The Service Delivery Alignment Engine, Part 1: Overview and Feedback Mechanisms

One of the key measurements that we can use to evaluate service delivery performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy called “The Service Delivery Alignment Engine.” We have established multiple communication flows to ensure that we receive feedback from all of the personnel that we support including management, DBAs, developers and end-users.

Since I work for a remote services provider, collecting, analyzing and processing customer feedback is critical to the success of our organization.  Our customers come in all shapes and sizes, from mom and pop shops to multi-national Fortune 100 Corporations.    Virtually every market vertical is represented – from retail to medicine and from heavy industry to high-tech.   We have learned that each one of our customers has a unique set of value drivers that they use to evaluate our services.    If we don’t understand what they are, how can we be sure that we are meeting their needs?

The answer is that we can’t.  And if that occurs, we have lost the battle to achieve our goal of 100% customer satisfaction.   We are in a very competitive business line.    Our customers’ needs change constantly.  If we don’t execute, one of our competitors will be more than happy to step in.

But do support personnel that work for a single business organization need their own “Service Delivery Alignment Engine”?   The answer is ABSOLUTELY.  The engine can work for any unit that delivers a service that needs to be constantly tuned, tweaked and adjusted to meet their customer’s changing business needs.

Over the next two posts, we’ll break the RDBAE Service Delivery Alignment Engine into its basic core components to better understand how they work together to accomplish the goal of 100% customer satisfaction.

Feedback Mechanisms:
We have learned that multiple communication paths are required to feed the Service Delivery Alignment Engine.  Relying upon a single path does not provide us with the volume and diversity of feedback we need to meet our customers’ unique set of value evaluation drivers.  Since many of these mechanisms are fairly complex in their implementation, they will warrant separate blogs to discuss them.   We’ll review them at a high-level in this blog and dig deeper into some of the more complex individual mechanisms in upcoming blogs:

• Service Level Agreements – Effective measurements are required to evaluate the success of any activity.  But what do you measure the results against?   What is the baseline?  The baseline for any service delivery organization begins with a clear set of Service Level Agreements.   The agreements are a set of predefined service performance objectives that are mutually agreed upon during the initial stages of the relationship life-cycle.  They describe and define a set of measurable targets that are used to evaluate service performance.   We’ll discuss some of the individual core service delivery measurement components in my next blog.
• Ticketing System – Ticketing systems are used by customers to initiate work requests and track progress.  The ticketing system also contains several key pieces of information that can be used to track customer perception of responsiveness and work quality.  Are the work requests being completed by the requested completion date?  Is the customer following the predefined set of service level agreements that were agreed upon?  Does the customer have to continue to supply additional information needed to process their requests?  Is the technician who is processing the request providing the appropriate level of feedback when a milestone is achieved or the request is completed?
• Daily Feedback – Remote Database Experts, like most service delivery organizations performs dozens (and dozens) of administrative activities daily.   Each of those individual activities is evaluated by customer personnel on a daily basis.  These individual evaluations are then combined together and used by the customer to evaluate overall service performance. A constant flow of information from personnel responsible for those daily changes is provided to the team responsible for overall customer satisfaction.   Issues with support quality are addressed immediately.  Particular attention is paid to long running problems that are affecting application performance or availability.
• Weekly Customer Meetings – Weekly meetings are held by personnel who are servicing the account on a daily basis.  The discussion focuses on current and upcoming activities.  We always ask three questions at the end of every discussion.  Is there anything else we can be doing for you? Is there any service or activity that we need to improve upon? What are we not doing that we should be doing?
• Service Level Assurance Discussions – The customer management team that is responsible for the relationship is also interviewed on a regular basis.  We understand that the management team’s expectations may differ from those held by customer personnel that are involved with our organization on a day-to-day service delivery basis.
• Root Cause Corrective Action Reports (RCCARs) – A customer that is affected by an application outage or slowdown needs to have a firm understating on  what caused the problem, the activities performed to correct the problem and the action items that will be undertaken to mitigate or prevent the problem from occurring again.  The Root Cause Corrective Action Document provides information on the underlying causal factors that generated the problem and a timeline of events that occurred during the problem event. This ensures that all problems are properly analyzed and that all steps are taken to prevent future occurrences.  This is a key component of our problem resolution strategy in addition to obtaining customer feedback on the quality of our problem resolution capabilities.    I’ll dedicate an entire blog to the Root Cause Corrective Action Report Process.

Next week, we’ll discuss the remaining components of the Service Delivery Alignment Engine: Processing customer feedback and realigning services to meet changing customer needs.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery