Understand Key Aspects of Service Management Models

Key Components of Service Management

Service Management is a structured framework designed specifically for delivering, managing, and improving services. Successful Telco providers integrate service management into their business operations as a key capability. In terms of service strategy, service management platforms are employed to establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ensure alignment with customer expectations.

These platforms assist telecom companies in diagnosing and troubleshooting incidents quickly, identifying root causes, and resolving issues remotely.

A service management platform also enhances agent & customer satisfaction by providing consolidated data from multiple knowledge bases. It allows agents to report and manage ongoing problems and integrates with third-party ticketing systems, ensuring a seamless omnichannel experience. For end users, these platforms can be integrated with self-service portals and apps, increasing customer autonomy and reducing reliance on contact centers.

Moreover, business owners can leverage the data collected by these systems as inputs for continuous improvement.

Finally, service management platforms can be utilized for policy enforcement, ensuring compliance with operational and regulatory requirements, as well as for data privacy and security, protecting data and systems from threats and breaches.

Benefits of Implementing Motive Service Management Platform (SMP)

When using Motive's Service Management Platform (SMP), service providers get a single platform that supports all customer touchpoints, leverages machine learning across all channels, uses automation to evolve to zero-touch care and promotes self-service as a prioritized channel for digital engagement. The main benefits that SMP brings are:

• Telco-focused use cases for care process automation
• Contextual omni-channel engagement
• Modern user experience and easy personalization
• Reusable integration components
• ML (machine earning)-based insights and proactive care
• OSS (operations support system) mediation and provisioning use-cases
• Low-code solution enabling citizen developers
• Cloud-native & flexible architecture
• Quick time to market for new services
• Enterprise enabled 
  
  

Choosing the Right Service Management Model

Selecting the right service management model can significantly influence an organization's ability to deliver consistent and high-quality support. Organizations often benefit from a hybrid model, combining best practices from multiple frameworks—e.g., using ITIL for service design and delivery, DevOps for development and deployment, and TM Forum’s ODA (Open Digital Architecture) for integration across telecom systems.

As an example, when a CSP prepares to launch a new service, SMP can be used to define the Troubleshooting WFs (part of the Service Design phase of ITIL), can connect with version control tools during the development and roll-out phases (DevOps) and can also, if required, implement TM Forum APIs to support the provisioning of this new service into the network and BSS systems (ODA).

SMP incorporates the best practices from the most popular models and can be used as an optimization enabler for the strategic transformation that redefines the business outcomes aligning them with the company goals.

Common Challenges in Service Management

Service management and support often pose several challenges to the teams that are in the front line of customer support. Below we highlight some of the most common challenges and describe how SMP can help overcome the identified issues:

• Not Having the Right Tools – Operational efficiency is hard to achieve when organizations don’t have the proper tools to support the operations teams. SMP is a framework that can help organizations define the internal processes, customize the customer service support experience and integrate multiple internal and 3rd party platforms into a single and unified environment, providing a 360-degree view of the customer and their service.
• Using Too Many Tools - Dealing with hundreds of inquiries daily can be extremely challenging. When the tools available are either ineffective or fragmented across multiple systems, contact center teams often feel overwhelmed and demotivated. Using multiple tools not only impacts efficiency but also makes onboarding and training unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. With the integration capabilities offered by SMP, organizations can consolidate internal and 3rd systems into a unified platform. This reduces the need for agents to switch between multiple tools (avoiding ‘swivel chair’ syndrome), streamlines processes and workflows, and improves both response times and overall user experience.
• Managing Service Outages or Crises – Service outages are always difficult to manage, and ultimately prevent them, organizations must be prepared to effectively manage disruptions and the avalanche of customer complaints that typically follow. With SMP's advanced automation capabilities, organizations can take advantage of the proactive care capabilities to automatically trigger the remediation flows that can identify and resolve service issues remote and proactively, reducing the volume of escalations and mitigating customer frustration. When customers do contact during a service outage, SMP can help to provide accurate and timely information to help defuse the situation.
• Meet Business Metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – Organizations that seek continuous improvement and operational excellence consistently track and measure the defined metrics and KPIs. The SMP capabilities for both Customer Service and Integration Platform have helped organizations to meet their SLAs while improving their metrics and KPIs. For more details, refer to our customer success stories to learn about how SMP transformed their contact center experience and improved the operational efficiency.
• Balancing AI and Human Touch - Full automated AI driven processes can contribute to service abandonment and sacrifice long-term customer loyalty when customers don’t have the option to interact with a human agent. This is particularly critical in the context of essential services, such as the availability of telecommunications. When issues cannot be resolved through proactive or self-service channels powered by SMP automations, conversations can be seamlessly escalated to human agents. These agents can leverage SMP’s customizable, web-based portal to deliver empathetic and effective support, leveraging SMP dynamic intelligent workflows. Additionally, the Generative AI Virtual Assistant enhances agent performance by offering real-time guidance and assisting with troubleshooting and diagnostics, ensuring a smooth and informed customer experience. 
  
  

Implementing Service Management Successfully

The success of a service management implementation is more than just the technology; it’s also about the internal processes that are established and defined and how the stakeholders engage and assume accountability.

When building a Service Management on top of an existing framework such as the one provided by SMP, the following areas need to be considered:

• Roles and Responsibilities: Each stakeholder—from frontline support agents to system administrators and service managers—must understand their part in the service delivery lifecycle. Defining ownership for tasks such as ticket resolution, escalation handling, SLA monitoring, and platform configuration ensures accountability and prevents operational gaps.
• Workflows definition: Through SMP, organizations can design and customize guided workflows tailored to specific scenarios. A well-documented troubleshooting library reduces training time, enhances compliance, and improves resolution times by eliminating ambiguity.
• Processes automation: SMP supports intelligent automation through business process orchestration, interactive workflows for customer support and service operations that can execute a specific data model, invoke DSAs (Data Source Adapters) to collect information from backends, apply business logic, and generate RR (Recommended Resolutions). Investing in automations not only boosts efficiency but also minimizes the risk of human error.
• Monitoring and continuous improvement: SMP enables organizations to track service KPIs and metrics, workflow efficiency, and system performance across channels. These insights help identify bottlenecks, emerging issues, and improvement opportunities. 
  
  

Service Management Best Practices

When discussing the implementation of a service management tool, it’s important to define a plan that prepares the organization for the transformational change coming with the new platform. If the following best practices are considered, the transition across the entire organization will be smoother:

1. Choose the right service management tool: Choosing the tool that best fits the business requirements is essential. It is important to invest time in research. When selecting a Service Management platform, key factors to consider include scalability, support, flexibility, customization, and stability.
2. Define the best strategy towards business goals: Before beginning the implementation, the relevant business units must establish the     strategy to be followed. Important tasks include defining the key focus areas for each team,     determining the frequency of status meetings, creating an accountability matrix, and     developing the project plan.
3. Establish metrics and KPIs for your service management strategy: Metrics and KPIs should be established as part of the Service Management strategy.     Leadership must clearly articulate the company's goals so that operational teams can     identify the metrics that will support these objectives and determine the important KPIs     that need to be measured.
4. Prioritize customer and agent experiences: Obtaining feedback from users of the tool (agents, supervisors, admins) as well as from customers receiving support is essential for fostering internal motivation and enhancing customer satisfaction. A mechanism to gather feedback from these personas should be defined and put in place.
5. Monitor performance & measure success: Having the best tool with the best processes might not be useful if those processes are not     aligned with the needs of those working with the platform. When agents work under huge     pressure and in a commissioned model, they tend to try to meet their KPIs even if that     means misusing the platform, affecting the overall customer experience.  That’s why monitoring the performance and the success of the processes defined is key to ensuring     they remain relevant, and efficient.
6. Implement a continuous improvement methodology: A Service Management platform is a living tool. Continuous feedback loops and real-world usage insights help identify gaps and optimization opportunities, allowing teams to adapt and refine workflows to better serve both employees and customers.
   
   

Evolving Trends in Service Management

Service management is undergoing a rapid transformation as emerging technologies reshape the landscape. Organizations are increasingly adopting modern tools and strategies to enhance operational efficiency, improve user experience, and maintain agility. Some of the most evolving trends are listed below:

• Generative AI: GenAI is revolutionizing service management by powering intelligent virtual assistants, summarizing interactions, generating contextual responses, and streamlining knowledge creation. In platforms like SMP, GenAI supports agents with troubleshooting steps and real-time suggestions, allowing faster and more personalized customer support.
• ML Automations: ML enhances automation by learning from historical data and automatically triage incidents. ML-powered workflows can dynamically adapt based on outcomes, reducing manual intervention while improving resolution metrics.
• Shift-Left Strategy: The Shift-Left strategy is evolving to include Predictive analytics & proactive care that relies on resources optimization to prevent issues from happening. With this approach, organizations can reduce costs while streamlining the support process because the service teams can anticipate potential disruptions and act before they affect the end users.
• Data-Driven Enhancements: By tracking business metrics such as CSAT, NPS, CES, FCR, and PHT, organizations can use the data collected from the platform to easily identify inefficiencies, improve resource allocation, and adapt services to meet evolving demands.
• Data Privacy and Security: As digital transformation accelerates, safeguarding customer data becomes a critical concern. service management platforms must comply with data privacy regulations ensuring that all personal data is stored, accessed, and processed securely.
  
  

Measuring Success in Service Management 

Measuring the effectiveness of the service management strategy is critical to ensuring continuous improvement, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. A balanced approach includes both customer-facing and internal performance indicators.

• Average resolution time (ART): ART tracks the average time it takes to fully resolve an issue, from the moment it's reported until its closure. A shorter ART generally reflects well-organized workflows and strong cross-functional collaboration.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This metric provides immediate feedback on service quality. A high CSAT score usually correlates with improved loyalty and retention.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): This metric measures the ease of use of a product or service. A good CES indicates a streamlined, effortless experience for customers, while a low score suggests areas needing improvement in customer interactions.
• Dispatch Rate (DR): This metric indicates the percentage of issues that require the dispatch of a field technician. A lower dispatch rate reflects greater operational efficiency, as more issues are resolved remotely without the need for on-site support. 
• Employee Satisfaction: Measures the satisfaction of the support teams. Happy and engaged agents are more likely to deliver empathetic and effective support. High employee satisfaction also reduces turnover and strengthens institutional knowledge.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): This metric measures the percentage of customer issues resolved in the first interaction. High FCR rates contribute to customer satisfaction and reduced operational costs.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures customer loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the service to others. NPS gives a high-level view of brand perception and long-term satisfaction.
• No Fault Found (NFF): This metric indicates the percentage of returned or replaced devices where no actual fault is identified upon inspection. High NFF rates represent inefficiencies in troubleshooting processes, leading to unnecessary returns and increased operational expenses.
• Process Handle Time (PHT): This metric tracks the average duration of the interactions, including troubleshooting time, and any follow-up tasks. Shorter PHTs indicate more efficient support.

As an example, a leading telecom provider, serving over 13M customers, partnered with Motive to modernize its customer service operations. By consolidating fragmented tools and introducing automation across mobile, fixed, and enterprise services, they achieved transformative results and experienced a huge impact on their KPIs.

Learn more about this success story.