Service operations involve collaborating with teams of professionals in areas such as customer success, customer support, and customer experience. Similar to other operations roles, the purpose of service operations is to enhance and empower a team's capabilities while also facilitating their growth. It is a complex role that requires effectively addressing the needs of both internal stakeholders and external customers.
Just like the gears of a well-oiled machine, marketing operations, sales operations, and service operations all play a crucial role in attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. They work together seamlessly to ensure the success of your marketing, sales, and service efforts. Behind the scenes, operations are the driving force that keeps everything running smoothly, allowing your team to shine and deliver exceptional results.
Describing Service Operations?
Many companies do not have a dedicated team for service operations on a day-to-day basis. Instead, they rely on specialists from their business operations or revenue operations team to handle service operations needs.
One of the key elements of service operations is the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure used by the service division of an organization. This involves not only ensuring that the team has the right tools to maximize efficiency but also that the technology stack is user-friendly for customers to derive value from. Additionally, internal team members should be able to easily utilize these tools and systems to deliver a positive customer experience, monitor feedback, and drive customer engagements forward.
In addition to infrastructure management, service operations also play a role in capturing and reporting on metrics related to the teams they support. This includes metrics such as resolution time, closed tickets, service delivery effectiveness, team staffing efficiency, customer usage, and return on investment.
Service Operations Work Tools
The technology stack that service operations will assist in managing and optimizing may vary depending on your team structure, but it typically encompasses the following tools:
- Tools for measuring the success and sentiment of customers like feedback surveys and ticketing
- Tools for providing self-service support to customers like knowledge bases
- Tools for managing your team and their product or service delivery such as project management and enterprise solution management platforms
- Tools for customer communications, such as messaging or chat platforms
- Tools for mapping and measuring the customer-journey
- The billing software that customers interact with
Ideally, your service operations team should lie parallel to the customer journey and oversee the process from end to end. Thus, they should be assisting with the processes and platforms that contribute to every touchpoint in that journey.
For example, the onboarding process falls under the umbrella of service operations. The touchpoints between when a prospect closes as a customer and when onboarding is complete are the bridge between sales operations and service operations. Setting up relevant internal projects, enrolling those new customers into workflows, informing internal stakeholders of customer information, providing customers with an internal point of contact information, integrating any necessary tools, and setting up the billing process are all responsibilities that would fall under service operations; thus, service operations would use all the tools necessary to accomplish those tasks.
Once onboarding is completed, processes related to collecting feedback about client sentiment also fall under service operations. For example, service operations would be responsible for ensuring NPS surveys are sent to the Customer Journey right contacts at the right cadence. Then once a customer responds, there needs to be automation to take the appropriate next step. For example, if there’s positive feedback, a workflow might get triggered to notify the people working with that customer of the good news. On the other hand, a negative survey response would need to trigger an escalation ticket notifying the employees responsible for that customer’s success and experience to create a response plan.
While the specifics of determining who gets contacted for various outcomes may fall to the leadership of customer success and service teams, ensuring that each automated step occurs properly would be the job of service operations.
Operations and Service Operations - Overlap
A seamless customer experience relies on a motivated internal team that is equipped with efficient tools to enhance productivity and avoid unnecessary burdens. When internal tools are difficult to navigate, team members can become consumed by administrative tasks, making it challenging for them to prioritize customer success and deliver exceptional results.
For service operations to succeed, they must collaborate closely with marketing and sales operations to ensure a cohesive approach. By working in tandem, these operations can support the entire customer journey, from initial engagement to closing the deal, while also enabling customer support, service, and success teams to excel in their roles.
