do I need to care? Is this just the next ISO 9000 kind of thing that the suits get all excited about but means nothing to us real folks? DallasA: They are a bunch of acronyms (the dreaded four-letter kind) that, in and of themselves, are meaningless.
However, the principals on which they were created are important. I shall explain.ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library, which came out of the U.K.
A few years ago. It is a 'framework' (fancy term for a place to put things that already exist) that has lots of supposed best practices that can be used to create ITSM (IT Service Management). It is not intended to be the answer, but a place to have common guidelines for overall ITSM and a host of best practices with the idea that you might share in the benefits of someone else's work.
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Related: The ITIL framework has a noble goal - to get people to talk to each other. How can you really build an IT service when no one below the application layer talks to each other? You can have your boss's boss run around and tell everyone how your IT group is in the middle of ITIL certification, but it's meaningless until you solve some more realistic problems.Before I forget - you can download the ITIL framework at.Because new (and especially four-letter) acronyms annoy me in my old age, let me try to explain what all the hubbub is about. Forget ITIL and ITSM for a minute, and let's go back in time to the term utility computing. They are the same thing. Forget what it's called, and concentrate on what IT should be: infrastructure that is malleable, scalable and ultimately hidden from anyone outside of IT - that can provide guaranteed service levels of application performance and availability - at a known cost.ITSM is sort of synonymous with utility computing. BrandPost Sponsored by HPEThe “As a Service” model delivers services, not products; flexibility, not rigidity; and costs that align to business outcomes.Now that we understand that, let's see where we are.
First, most every ITSM 'framework' tool is entirely useless as it sits today. They tend to consist of nice graphical user interfaces with nothing of substance behind them. Second, even if they weren't useless, I haven't found one yet that solves the real problem of being able to deliver IT as a service, and that is communication.Since I'm simple-minded, allow me to draw a simple example.
If it is the premise of ITSM to be able to guarantee predictable service levels from IT to the business, which means what we really want to do is guarantee application performance and availability. The business decides its requirements and an application is purchased or created in order to satisfy those requirements.
At that point, in a perfect world - the business is done. It doesn't see, hear or smell IT. It doesn't want to care about infrastructure, gizmos or problems.
It wants IT to provide, not talk.IT, on the other hand, doesn't want to be seen or heard. If IT were invisible, that would be just fine - because the phone would stop ringing at 3 a.m. IT wants to be able to deliver whatever the application needs to perform its job to satisfy the business requirements.So far, we all have the same goals.
ITSM is the high-level interface to theoretically provide control of the infrastructure beneath it in order to comply with the service level objectives guaranteed by IT to the application/business. That's where we break down.The two core elements we are speaking of are:a). The User Layer - real users, with an application(s) interface trying to either make their company money or save their company money. This is the business. They couldn't care less about IT, infrastructure, megabytes per second or that hot new switch you just got. To them, Token Ring is the Frodo movie. They might be out on the net, in a remote office or sitting next to the data center.b).
The IT Layer - in a perfect world, it would be invisible. It is comprised of:1. The Application Execution Layer - the apps themselves, the servers they run on, the networks they connect with, the middleware and everything else they need to do their job once they get the request from the user - and the data they require to satisfy that request, which comes from:2. The Data Layer - this is the most interesting place in my diagram.
The data layer consists of data management and organization, storage and everything in between.