Why is value so difficult to deliver?

Service Management guidance tells us that a service is defined by the value we deliver to our customers. Such a simple concept but how many times do you feel, as a customer, that you've not received what you consider to be 'value'? Why do so many service providers fail to deliver value?

At the heart of a service provider's ability to deliver value are two factors:

- Understanding what the customer will consider as valuable; and

- Working out how to deliver that value ... consistently.

But these relatively innocuous statements hide a plethora of complicated detail.

Understanding your customers

Customer's will (somewhat annoyingly) not just base their judgement on what you deliver but on their preferences, prejudices and perceptions. Past experiences, peer reports, other options, rumours, misunderstandings; they can all affect how the customer feels about what they receive.

You could be delivering the service to the exact specification but an underlying mismatch of expectations on the part of the customer can undermine all your hard work.

So, how can you counter this? Well, by knowing your customers. Knowing their requirements (MoSCoW) is only one part of it, knowing your customer means understanding their history (where they've been, what they've done.), their current reality (what they are driven by or stressed about, what their personal and organisational objectives are) and where are they going (what their long term goals are).

Talking to them (and listening too)

Business Relationship Management seeks to understand what the customers' long term and strategic objectives and needs are but can be, mistakenly, viewed as a mechanistic process. It is not! Business relationships are just relationships whilst doing business ... people are people and do business with people. Ask lots of questions and really listen to the answers. Listen not just to what they say but also how they say it, what they don't say, verbal and visual cues, their comments and what cultural references they make. The main thing is to actually listen - it's sometimes difficult to really listen when you are full of enthusiasm and ideas.

And it's not just about capturing what they've said in such a way as allows you to regurgitate it later; you have to understand their needs. What does our service allow the customer to achieve (and, critically, what does failure to deliver all or part of our service prevent the customer from achieving)? This is what really represents value to the customer. Utility of a service comes from either supporting enhanced ability or removing constraints to the customers business processes. If your service doesn't do one of these ... no value. If you don't truly understand what the customer is trying to achieve then how do you know if you're helping them (or hindering them)? Warranty is about making sure that the service you deliver meets the living needs of the customer; is it there when they need it, to the extent that they need it? This is covered by the four factors of availability, continuity, security and capacity: When is it needed? What degree of absence can be tolerated? What assurances are needed around the areas of confidentiality and integrity? And, when it is available, what characteristics does it need to demonstrate in terms of throughput, scale, etc.?

Once you believe that you understand what will represent value to the customer, play it back to them; set a scene, paint a picture. It will help them to express to you whether you have it right whilst also consolidating it in your own mind.

Delivering that value

Hard as that first part might seem, it's just as common (if not more common over a long time period) to find service providers not following through on delivering the service in a way that addresses the customers value needs.

Having asked the right questions and really listening to the answers the service provider has to enact that into the fabric of their service delivery organisation so that everyone understands what the customer needs, how they needs it and what represents a valuable outcome to the customer. And, again, unfortunately it's lots of little things that all have to be done right not just the big things.

Here are some examples of where I think service providers have obviously got the right idea but their execution has missed the mark:

• Telephony service providers with, what I'm sure they feel are helpful, monsters of call centre menus ("Press one for support, two for sales, three if you're thinking of leaving us ..."). They know that customers want or need to call them; the customer doesn't want a series of numbers to call but it's essential for the customer to speak to the most appropriate person therefore have them call a single number and give them a menu of options.
• Web based supplier of goods who offer a 'no quibble' returns policy but you have to send the goods back via a specific network of collection points. Surely it'd be better to make sure that the goods sent were right in the first place but, on the basis that mistakes happen, if the customer has to go out of their way to return goods ...
• Live on-line chat facilities for your cloud storage provider (a good concept) ... except their live support staff are based in the US and aren't yet awake.

I realise that there is a big distinction between service providers with a known internal or known external customer base and those with an unknown external customer base. If you don't actually have a direct relationship with the customers of your services it's harder to know exactly what drivers and triggers there are but that only makes it more important that the customer is made aware of what the service will deliver and that it is delivered consistently to that specification.

What goes wrong?

Overall delivering service is at the heart of every business transaction; it's something that people have been engaging in for thousands of years but we still often get it wrong.

The problem is that delivering a service has to result in a mutually beneficial situation: I deliver these outcomes to you in return for you paying me. One of the things that I think goes wrong is that each side are out to get the most they can from the transaction:

• The service provider wants to make a profit and so greed slips in and they charge more for a service that they really should which leads the customer to expect more for their money.
• The service provider becomes lazy or apathetic about making sure that what they deliver represents true value.
• The customer has unrealistic expectations about what the service entails and so constantly feels 'cheated' by being charged for something they're not getting.
• The customer's requirements have changed but either nobody asked or nobody told. Over time the service being delivered diverged from what the customer wanted or expected.

What can we do?

The main thing keeps coming back to communications. Asking questions, listening to answers, stating expectations, confirming facts, verifying success, reassessing requirements ... a never-ending cycle of assessing what is needed and how to best deliver it in a way that shows the customer that you understand their needs (not just that you remember their needs - you understand them). That's all - dead easy right?