SFIA Customer service support CSMG

This page provides deep dive guidance and additional material to help individuals and organisations use and apply this SFIA skill effectively. It supplements the SFIA reference material.

SFIA v6 definition of Customer service support

The management and operation of one or more customer service or service desk functions. Acting as a point of contact to support service users and customers reporting issues, requesting information, access, or other services.

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• This skill covers a wide range of levels from SFIA level 1 to level 6.
• The higher level skills focus on strategies, policies and standards for Customer service.
• At the low levels reflects administrative/procedural level skills for handling requests and calls e.g. on a support desk.This represents one of the lowest level entry points into Enterprise IT careers
• The focus of Levels 4 and 5 shifts towards “process and resource management”.
• The skill does not reflect a technical skill; it is customer/end-user focussed and reflects good operational and relationship management.

If you are looking for skills relating to:

• the process of responding to and resolving incidents; try SFIA Incident management USUP
• the management of stakeholder relations; try SFIA Relationship management
• the process of resolving problems (proactively or re-actively); try SFIA Problem management PBMG
• the ongoing management of operational facilities to provide the agreed levels of service; try SFIA Service level management SLMO
• overall development, delivery, support continuous improvement of IT services ; try SFIA IT management
• the provision of technical advice and assistance to the sales force, sales agents, etc; try SFIA Sales support

• ITIL
• ITSMF International: Independent and internationally recognised forum for IT Service Management professionals worldwide.
• IT4IT™ Reference Architecture: see the IT4IT Reference Architecture Detect to Correct (D2C) Value Stream
• CMMI® for Services, CMMI-SVC, V1.3 Improving processes for providing better services
• ISO/IEC 20000-1
• Service Desk Institute
• Service Management and Marketing : Managing the Service Profit Logic - book by Christian Grönroos examines service management and management in service competition from the point of view of the service profit logic.

• Customer Service
• Service Operations

By focussing on work outputs/work products we can move the focus from activity/knowledge to performance and provide a direct link to business results. See 6 boxes model.

Leading

• stakeholder relationships and relationship management plan
• management commitment to customer service processes, tools, continuous improvement
• sufficient resources and capability to enact customer service
• strategy for provision of customer service
• organisational model for provision of customer service

Managing

• operational plan for meeting customer service commitments
• flexible, responsive customer service processes
• log of issues, dependencies, conflicts and actions needed to improve customer service quality and stability
• customer and end user relationships
• 3rd party supplier relationships
• capable team to deliver service support
• software tools and performance support for customer service support
• customer service resource and deployment plans
• customer service performance reports (e.g. process metrics, progress, quality of deliverables, compliance to standards)
• knowledge management
• reviews to ensure quality of service

Doing

• resolution of service requests
• logs of service requests and incidents
• informed and satisfied customers
• allocation of unreserved calls
• investigation and diagnosis of issues
• education, guidance support to aid adherence and adoption of customer service processes
• action plan to resolve issues
• documentation of temporary solutions
• classification of issues
• reports on the progress of service issues
• known error database