Customer Relationship Management > Customer Service

Unchecked and forgotten, minor difficulties are left alone until they bubble up and become real irritations. Having a systematic process in your customer service and support area--one that allows you to act proactively with clients to correct these issues--can set you apart from competitors and give your own project teams peace of mind.

For governance to work, the system must have credibility. If you don’t build credibility early, it’s too late to recapture it later.

Since service management is far more important to our customers than information technology, the acronym should be SMIT--or Service Management through Information Technology--rather than ITSM. There are many methods for structuring the improvement of the service that we provide to our customers, but all of the complexity boils down to a few important considerations.

Gaining popularity in the U.S., the Information Technology Infrastructure Library provides a set of best practices for IT services. After decades of use in Europe, the framework has gone through two revisions and is helping businesses regulate and monitor services provided to customers as well as devising new ways to meet those needs. ITIL V3 offers mature companies a vital methodology for revitalization of their service processes.

Developing a phased approach that brings continuous and measurable improvements is key to implementing an effective SLM capability. SLM isn’t about service level agreements, layers of complex processes and such. SLM is about aligning the services and capabilities IT provides to the organization with its fundamental operational and competitive sustainability needs.

For global organizations with diverse workforces and clients, maintaining a consistent level of project management excellence requires a permanent commitment to training. IT infrastructure provider EMC teamed with PMI to launch a talent development program for its project managers.

Ever stop to think what the differences are between ITIL Service Level Management and mainstream Customer Relationship Management functions? Are they complementary to each other? Is CRM contained within SLM, or visa versa? The answers are a click away...

What inherent characteristics must an effective business analysts possess? Here are three.

In these competitive, customer service-focused times, can customers be managed or do they call all the shots?

Discussion on quality management has not evolved much since the mid-1990s. Within executive circles, the discussions are not about the importance of quality, but rather on what quality is, how it is achieved and how it can be measured. The issues surrounding quality seem focused on definition and approach rather than on need. What is quality? What does senior management expect from the quality process, and how do these expectations apply to IT? Read on...

Bad client reviews travel faster than a speeding bullet. If a situation is deteriorating rapidly, it’s time to explore some extreme customer service options.

Our yearly look at the state of IT, collected from various industry surveys. We'll take a look at everything from outsourcing and budgets to IT's move toward something greener.

Quality is a nebulous term that is often misunderstood and misrepresented. In this series of articles, our writer presents a three-stage quality management process of quality planning, quality assurance and quality control using a simple example of purchasing a submarine sandwich (hold the pickles, please!).

Welcome to IT Strategist's annual roundup of IT surveys. Here are the trends you need to know about to wind up 2009 and head into 2010.

We pay a steep toll when it becomes more important to be right than to exercise tact. But when it comes to working relationships, harmony, not righteousness, is the higher purpose. Perhaps no area of project management is more contentious than scope change. Documentation is a good friend.

“Cloud” sounds kind of ethereal, doesn’t it? Lofty in some ways, yet soft and comforting like a bed of heaven. With this new system direction, we’re supposed to let our concerns just float away. Not so fast...

John Baldwin, new CEO of on-demand PPM solutions provider Daptiv, shares his plans for the company, and where he thinks the industry is headed.

People fail to consider that social networking has its shortcomings--and that there are serious and embarrassing repercussions if not executed properly. As our series continues, we look at more of the seldom-discussed problems.

The way you treat your team--much like the way you treat your customers--is a reflection on you as a manager. So, how are you looking these days?

Why involve project management before there’s a project? Customer expectations are often out of whack before the services part of the organization ever gets its hands on the project. Here we look at the root of the problem--and provide some solutions.

Without a solid understanding of strategy at all levels of the organization, the portfolio is just a disconnected set of investments — not really a portfolio at all. By implementing and following a strategic road map, companies can link their investments to results and more fairly evaluate project contributions. Here are some guidelines and examples.

Change management is the answer, but experts disagree about implementation. Here's some advice on how to direct and work with the people who have to implement change. Our concluding installment looks at one PM’s experiences in the trenches.

Despite this global recession, the competitive landscape keeps becoming more urgent and faster paced. You will be expected to keep managing new projects to keep your organization competitive--but will do so with less (and exhausted) resources, tight budgets and more scrutiny for success. How does one meet such challenges and succeed? One of the agile practices tailor made for such an environment is the Lean method.

Driving from point A to point B might require a map, but driving customers to your business requires much more. Creating and sustaining successful CRM solutions requires commitment from your entire organization and a single, clearly defined implementation roadmap.

It's easy to get lost in the Cloud if you are unsure who the major players are out there. This overview will examine several Cloud frameworks and identify the who's who of the big-league Cloud riders.

Size, cost, geography and the logistics of delivering state-of-the-art training have become outrageously expensive. Considering the demands of a knowledge economy, you’d think companies would be willing to foot the bill. But many companies’ priorities are way off the mark.

This writers experience with the Disney Institute--the learning arm of the Walt Disney organization--provided fresh approaches in achieving excellence through--and with--people.

Nothing makes executives salivate like when you hit their hot buttons with your justification. Executives’ top three drivers of competitive advantage should be your guide.

As we think about how we evolve our portfolio management disciplines, it is important to practice portfolio management within the context of service management. Ideally, an IT organization clearly defines its set of products and services via a service catalog and each customer works with a service portfolio manager to manage the lifecycle of services that is pertinent to them.

Product development requires a unified, collaborative team effort. A social project management framework, combined with the right social tools, helps to connect team activities to the product development process and stakeholders. The benefits include increased visibility, more accurate estimates, responsive, real-time analysis and streamlined workflows.

All IT projects are really business projects in that they are — or should be — about delivering business value, according to former CIO Bob Lewis, author of A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology. But that doesn’t let CIOs or PPM executives off the hook.

Does the use of agile project management require new contract models in order to be successful? Can agile project management be used with traditional fixed-price contracts? Does agile project management require a new type of contract (and if so, what kinds)? Furthermore, wouldn’t a new type of contract discourage the use of agile PM?

Some things in life are inevitable--unfortuntely, customers are not. You have to build a strategy to get and keep customers, based on who your customers are. Different types of customers require different CRM approaches, but one thing is certain: You can't afford to ignore CRM.

In many ways, starting a new Project Portfolio Office is easier than inheriting a PPO that is already in process. However, the risk assessment process is essentially the same. Assessing risk of project delays and failures on the PPO basket of projects, at a minimum, should consider six areas. Find out what they are--and plenty more crucial risk management information--inside.

An IT project can’t do it on its own; it takes customer involvement to keep things moving. So what can your PMO learn from a visit to the car wash?

For the workforce that is widely dispersed, sharing application development, design and testing responsibilities goes beyond the normal struggles that hit most project teams.

Having an integrated understanding of customer and business needs, a command of technical components, a keen eye for upcoming technology trends, strong communication abilities and a tight grip on the ramifications of change are critical. Here are some steps you can take to help.

What can the IT Infrastructure Library--and certification--do for you? Read on to find out.

With an unprecedented 96 percent project success rate, Dell Services’ Healthcare and Life Sciences team wins the 2011 Project Management Office of the Year award.

Maybe we should consider our internal customers as just that--customers. That doesn't mean that we stop using ITIL and start entering them into our CRM system, but we should provide them with the same standard of service--and expect the same level of commitment.

Many companies struggle with justifying the need to maintain a project management office after it is established. But the onus is on the PMO itself. Here are five key performance indicators that PMOs should use to measure effectiveness and ensure alignment with the needs of the organization.