Service Management And Service Business
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Service management is a field that's essential in allowing an organization to prioritize and manage business requirements so that their revenues can go up, they can retain and satisfy their customers and their employees and also adopt new and emerging technologies to assist them in increasing their efficiency and reducing their costs.
In today's rapidly changing technology scenario, with new products and applications emerging almost daily, it's important to manage IT services to ensure continuity, consistency and quality of services. This can also significantly reduce your costs and prevent road-blocks in the delivery of services to customers. In reality, the issue that service management has to deal with is the nature of its operations, since it is dealing essentially with an "invisible" product – the delivery of timely, accurate, cost-effective, repeatable and measurable service to a customer. Thus the value gained may also not be always completely measurable in terms of actual revenue, since customer satisfaction translates slowly but surely into repeat orders and goodwill and not merely in terms of sales and production.
Hence a good, efficient and modern service management system is essential to the working of any service business. Today most companies see themselves as having some role in the delivery of good customer service, and have begun using the available technologies and tools to increase their service management processes to build their competitive edge and increase their market-share and profits.
As customer expectations increase, companies find that their service management strategy has to keep pace. Hence a complete life-cycle assessment of these service processes is important for any company. A fully-integrated approach is now the buzzword, as companies realize the importance of coordinating call-centers, field services, sales, inventory and billing / accounting. Hence, the life-cycle approach can help to bring these elements together on a common platform. Information systems and enterprise resource planning systems can work in tandem, so that inventory, logistics, sales and marketing, vendors, customers and field service staff are kept in the loop. Contracts, billing, warranties and repair scheduling, rostering, emergency hot-lines etc, can all be managed to avoid confusion and bad customer interactions.
Working with real-time data regarding the job-status, providing help-desk facilities according to the customer's preferences – whether on the phone, by email or messaging on the Internet etc. can reduce an organization's overheads enormously. Order processing becomes much more efficient through a good service management system, since taking the order, delivery and billing are all part of a single, integrated service process. This also gives the management a global 360-degree view of the complete business, thus making it easier to see the larger picture and spot the lacunae.
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Source by Brian A Richards
