Helping customers maintain and optimise their IT-Infrastructure is not a heroic act of a single trusted advisor. Although this may seem the case in some instances, the services delivered are often based upon a set of customer experiences.
To ensure that best practices can be duplicated, companies gather these best practices into a library and re-shape them into general procedures for practices such as Problem- or Service Continuity Management.
Service Value chain – What is ADF
Within the Account Management Delivery Framework (ADF), we have placed a dozen key practices into our Service Value Chain (SVC). ADF is based on successful customer experiences, servicing customer needs and improving their solutions. These key practices are divided into five pillars: Demand, Engage, Deliver, Serve and Value.
Demand: with customer relationships, we can understand the business objectives and IT requirements of complex solutions. We establish and maintain key contacts at the right level in the organisation and improve support services deliverables and tools automation.
Engage: with collaboration, we proactively identify gaps between customer IT needs and Dell Technology’s offering. We determine common objectives for practice alignment.
Deliver: we help to progress operations efficiency and automate system maintenance, leading improvement activities within customer environments. We review our performance of best practices adoption and delivery.
Serve: we support customers through a single point of accountability for Dell Support Services and report on the deliverables by reviewing ProSupport Plus best practices, ensuring proactive support services and field operations.
Value: we make our customers happy.
For example, as an outcome of patching a hard drive to different customers for solving very same incidents, a trend analysis is initiated. Another department can investigate the root cause of this behaviour trend and conclude that the fault originated from a certain production batch. To avoid further issues, a proactive field replacement would be a permanent corrective action for potential affected IT-infrastructure solutions containing drives of this batch. By replacing those, potential issues can be prevented.
Combining the above-described practices – incidents, problem management, change control and field operations into a chain – creates additional value towards Dell Technologies’ customers.
In comparison with the ITIL4© Service Value Chain, both elements “Demand” and “Value” have been integrated. The reason is that certain practices around onboarding and customer satisfaction are integrated elements within Dell Technologies’ account management services.
Changing approaches based upon complexity
Depending on the complexity of the customer relationship, different practices are used to manage the customer. For example, to define a customer’s requirements, a simple review could be appropriate for certain customers. For others, a deeper discussion on a particular practice would be a better fit. To ensure the right approach for each customer our key practices have been categorised into three lanes: Base, Core and Advanced.
Certain key practices are categorised in the base lane. Other practices, which are mainly used for deepening the relationship are core. The advanced lane is a set of deliverables, which can be used to grow the relationship.
Together with the pillars we have a 2-dimensional SVC in place, where the key practices are embedded in a matrix.
Scaling by tools and resources – What are technical layers
Defining and categorising procedures is good and when its in- and outputs are linking the procedures, value can be created repeatably. However, tools and resources are required to scale-out. To ensure an end-to-end service account management towards customers, best-practices should not only be valid for a certain IT line of business (LOB).
Especially within larger companies, Dell Technologies’ products include client and enterprise solutions. Laptops, workstations, servers, switches, and storage devices are all covered by service management. Based upon the technology demand, different tools and resources are required for the same practice. System-maintenance for clients might be far more automated, as this is the case for complex storage clusters. Think about your monthly auto-patches on your laptop versus planned data center maintenance windows.
To ensure that the five-pillared SVC is capable to support different offerings and LOB’s, technical layers are included:
- Organisational practices
- Technical management practices, and;
- Infrastructure and platform management
Organisational practices structure different offerings and roles. Technical management practices and infrastructure are based around tools and resources. Platform management contains the external customer facing tools for the different practices, such as TechDirect, SupprtAssist for Clients, Dell Command Suite, MyService360 or CloudIQ.
By bolstering the SVC with different layers, the framework is now emphasising on value, complexity, and technology.
Focus on areas by value pathways
In addition to those dimensions, certain focus areas need to be ensured as well. Operational excellence, customer sentiment, and advanced planning are just some of them. To amplify hereupon, certain practices are combined into pathways within the framework.
The customer sentiment pathway, for example, is all about asking questions and listening to the customer. What is the customer saying with the feedback in the survey? Do I understand what was said, and could I propose suggestions to overcome the customer’s current challenge? Or should I ask for more information?
To help create the added value required, elements have been added to the toolkit to enable a Service Account Manager or Technical Account Manager to ask and listen again and again. Demand is evolving overtime and what was valid for the customer a few years ago, might be out-of-date today.
What’s in it for me/customer/company?
By embedding those pathways within the framework, value can be created. With answering the question “What’s in it for me?”, the value can be addressed to its stakeholders. By extending the same question to customer and to company, all three perspectives can be reflected, and a triple win is achieved.
In a nutshell, framing our deliverables and backing these up with the tools and resource – a framework has been created for Dell Technologies’ ProSupport Plus customers. Adding value pathways and checking what is in it, the service delivery is not only based upon the experiences of the past, it is also progressing towards new requirements of the customer.