Organizations regularly redefine customer service to maintain their competitive advantage or to improve their competitive status within the marketplace. However, they only end up tweaking customer service delivery or re-engineering what they are already doing without truly understanding if what they are doing is indeed correct.
The tiered service delivery model is a favourite among customer-oriented services. Most often tiers are based on an escalation process with the initial tiers representing technology layers, such as self-service then migrating upward to more hands on, consultative support. Service transformation becomes somewhat inhibited, for example, as decisions on what services are to be delivered through self-service prove challenging. The traditional approach results in a tier one: self-service, a tier two: processing, and finally a tier three: consultative layer that delivers service. This model is restricted because it mixes both the business tiers with the channel tiers resulting in confusion over the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of the various service delivery components. There are in fact 5 business tiers that support and deliver service that are separate from the various service channel tiers that customers can use to access a service type.
Business Tiers
The business tiers are composed of three distinct groups: strategic, tactical and operational. The strategic tier defines the strategic aspects of service delivery and is associated with direction setting. The tactical tier consolidates centres of expertise to interpret the strategic direction and to provide tactical guidance to the delivery of service to customers. Finally, the operational tier executes the delivery of service directly to the customer according to the guidelines and parameters set down by the tactical and operational tiers. However, the operational delivery arm is further decomposed into three sub-tiers: simple, complex and unique customer requests. [Read more…]