ITIL Best Practices and Processes for CSM

ITIL Best Practices and Processes for CSM

ITIL 4 establishes the service value system (SVS) to show “how all the components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation.” This is comprised of five elements:

  1. Guiding principles
  2. Governance
  3. Service value chain
  4. Continual improvement
  5. Practices

It’s vital to understand the core principles before you can relate them to customer service, as they all play a role in the customer journey. 

Customer Journey

The customer journey is a combination of service management, customer success and sales processes. When applying ITIL to the customer experience, it’s these three components that deserve the primary focus. Organizations address them by tying together people, processes, and automation. 

How Enterprises Optimize Service and the Customer Experience 

The components of the customer journey tie directly to the fifth component of the ITIL service value system: practices. 

There are 34 best practices that can be used to guide organizations. They’re broken into three categories: general management practices, service management practices, and technical management practices. 

General Management Practices 

Service Management Practices

Technical Management Practices

  1. Strategy management
  2. Portfolio management
  3. Architecture management
  4. Service financial management
  5. Workforce and talent management
  6. Continual improvement
  7. Measurement and reporting
  8. Risk management
  9. Information security management
  10. Knowledge management
  11. Organizational change management
  12. Project management
  13. Relationship management
  14. Supplier management
  1. Business analysis
  2. Service catalog management
  3. Service design
  4. Service level management
  5. Availability management
  6. Capacity and performance management
  7. Service continuity management
  8. Monitoring and event management
  9. Service desk
  10. Incident management
  11. Service request management
  12. Problem management
  13. Release management
  14. Change enablement
  15. Service validation and testing
  16. Service configuration management
  17. IT asset management
  1. Deployment management
  2. Infrastructure and platform management
  3. Software development and management

https://wiki.en.it-processmaps.com/index.php/ITIL_4#Four_dimensions_model

Of course, no one is recommending that enterprises adopt all 34 best practices. For many, it’s safe to focus on a few key areas specific to customer service and its delivery. Specifically, focus on the components related to service optimization. 

  • Service Strategy: Best practices in this area relate to strategy, service portfolio, financial, demand and capacity, business relationship, and general management. 
  • Service design: ITIL best practices covering this area include design coordination, service catalog, risk, service level, capacity, and availability management. Also included are IT service continuity, security, compliance, architecture and supplier management. 
  • Service transition: Best practices relate to change management and evaluation, knowledge management, service asset, and configuration management and release and deployment.
  • Service Operation: This includes incident and request fulfillment management, as well as problem and technical management. 
  • Continuous service improvement: In-service review and process evaluation are the two components of this service optimization segment. 

By examining these components of service, an organization can begin to break down the specific best practices that apply to its customer experience. Of course, to understand how to address these segments, we must revisit ITIL’s PESTLE framework and enterprise-specific factors. 

Evaluating External and Internal Enterprise Factors in the CX

PESTLE means political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors impacting business operations. These are the big-picture issues that cause business disruption. ITIL 4 lays its PESTLE framework over the four-dimensional model to show how those outside factors intersect with the business.  

The overlay shows how PESTLE factors affect every dimension and how all those dimensions in turn affect value.  In customer service management, it means recognizing how those factors will affect the delivery of value to your customers. 

For example, a new trade tariff will delay the ability of partners and suppliers to provide support, which will delay processes, leading to an increased burden on both technology and people. An organization that is focused on customer experience will be aware that PESTLE issues are inevitable. As a result, it makes sense to have a plan in place in case this happens. 

However, major world events aren’t the only problem enterprises will face – they aren’t even the most prevalent. Gartner reports that 80% of unplanned downtime is due to human or process errors. A small problem in one segment of the value model will ripple outwards, affecting every other segment. However, positive changes will have the same effect. 

When enterprises use ITIL best practices within this framework, they can improve on small segments and see that improvement ripple outwards. Small improvements and continual improvement of those areas are key. However, to do this, they need to use the right tools to support their teams. They need to adopt a complete platform that supports ITIL principles. 

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you implement ITIL service management principles into your customer experience, contact our team today or register for a free demo

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Implementing ITIL Best Practices can help your business better serve customers
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