[Originally published April 12, 2024 via LinkedIn]
Service delivery operations such as customer support have a million moving parts (it can seem) all happening in concurrence. Forecasting, capacity, workforce management, issue journeys and throughput effectiveness, channel-based service levels, severity-based prioritization, knowledge repositories, training, readiness planning, issue driver feedback with product and services, customer sentiment and satisfaction management….all of which have one or more KPI’s producing measures requiring analysis and actions, themselves inputs to recurring operational and business reviews.
It can seem like precariously managed chaos, and one element that goes off the rails can ripple through the entire system.
I’m trying something new with my customer support team to help minimize the randomization and level up our service operations discipline: Playbooks. And so far, they’ve been game changing.
Typically used at a more macro level for organization-wide swimlanes, we’ve adapted an agile-based, operational model around them. At it’s simplest form, we’ve aggregated our KPI’s and functional deliverables to a centrally sourced dashboard, and any datapoint of note spins up a connected activity log that captures status, impact, discovery, remediation, progress and monitoring. On a daily/weekly/monthly basis, managers and I are able to focus on the set of activity logs (which collectively are the “playbook”) to execute process, tools or resource responses, evaluate their efficacy, and monitor their durability. Beyond data metrics, we also use the playbook for planning and functional initiatives, such as peak season or spike readiness.
Since we implemented them, these playbooks have given the team powerful capabilities around:
- Visibility– the dashboard and associated playbooks keep the most important operational activity in front of everyone in real time and in a meaningful format.
- Clarity– there is no ambiguity around what’s happening, who is doing what, or what the plan is for any given element or variable.
- Accountability– everyone driving inputs and updates in the same central tools creates frictionless collaboration and accountability for priorities, actions and outcomes. The issues and workstreams are also tagged and aggregated directly into needed endpoints such as leadership MBR’s and operational reviews.
- Responsiveness– disparate reports and reviews without integrated, real-time operational activity contexts have been replaced by the team working, communicating and collaborating directly in the playbook, eliminating layers, communication gaps, and context mismatches. The result has been rapid awareness or operational issues connected to discovery, remediation and validation within days or weeks rather than months.
We still have a million moving parts, but simplifying how we manage them makes it feel a lot less like chaos.