The most successful service providers all have something in common, which is not by co-incidence. They all understand how they provide value to their customers. Using strategy is the key stone.
When we think of value, we might be thinking about business value and return on investment. But also, if we think about business value we think about critical success factors and the successful service outcomes. We need to document those and if we do that we can start thinking about metrics, KPIs and actual metrics as a score card that helps us measure whether we're actually delivering business value. These could be the actual number of customer requests, customer satisfaction surveys or even a productivity survey.
In the real world, outside of ITIL, value comes in many different forms. For example, in psychology, we ask why human beings develop, assert and believe in certain values, and act or fail to act on them. In sociology, different groups of people may hold or prioritise different kinds of values differently. Economists use wealth maximization to predict that a person will choose to obtain the goods or service in the place where it is cheapest, where the amount given up is the least. Putting all of these philosophies together, presents us with an interesting conundrum. How do customers perceive value?
It can be subjective, it varies across people and cultures, and in many ways it is aligned with belief and belief systems. However, it is measurable.
It's critical to understand the positive effect that customers perceive a service can have on their business. Ask yourself, how do your customers think? They think about value, it's the bottom line. Value is related to positive outcomes to the success of the organisation.
When we talk about Value, we aren't talking about financial value, but customer perception. The composition for value, can be broken into two distinct terms; utilities and warranty. Utility being the fitness for purpose and warranty being the fitness for use. When we add those two together, we get a real chunk of the overall pie -
the real value of the service.
Typically, value is in the eye of the consumer and what they're thinking and how it appears to them. Can these really be different to what we're seeing from our measures? They certainly can, and in most cases will. Using the maturity model, we can look at the values differently. Areas such as high availability of services, continuity, disaster recovery and security cover just a few of these.