Service providers have to remember that the success in a business comes from deep understanding of what the cutomers’ expectations are and where to look for possible improvements in those needs. Customers love buying not products but satisfaction of particular needs.
Therefore, to provide services with the highest possible satisfaction to the customer we first have to answer several questions such as: what the needs are, where to look them for, what’s the real reason they occur and many other questions. This requires a long investigation and understanding of who may be our potential customer, who is our current cutomer, why we lost the previous clients.
Moving forward we discover that this wider context forces us to clearly define our market place and our borders between which our services are provided and between which we operate in. What is worth to underline is that service strategy has never succeded when it was created in isolation of the general strategy and culture of the organisation that the service provider belongs to.
The strategy adopted by the service providers has to be compliant with the over-arching strategy the provider operates in. Also the selected service strategy should provide sufficient value to all the customers we do business with and of course meet stakeholders expectations. Regardless the scope of services provided the strategy is a must and all providers need it to be in the business.
In ITIL version 3, the Service Strategy part is in the core of the ITIL V3 lifecycle. It acts as a guide to all IT service providers in terms of helping them to determine:
- what kind of services should be offered and who should be offered to
- how to measure the service performance and productivity
- how visibility and control over value creation can be achieved applying financial management
- how stakeholders and customers perceive value, also how this value can be created