Why is Customer-Centric ITSM Important?
IT and broader business objectives are often partially but not totally aligned. Business leaders now need IT to underpin and drive innovation making their organisation responsive and adaptable to market demands. Although valuable, traditional ITSM approaches must evolve to place equal emphasis on user experience and customer-centric ITSM.
Although traditional metrics such as system uptime, SLA compliance and effective change control remain important, evolution is needed to ensure your IT strategy and day-to-day service operations are enabling business goals to be achieved.
This means re-thinking your Service Management approach to include different priorities:
- User satisfaction – understanding and meeting customer expectations
- Technology adoption – ensuring investments deliver value through actual usage
- Business outcomes – directly connecting IT delivery to measurable business results
To do this, you need to examine how you currently deliver IT services and where improvements can be made. This is where customer-centric ITSM becomes essential, ensuring you fully understand business objectives and how users interact with your technology services. an
The Current State of ITSM
Traditional ITSM approaches have prioritised process standardisation and technical stability. As mentioned earlier, although these remain important, they are insufficient in an age where –
- Users have expectations shaped by consumer technology experiences
- Shadow IT flourishes when official channels fail to meet user needs
- Business agility depends on effective technology utilisation
Recent research indicates that whilst 78% of IT departments met their technical SLAs, only 42% of end users reported satisfaction with the IT services being delivered to them, creating a persistent gap between technical success and business value.
Core Principles of Customer-Centric ITSM
1. Understanding Customer Needs
Customer-centric ITSM begins with comprehensive user research for both internal and external customers:
- Conduct user research through interviews, focus groups, and workshops
- Implement journey mapping to visualise how users interact with IT services
- Create detailed profiles of different user groups within your organisation
- Establish exception processes for users with unique requirements
Strategic impact: This intelligence often reveals that organisations are over-investing in features with minimal user value whilst underinvesting in capabilities that drive significant productivity gains.
2. Designing for Experience
This principle puts user experience at the centre of service design and delivery:
- Apply user experience measurements to ITSM processes
- Simplify complex technical processes into user-friendly interactions
- Test new services with users before full deployment
- Balance security requirements with usability considerations
Strategic impact: This approach transforms IT from a perceived business inhibitor to a value enabler, most notably in high-value business units like marketing and sales.
3. Measuring What Matters
Customer-centric measurement shifts focus from purely technical metrics:
- Implement Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) measurements
- Track Customer Effort to measure how easy users find support options
- Monitor adoption rates of new services and self-service options
- Analyse abandonment points in service processes
Strategic impact: This measurement framework creates clear visibility between IT investments and business outcomes, enabling more effective resource allocation.
Real-World Application: Password Reset Example
Password resets exemplify how technical solutions comprise only half of the equation. A customer-centric approach considers:
- Is the self-service portal simple and user-friendly?
- Are users being asked to remember secret words set years ago?
- Is the portal accessible from non-corporate devices?
- Does the communication acknowledge user frustration?
These factors can be identified by mapping the customer journey, gathering feedback on how customers feel about their experience, and continuously refining the service as required.
Implementation Framework
Successfully implementing customer-centric ITSM requires a structured approach:
- Assessment: Evaluate current ITSM maturity against customer-centric principles
- Vision: Establish a clear vision for customer-centric ITSM
- Strategy: Develop strategies for each core principle
- Capabilities: Build necessary capabilities through training and tools
- Processes: Redesign key processes with customer experience in mind
- Technology: Implement enabling technologies
- Measurement: Establish metrics that balance operational and experience measures
- Governance: Create governance structures that prioritise user experience
Quantifiable Results
Organisations that successfully implement customer-centric ITSM typically report:
Financial Outcomes:
- 70-80% reduction in shadow IT, eliminating duplicate technology spending
- 20-25% increase in productivity across digital workflow-dependent teams
- 15-20% reduction in support costs despite increased service quality
Operational Improvements:
- 60-70% increase in self-service portal utilisation
- 40-45% reduction in recurring incident tickets
- 30-40% improvement in user satisfaction scores
- 25-30% faster adoption of new technologies
Executive Implications
When considering a shift to customer-centric ITSM, executive teams should focus on five key areas:
- Reframe technology governance: Evaluate technology not just on technical performance but on human enablement and business outcomes
- Reset investment criteria: Prioritise initiatives that balance technical excellence with superior user experience
- Realign organisational structure: Break down barriers between IT and business units through cross-functional teams
- Redefine success metrics: Implement balanced scorecards that connect technical performance to business impact
- Reinforce cultural change: Position technology as a human enabler rather than an end in itself
In Conclusion
Customer-centric ITSM represents a strategic necessity rather than merely an operational improvement. By placing user needs at the centre of technology strategy, organisations can maximise their technology investments, accelerate digital transformation, and create sustainable competitive advantage.
Regardless of your current Service Management maturity, adopting customer-centric principles has a crucial role to play in effective Modern Service Management approaches. It does not need to be applied to every single activity but is an effective practice to encourage throughout the organisation so that IT service delivery approaches are consistent, optimised, and focused on delivering genuine business value.
In short, customer-centric optimisation ensures that investment in skills, processes, tools, and other resources is focused on value creation, supporting strategic objectives, and guiding future investments for your organisation.