The TOPdesk Service Excellence Maturity Model is one of the key tools that your organization can use to initially measure the health and direction of your service departments. It also helps business leaders to continually manage the services’ level, speed and quality.
The TOPdesk Service Excellence Maturity Model comprises five maturity levels: from scenarios in which service departments are isolated with the sole purpose of managing costs to higher levels in which service departments are fully embedded within the organization, resulting in continuous value for the entire organization.
Are you interested in a maturity health check?
The TOPdesk Maturity Model
The TOPdesk Maturity Model measures the ability and capability of your organizations’ services to meet the increasing expectations of your customers. This model helps business leaders to assess their maturity level and provide key insights into which service management areas need improving.
The model has two axes; the internal or external business focus of service departments, and the cost-driven or value-driven mindset of service departments.
Performing a maturity health check
Want to determine the maturity of your organization? TOPdesk can perform a maturity health check. A health check consists of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and an assessment of the data that is available in TOPdesk. The results from this analysis will be plotted on the five maturity dimensions: People & Culture, Process, Integration & Automation, Customer and Supplier.
The health check gives you an objective overview of where your organization stands in terms of service excellence maturity and which areas you can improve upon. This overview enables business leaders to improve the maturity of their service organization and subsequently embed this in the organization’s strategy to maximize the value for their customers.
The levels of maturity
There are five levels of maturity. Each level is measured across:
People & Culture
Process
Integration & Automation
Customer
Supplier
Level 1 – Cost center
At level 1, the different service departments in your organization aren’t aware of each other. They’re isolated and operate independently, with a sole purpose of managing costs. These departments use several service management tools. Processes are ad hoc, scattered and not connected to one another. The idea of optimizing service delivery within these departments is considered unimportant and costly.
Level 2 – Controlled service delivery
You have processes and guidelines in place and you’ve appointed process owners. The service departments provide on-demand support, which is characterized by a high degree of firefighting. KPIs are available to manage operational day-to-day tasks.
Service departments are still isolated and there is hardly any collaboration between the departments. There is a strong focus on the supply-side of the service departments, mainly driven by cost savings.
Level 3 – Customer-centric
You’ve moved away from a silo-level approach and have brought together all service departments to form an enterprise-wide strategy. The focus has shifted from managing costs to a customer-centric approach. Several service departments actively collaborate in one enterprise service management solution to provide a one-stop-shop experience for the customer.
Suppliers are actively involved in the process to better support the customer with end-to-end interfaces. Customer sounding boards and key metrics are in place to collect feedback on how to improve your service delivery.
Level 4 – Business alignment
You have a unified vision on service management and an enterprise-wide strategy where annual goals are based on customer experience metrics. This lets you continuously improve the level of your service delivery. You have established an agile-like core-team that helps the different departments to improve their service delivery, and which supports initiatives and projects that lead to a better customer experience.
You focus on improving end-to-end processes and providing multi-channel support for the customer. This helps the organization to act as a whole to provide a single view of the customer.
Level 5 – Business partner
At the highest level of maturity, the quality of delivery by all the service departments is recognized as a key differentiator. Customer service is continually improved by delivering experiences and insights where, when and how the customer wants them.
Employees are empowered to take action and innovate, transforming the service departments into a business partner. This provides value by continuously gaining a competitive edge for the entire organization.
