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Operations are the most important aspects of an organization. In technology, DevOps dominates the conversation due to the importance of aligning building products, applications and infrastructure with code. DevOps encompasses much more than just a team of developers. It’s the culture, practices, and tools that enable organizations to deliver applications quickly and at scale, and then run them efficiently. This philosophy has been incredibly useful over the past decade, but has been out of touch with other parts of the organization. Developer teams are connected, but within their cells, their work lacks integration with the end user, depriving them of the opportunity to deliver the best solutions to their customers. Immediately, developers, DevOps and Itops cannot see the scope of the impact when working in an autonomous environment, leading to poor prioritization and optimization.
Enter customer service. Another pillar of corporate strength, customer service is not only important but has risen to become a strategic function of the business. They are a business’s first responders if digital services don’t perform as expected or if their customers’ expectations aren’t met. Customer service agents are highly trained, well supported and equipped with the latest technology, so they can be the most effective first point of contact for customers. Customer service teams can learn something from developers in their organization and work within a similar ‘operations’ model that represents philosophies and practices: in other words, CSOps or Customer Service Operations.
Why CSOps?
Customer service is an incredibly powerful part of business because it’s tied to the user experience. Consumers are not shy about reporting poor customer service, and the opposite is also true. End-users shout out times when they’ve experienced strong customer service. It goes a long way to creating loyalty, repeat business and retention. In a study from Bain and Company, it has been suggested that customers who experience a service-related issue, rather than a price- or product-based issue, are four times more likely to purchase from a competitor. Leading with customer service, as many e-commerce platforms do, is critical to meeting new operating standards and customer expectations. Customer service in a B2B setting is no different. Customers or users are attracted to organizations that can quickly resolve their concerns in a frictionless and efficient manner.
Customer service is now at the forefront of corporate initiatives and it’s not going anywhere. In a recent article Wall Street Journal, analysts and executives weighed in on CIO budgets and forecasted priorities for recessionary concerns. Lacking in some areas, customer service was not one of them. The overall idea is that “businesses are finding more value than ever in technology that enhances customer experience and positions them in an increasingly tight market.”
In today’s organizations, you can’t compete with DevOps if you don’t have CSOPS. They are symbiotic in their relationship with the bottom line: if products or applications do not meet the customer’s desired results, customer service teams must communicate with developers and convey the error or omission. Then, developers can work to provide appropriate solutions. Customer service feeds the DevOps pipeline to create products and services that meet customer needs. In other words, you can’t succeed in DevOps if you don’t have CSOPS.
Creating a relationship between DevOps and CSOP
In reality, most CSOPs and back office teams, such as SREs or ITOps, do not have good communication or effective processes to communicate with each other. Not only does this disconnect create problems for customers, but a lack of internal communication creates broken lines within teams and an inability to deliver results effectively. In the last decade, the direction of technology organizations has been driven by the SaaS model, flexible work and the increase of applications, it is important to look at the best practices in an organization and understand how teams can work better together.
As development teams continue to iterate and produce code, customer service teams are constantly fielding customer feedback, concerns, and complaints. Customer service agents are often missing out on valuable information that can help them find a solution if something breaks, and where organizations don’t use their frontline employees as a recovery and disaster response tool.
In addition to filing complaints and reports about product and service issues, customer service teams can aggregate and correlate reports and collect additional information from consumers. When something goes wrong, it is often difficult to muster the necessary quick response. If there is a lack of communication between customer service teams and the developer or engineering teams, a customer complaint about a product or service may take a long time to resolve. Creating fast communication from the customer service team to the developer team allows customer service agents to have visibility into the problem and the solution, providing feedback to the customer while the solution is being implemented. It is this ‘Ops’ culture within both the customer service and development teams that supports the organization end-to-end.
A symbiotic relationship between DevOps and CSOps can benefit any organization, but adoption requires visibility and two-way communication. Development teams that work closely with their customer service teams benefit from better, real-world user data that can then be incorporated into new features and improvements. A clear way for customer service teams to escalate customer-reported issues – from the right context to the right teams – reduces the time to resolution by eliminating silos and breaking down walls between CSOPs and DevOps.
It’s time for every organization to integrate customer service teams as part of customer satisfaction rather than just reporting on it. Integration with engineering and back office teams creates a culture of service-first operations.
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