Sunday 13 April 2014

Patience in Service Management


As we all know that the requirement of service management has grown enormously in this decade due to growth of every sector in line with the technology. Every process of the sector has gone technology based thereby ensuring that the customer is availing the service within no time. If a customer wants to add the option of paperless account statement, it is a single click on the desired option in his/her account portal. But if the same doesn’t works for a customer after repeated try, they will call the customer support with a lot of anger and sometimes they will be harsh which completely depends on their situation. Some customers will agree with the status provided by the customer support agent. But how to handle customers of those situations requires a lot of Patience and also ensure that his/her concern is properly addressed before the end of call. Patience is not a soft skill that can’t be thought, it should be developed by an individual when we work in any Job Role. Patience is something that will give us the clarity in taking any decision. When we take any Decision Making, patience plays a vital role as we have to listen to many opinions and then make the right move.
When we have the patience, we can make customer understand the root cause of an issue due to which there is issue in restoration and what is the proper alternate solution in order to resolve that issue. We should never panic or get angry in those situations thereby losing a valuable customer. In the scenario of Service Management the information that is delivered to the customer should be apt and it should be justifiable. Patience is directly proportional to Analyzing the opinions or issues & Time Taken to response. Analyzing is the key for deriving the solution for any issues and time calculation is must in getting the solution. Let me provide a real time example from Information Security. When we come across an alert from Antivirus Vendor that there is vulnerability that can affect applications that are with Java 1.6 and along with they will provide a work around and precautionary measures. Here the security analyst has to be proactive in fetching the details of the systems of PC's with Java 1.6 and execute the solution with proper approvals & pilot testing to check if his/her application doesn't stops working with the provided solution. Here the following are the steps that should be kept in mind
1. Understand the issue highlighted by the Antivirus Vendor.
2. Check the solution in your Test Environment having all applications used by the organization.
3. Document the test results along with supporting document for getting approval.
4. Execute the solution after getting approval from management
In the above decision making process patience is very much required to get successful output. Analyzing gives you the clarity on the said vulnerability accordingly make the move to deploy the patch or roll out precautionary measure notification to the users. Time Management is highly important as even a delay of 1-2 Days the vulnerability might affects some systems in the organization.
In Service Management "patience" has got it's own importance in ensuring that the deliverable meet the target. If each and every agent makes sure that his/her customer are addressed with at most patience the growth rate of the organization will be on the positive side of the Graph. Patience along with Decision Making, Analyzing and time management put together adds "Value to Service Management". Patience is one of the parameter in any profession where the HR during the interview try to see the candidates patience level and how he handles each scenario. Patience can also calculated on the scale of 1-5 and give a feedback on the candidate patience level which will boost his/her confidence level in handling any scenario or customer at every situation in his career. Every organization should make sure to keep a survey to test customer handling skill set by putting forward a common scenario based questionnaire and see how they answer those scenario which gives a fair idea on their patience character. Based on which we can derive a graph to know the patience level of an employee which should taken quite seriously and accordingly give required seminars to them in order to understand the importance of "Patience". Some times we map Politeness is Patience which is not 100% compatible as politeness is a component of patience. Kindly provide your suggestions or comments on this article. Any queries kindly let me know I shall be more than happy to reply you the solution.

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