Service reviews are boring
There. I said it. I'm sure anyone who has ever had to sit through a service review will agree with me. Trust me, they're pretty boring for a service manager to compile too: endless charts with pretty colours showing no trends in either direction; jargon-filled lists of technical incidents and problems; details of changes that the customer already knows about because they requested them in the first place. No wonder service reviews are boring.
Service reviews are a requirement of the ISO20000 standard. At a service review you're supposed to cover such subjects as workload characteristics. This could mean anything that you may need to plan for such as a increase in the number of users, or a surge in usage of a service. For example, a Customer Services team may be need to increase the number of agents to respond to the execution of a new marketing plan resulting in higher software licence costs. Sudden influxes of users to a banking website could tie in with pay-day at the end of the month. Once identified you often find that these changes follow a pattern and can be predicted to the point of becoming predictable - and boring.
Another topic on the agenda should cover how the service is performing against its service level agreements (SLAs). Every month they show they are well within tolerance - exceptional even. A chart that never dips into the red never piqued anyone's interest.
Major incidents will sadly always happen, albeit infrequently, but an engaged customer will know all about these. Your major incident team communicated effectively, found a resolution quickly and efficiently, and your problem management process is well on the way to finding a root cause and making sure it never happens again. Reminding the customer of that small blip in service that they hardly noticed in the first place will barely raise an eyebrow.
The same goes for changes. Your customer is likely to have requested the change in the first place and they would have been involved in requirements gathering and acceptance testing. The change management process would have ensured they knew exactly when the change was taking place. All due diligence would have been followed to ensure the change had as little impact as possible. Furthermore, once the change had been made, your customer would have likely verified that it had been implemented successfully. They probably know more about the change than you do and would rather be thinking about what's next.
Maybe you've conducted a customer survey or gathered some feedback from the users. Most people are happy with the service provided because it just works. Sure, there were a few disgruntled responders but they had a specific issue affecting them - and only them - at the time of the survey. You went back and checked and found the Service Desk had resolved any issues they were having anyway.
Finally, you'll run through any actions on the service improvement log. Any work you've done on these actions is unlikely to be a surprise because you kept in regular contact with your customer throughout the process anyway.
So why do we make our customers sit through these boring boring service reviews? It's because boring is good. It's the end goal we should be trying to achieve.
Imagine the alternative: finding out your service won't scale to the demands of the customer; trying to explain away indicators of poor performance; running through all the same ongoing incidents and problems that you went through last month; being reprimanded about a change the customer didn't want in the first place and affected their ability to operate; unhappy customers telling you the only reason they use your service is because they have no other alternative; justifying why there's been little progress on actions to improve matters since the last time you met. Just writing this out is making me shudder. I'll stick to boring thank you very much.
The truth of the matter is that your average service review sits somewhere in the middle of the scale - hopefully nearer the boring end than the more exciting end. It's an opportunity to show to the customer that you're doing the groundwork that's expected of you. Your service may be one in hundreds that they consume daily and, while your service may not be a mere minnow, they might have bigger fish to fry. You're giving your customer the headspace to think about the quality of service they're receiving and ask themselves "is this really good enough?". The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe tends towards a more disordered state, so there will always be something to discuss. It's your job to make sure that everything is being done to keep your little piece of the universe in order.
