Over twenty years ago now, I was offered the chance to do an executive development programme and I set off on a course of study that included people management, policy, financial management and resource management.

My university qualification had been in Psychology and had exposed me to everything from Freud on psychoanalysis through to Kahneman and Tversky on decision making. However managing finances and understanding policy sounded like something I would need for the long managerial career ahead, so I set off on the course thinking at least I would understand accrual accounting by the time I had finished.

The course also included a module on customer service management and I wasn't expecting to learn too much from that as I passed the whole unit on accreditation of prior learning. I did the course anyway and something called Total Quality Management caught my eye, sufficiently so that I decided to use up one of the training credits I had under the programme to find out some more/ 

I enrolled in Quality Management week at the New Zealand Institute of Management, little realising as I arrived on the first day that this was a course that would change my view of the world. The first day was on Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continual improvement which means I am told "changes for the better". One of the proverbs I picked up was along the lines of "problems are a mountain of treasures" and for the first time I understood that in running a service, you had to actively seek out what customer didn't like about your service, as that was what drove the improvement. Assuming that no complaints meant no issues was in fact one of the biggest false assumptions in delivering services, and the approach of discouraging complaints or trying to bury them, was possibly the single biggest mistake you could make. 

One of the points made on the course was that New Zealander's as a nation were pretty accepting of poor service. Suddenly with my new lenses on I saw that I was putting up with poor service and poor quality quite often. A few days later I was in a Bulls (a town in Manawatu, New Zealand) service station where the person serving me not only did something I specifically asked her not to do, but then launched in to a tirade when I asked her to reverse the action which had charged my petrol to the wrong account. I'd watched her for a while before that in a twenty minute wait to pay for petrol, and the attitude was "I'm running the joint and you're just a customer who will do what they're told". A complaint to the company got me an apology and some petrol vouchers, I don't know if the service improved because I never went back to find out.

A few years of complaining down the line and I noticed the different response from companies showed pretty much their underlying real view of customer service. A local firm L.V Martin has long has the motto "it's the putting right that counts" although in my experience they should change it to "it's the putting right that costs". However the basic idea is that how you recover from a problem is an important part of how you're judged as a service provider is right. No one can be perfect but when the customer just had their new gizmo break down, they're probably going to judge you on how well you get on and recover from this. Some retailers seem to try and make it difficult and put barriers in the way, but at the other end of the scale you get firms who go the extra mile to ensure they not only fix it, but make sure you're happy with the service.

Years later I find myself working in IT and the same customer principles apply. Service Management frameworks like ITIL are similar ideas to working with the business, the same principles like putting things right are just as important, and dealing with customer complaints as a mountain of treasures sets apart those who see opportunities to improve rather than complaints to get rid of. Overall I've found IT fairly traditional as an industry, still like to focus on the technology and still see complaints as calls to close rather than opportunities to learn. Frameworks such as ITIL aren't just about being customer focussed, but developing service catalogues and engaging the business so that you deliver value to the business processes sounds very much like the IT equivalent of what I learnt about TQM so many years ago.

I'm afraid you can use these frameworks cynically as well, you can generally be sure that anyone who is "doing ITÏL" is likely only using labels like incident and problem management. This is nothing new to ITIL or even IT, I recall a senior manager once claiming they had adopted a particular framework because they had used the headings from it to organise their management meeting agenda. Unfortunately these people aren't generally interested in the customer or service, and if you find yourself a customer of one of them then expect them not to see your problems as a treasure, but more as something to call the legal department about.