From Service Management to Service Excellence!
Service management, especially IT service management, has been developed for over fifty years now, with established frameworks and standards, such as ISO/IEC 20000, SIAM, CMMI-SVC, ITIL and COBIT, published and updated regularly.
All these provide requirements and guidance for the establishment of basic services and service management and systems.
Most service providers will today be on varying stages of maturity when it comes to these frameworks, with a constant need to cater for the basic requirements of their customers.
Probably the great majority of organisations are still struggling getting their change and incident management right.
Say, however, that a service provider has all its basics in order, including continual improvement to adapt to the continually changing marketplace, service types and customer needs. Then they may be ready for their next step, service excellence.
Why Service Excellence?
According to the model of the Evolution of Economic Value*, societies have developed to economies that used to be based on extracting commodities (e.g. coffee), to making products (e.g. packets of ground coffee), to providing services (e.g. a coffee bar), to staging experiences (e.g. a coffee bar with free Internet).
This evolution is based on increased differentiation of the offering based on individual customer or consumer needs and leads to a relative increase in the market price a provider can ask for their offerings.
The steps from basic service management to service excellence fits into this model as the transition from the service economy to the experience economy: services should be increasingly individualised and perfected to generate continual customer delight and a general sense of excellence by the services provided.
Service excellence is about exceeding the expectations of the consumers, rather than just meeting them.
The Service Excellence Pyramid!
In the past nine years, ISO committee TC 312 has developed a series of standards for Excellence in Service, starting with ISO 23592, published in 2021. ISO 23592 presents the core model of service excellence and requirements for organisations that want to implement service excellence.
The core model for service excellence is presented as a pyramid with four levels:
Level 1: Core service proposition: the service provider delivers on their promises to customers.
Level 2: Customer feedback management: there is a functioning way to collect customer feedback and act on it to handle service requests, issues and complaints.
Level 3: Individual excellent service provision: the service is perceived by customers as personalised, warm, value-creating and authentic. Customers experience an emotional feeling of being valued and appreciated.
Level 4: Surprisingly excellent service provision: service are tailor-made to customer specifications and lead to a feeling of surprise and delight. Customer expectations are exceeded.
It can be said that existing service management standards such as ISO/IEC 20000-1 cover the first two stages of this model, whereas service excellence caters for levels 3 and 4.
The motivation for moving towards service excellence lies in the fact that consumers are getting accustomed to basic services, which have high competition and are becoming commoditised, i.e. they are moving down in economic value.
Customer expectations and needs are constantly evolving, so services should continually be improved in co-creation with the customers and other stakeholders.
Customers can only be delighted through individualised approaches and continued innovation of the services.
How do you evolve from service management to service excellence?
Service excellence is not something that can be implemented in isolation from service management: the pyramid model is clear in that the core service and establishing customer feedback mechanisms are the foundation on which service excellence is built.
Organisations should therefore first create a service management system (SMS) that provides the management environment for the services they provide to their customers.
Requirements for an SMS are documented in ISO/IEC 20000-1, with guidance provided in the rest of the ISO/IEC 20000 series.
Once the SMS is established, existing practices should be refined or enhanced to move the organisation to service excellence.
ISO 23592 provides a model of service excellence that outlines four dimensions to consider to achieve service excellence:
Service excellence leadership and strategy
Service excellence culture and employee engagement
Creating outstanding customer experiences
Operational service excellence
From Service Management to Service Excellence!
Service management, especially IT service management, has been developed for over fifty years now, with established frameworks and standards, such as ISO/IEC 20000, SIAM, CMMI-SVC, ITIL and COBIT, published and updated regularly.
All these provide requirements and guidance for the establishment of basic services and service management and systems.
Most service providers will today be on varying stages of maturity when it comes to these frameworks, with a constant need to cater for the basic requirements of their customers.
Probably the great majority of organisations are still struggling getting their change and incident management right.
Say, however, that a service provider has all its basics in order, including continual improvement to adapt to the continually changing marketplace, service types and customer needs. Then they may be ready for their next step, service excellence.
Why Service Excellence?
According to the model of the Evolution of Economic Value*, societies have developed to economies that used to be based on extracting commodities (e.g. coffee), to making products (e.g. packets of ground coffee), to providing services (e.g. a coffee bar), to staging experiences (e.g. a coffee bar with free Internet).
This evolution is based on increased differentiation of the offering based on individual customer or consumer needs and leads to a relative increase in the market price a provider can ask for their offerings.
The steps from basic service management to service excellence fits into this model as the transition from the service economy to the experience economy: services should be increasingly individualised and perfected to generate continual customer delight and a general sense of excellence by the services provided.
Service excellence is about exceeding the expectations of the consumers, rather than just meeting them.
The Service Excellence Pyramid!
In the past nine years, ISO committee TC 312 has developed a series of standards for Excellence in Service, starting with ISO 23592, published in 2021. ISO 23592 presents the core model of service excellence and requirements for organisations that want to implement service excellence.
The core model for service excellence is presented as a pyramid with four levels:
Level 1: Core service proposition: the service provider delivers on their promises to customers.
Level 2: Customer feedback management: there is a functioning way to collect customer feedback and act on it to handle service requests, issues and complaints.
Level 3: Individual excellent service provision: the service is perceived by customers as personalised, warm, value-creating and authentic. Customers experience an emotional feeling of being valued and appreciated.
Level 4: Surprisingly excellent service provision: service are tailor-made to customer specifications and lead to a feeling of surprise and delight. Customer expectations are exceeded.
It can be said that existing service management standards such as ISO/IEC 20000-1 cover the first two stages of this model, whereas service excellence caters for levels 3 and 4.
The motivation for moving towards service excellence lies in the fact that consumers are getting accustomed to basic services, which have high competition and are becoming commoditised, i.e. they are moving down in economic value.
Customer expectations and needs are constantly evolving, so services should continually be improved in co-creation with the customers and other stakeholders.
Customers can only be delighted through individualised approaches and continued innovation of the services.
How do you evolve from service management to service excellence?
Service excellence is not something that can be implemented in isolation from service management: the pyramid model is clear in that the core service and establishing customer feedback mechanisms are the foundation on which service excellence is built.
Organisations should therefore first create a service management system (SMS) that provides the management environment for the services they provide to their customers.
Requirements for an SMS are documented in ISO/IEC 20000-1, with guidance provided in the rest of the ISO/IEC 20000 series.
Once the SMS is established, existing practices should be refined or enhanced to move the organisation to service excellence.
ISO 23592 provides a model of service excellence that outlines four dimensions to consider to achieve service excellence:
Service excellence leadership and strategy
Service excellence culture and employee engagement
Creating outstanding customer experiences
Operational service excellence