5 Ways That Service Providers Deliver Customer Value Through Integrations

It is not always an easy decision for a business to hand over the delivery of their services to a service provider. They have concerns that the service provider must address:

• “Will my data be safe?”
• “Can I know that my provider is serving my customers well?”
• “Which service provider will help my business grow the most?”

This blog post and the next one will help you consider these matters. Together, they will communicate 10 ways that service providers deliver value for customers through an integration solution.

Of course, enlisting new customers is just one way to grow your business. When you enrich the experiences of your current customers, they will thank you for those services—and may even spread the word about the awesome value you provide.

Here are the first 5 ways to deliver that value, along with stories from service providers who are getting it done.

1. Building Trust Through Transparency

When a company signs on with a service provider, the IT team at that company wants to know that their employees are being taken care of.

What if you could give your customer a window into how you are treating their customers? Can you give them a view the way your phone app monitors your living-room temperature, or the way your security camera lets you observe your property?

By integrating your ITSM instance with your customers’ instances, you give them visibility into what’s going on with their incidents, along with the ability to comment on them or make adjustments to them.

When those monitoring events come into our system and they cut an incident, we can then transfer that ticket over to the customer system. And they’ll have visibility into what’s happening in their environment in their own ticketing solution, and then make comments or assign things back to us, or we can assign things to them.

– Paul Liesse, Supervisor of Managed Service Application, CDW

2. Ensuring Customer Control over Data

ITSM Directors like to maintain control over their data. Before handing over their data to a service provider, they have questions:

• “Where exactly is my data going?”
• “Will I lose access and the ability to act on data that I own?”
• “Can I trust someone else to keep my data secure?”

And if we are honest, we realize that at one level or another, it is hard to let go. It is a matter of trust.

With a complete integration solution, however, you can deliver ITSM services to your customers while assuring them that they have access to control when and where the data gets sent. And they can turn off the data-transfer faucet any time they want.

Every time we go through a customer onboarding, they always ask . . . “How is data controlled?” . . . And the conversation usually wraps up as soon as I’d let them know that, hey, we’re going to install the Perspectium application. It’s going to be administered within your instance. Your admins have complete control to stop any data flow that they they would like at any given time. . . . Not only do they have the access because that data is being pushed from their instance and not pulled, they retain the control. They can filter down as they feel.

– Matt Miller, VP of Service Delivery, Virteva

3. Reducing Incident Resolution Time and Preventing Escalation

Level one service desk personnel can handle frequent service requests and can help customers with basic issues that they face. But if they cannot provide a solution, the incident escalates to level two. When a service desk escalates many incidents, costs increase and customer satisfaction decreases.

One way that integration can prevent escalation of incidents is through real-time updates of knowledge articles. If level one personnel (or better yet, level zero—customer self-help) have the information they need to resolve an incident, value for everyone rises.

When an outage occurs at a company that has hired Virteva, a service provider, level two or level three personnel at the client company can write a brief knowledge article that syncs with Virteva’s instance so that level one personnel at the Virteva service desk have the knowledge they need to address incoming calls.

By us getting that data to our analysts in near real-time, that was less manual effort they needed to go around to escalate to a level two or level three resource.

– Matt Miller, Virteva

4. Keeping Costs Low Through Reduced Maintenance

Automation reduces the need for human intervention. And without integration, one form of automation, service providers task employees with work that systems should be performing by themselves.

A team of employees at Accenture was managing access for 300,000 users, with new hires needing to be provisioned constantly. After implementing an integration solution, Accenture freed up massive resources.

It’s been huge. . . . We had an entire team of people pretty much constantly working on managing access to engagement data. And this [integration solution] has just taken that away for us. We don’t have to deal with this nearly as much there. . . . It just works.

– Jonathan Livingston, Application Architect, Accenture

5. Accelerating Time to Value (TTV)

The sooner you can onboard a customer, the sooner that customer starts realizing the benefits that you deliver, hastening the return on their investment.

It used to be that managing the technical side of an integration took just as long or longer than communicating and deciding with customers about mapping fields to be replicated. And yes, you are still at the mercy of a customer’s ability to get their initial set of data ready to load.

But with an integration solution, especially one that makes use of a common data model based on ITSM, the technical work is much simpler and quicker, allowing you to fast-track the onboarding of new customers.

Our customer onboarding previously took us anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks. Now, we’ve done them in as quick as 2 weeks and typically they take us about 4 weeks.

– Matt Miller, Virteva

That’s always sort of a litmus test—how quickly can we get on board people. Well, you know, if you got all your data ready, we can do it in a couple of minutes or a couple of hours.

– Jeff Lowenthal, Enterprise Architect, Accenture

You Rise by Lifting Your Customers

A reliable integration solution opens possibilities for delivering value in numerous ways.

Ready to learn more? Check out 5 more ways that service providers deliver customer value: