CSI: a critical tool for staying ahead of the game

Within the service management industry, CSI is in the spotlight. Organisations know they should be doing it, but they don’t really understand its true value. Being bogged down in the mentality of firefighting day-in-day-out, resetting passwords, granting access to reports, issues with a firewall, or a broken printer, is exhausting.

Changing mindset, taking the time and energy to consider how things could be better can seem unattainable. But the long-term benefits of CSI should be motivation enough to stop thinking and talking about CSI and start doing it.

The why’s and what’s of CSI

CSI is working in a way where the only constant is change. Why should you take this approach? Well, user’s demands are regularly adapting to new technologies and customer experience ideals, it’s only natural. To ensure you’re meeting their demands, the delivery of a service must be prepared to change, whenever is required.

The value of CSI goes beyond that service excellence experience. If time and effort are put into this approach, it will keep organisations relevant in their industry, not just for a few months, or a year, or a couple of good years, but continuously. As an organisation, you’ll embrace the fact that today’s service is good but staying stagnant with this approach for the next five years isn’t good and turn it to your advantage.

Staying ahead, being a leader in your industry is important. From this perspective, investing focus, resource, and time in CSI is critical for organisations and service providers to ensure they don’t drop onto the backfoot and end up having to play catch-up. That’s never a place that you want to be.

Challenges: truth or myth?

When it comes to CSI, there are often two barriers that act as deterrents for organisations. Firstly, it is the mindset that CSI is ‘just a stage’. Secondly, is that CSI comes across as a resource-heavy approach.

1. “It’s just a stage, you’ll get over it.”

Those with the mindset that CSI is just another stage are wrong. The first word is continuous. CSI is always happening, or at least it should always be happening. This doesn’t mean 24 hours, 7 days a week, it means a habit instilled in your organisation. On a regular, continuous basis, you’re checking in with yourself, the organisation, and your customers. Looking at what’s good, what’s bad, and what can be improved.

2. “We don’t have the time, money or people for CSI.”

Within organisations, there’s confusion about the best uses of the workforce. On one side, best practice is defining roles that organisations are encouraged to embody and perform. On the other, companies are striving to become lean, efficient, and balanced in terms of how many different caps employees wear in their organisation.

This ongoing battle means implementing CSI seems unrealistic for organisations. When do we make time for CSI? Who takes ownership? What does ownership look like? How can we be successful when we’re constantly bombarded with emails and requests?

The key to implementing CSI

Implementing CSI has been overblown for a long time. It has the reputation of a tall hurdle that you must build several steps, over several months and years, to be able to reach a height possible to jump over it. Whereas, in reality, CSI should be a series of small, achievable hurdles.

Put it this way, if you were competing in the Olympics, you would participate in the 100-meter hurdle race, not the pole vault.

The key to CSI success? Aim to make small, bitesize improvements, continuously. This way, each little goal you achieve will deliver satisfaction for yourself, and your user base, while providing the motivation to reach your next goal. Remember the three K’s: keep it simple, keep it small, keep it achievable.

Ready to start?

We’ve discussed the theory behind CSI, common challenges, and how to implement this way of working. Now, let’s look at one way you can make an instant impact within your organisation using CSI for knowledge management.

Your service desk is often bombarded with basic questions about the way your service functions. What are the opening hours? Who should I contact about this problem? What are the terms and conditions of a service?

Now the problem has been recognised, how can you improve it? Simply create a knowledge item and make it visible to your customer base through the self-service portal. This empowers your users to find answers to their questions and frees up your already busy operators.

It might sound like a small, insignificant step but by making this improvement you’ve flipped from reactive, firefighting to being proactive and providing information for the future.

It’s not a solo job!

To truly succeed in CSI, everybody within the organisation needs to be open to playing their part. While it’s a good idea to have a part of the organisation or an individual to oversee CSI, keeping an eye on the progress, it’s not the responsibility of one person. Everybody has the responsibility to be involved.

Collectively as an organisation you must create a service improvement routine to measure the success of your bitesize improvements. For example, facilitate weekly, monthly or quarterly drop-in sessions for users and staff. This will allow you to receive feedback on the work you’ve been doing and your current development programmes.

Stop thinking about CSI, start doing it

Going forward, stop considering CSI as something you should be doing but is going to take too much time and effort to implement. Start trying it out. It doesn’t have to be a big project, small incremental improvements that are properly communicated is far more effective.

Having the mentality of using CSI not a part of the process but as an underlying habit that we all do is going to be key to organisations staying ahead of the curve, keeping up with the pace of change, and leading the way for service excellence.