Top business organizations understand that solving a customer’s pressing problems is the key to sales. However, when trying to identify issues affecting their customers, most businesses use processes that are way complicated. There is a simpler way to identify issues and improve the quality of services: Service monitoring.
This article will address what service monitoring is, how to help your customers be successful, and how to build a solid foundation within your company.
What is service monitoring?
In the IT sector, service monitoring keeps an eye on the performance and availability of IT Services. The most effective approach is to monitor the Service both from the end-user perspective as well as the health of underlying infrastructure and its dependencies. This systematic checkup ensures that each service is online and working as it should.
Imagine this; Your service monitoring system is measuring the transactions in an e-commerce store. A visitor browses through the product catalog and does the following:
Monitoring is happening in every step of this process. On each step there is a predetermined number of seconds which is considered the “norm”: the normal time the step will take to complete. If the steps in the process take more time than normal, then the monitoring will raise “Flags”. This is called “Synthetic monitoring”.
The complete transaction should not take more than X number of seconds.
– If it takes a little more time, you get a yellow flag.
– If it takes a lot more time you get a red flag.
– If the time taken is as expected, you get a green flag.
Making your customers successful with service monitoring
Your clients deserve your best efforts.
You should solve their problems as if they are your own.
So, the main question is, how can you make your clients successful with service monitoring?
To answer this question, you can use the following five-step problem-solving approach to solve your client’s problems.
The Five-Step Problem-Solving Approach
This method means placing the issue in context and evaluating alternatives while not jumping to conclusions.
The five-step approach is as follows;
1. Identify the issue.
First, you must make sure you know the main problem that is affecting your client.
How do you do this? By asking the right questions and observing the situation. You might ask your client what makes them feel there is a problem. The key is to communicate and use your observation and analytic skills to learn about the problem. Ceeview’s service monitoring tool identifies issues automatically. This saves you time and enables detection and resolution before the issue starts impacting the customer.
2. Analyze the issue.
Now that you know what the problem is, you want to analyze it.
Does the issue occur often?
Is it severe, and what causes the problem?
In analyzing the issue, you ask deep questions about the problem, and you go through the issue with a fine-tooth comb. It’s imperative that you have a service monitoring tool that can perform root-cause analysis.
3. Define decision criteria.
Once you’ve analyzed the issue, you can now identify decision criteria.
This means setting up criteria that will help you and the client decide how to proceed once it’s time to decide. In this step, you should research and communicate with your client about any standards that you will use. Having a service monitoring tool in place makes it easier for the right people to be notified immediately to resolve the issue.
4. Develop multiple scenarios.
Remember to continue looking for more scenarios. Evaluate all the pros and cons of each scenario and don’t settle on just one solution.
Why? Because better solutions may be available, you just have to dig deeper.
5. Choose the optimal solution.
In this final step, you use the criteria developed in the third step to choose the best solution for the problem. Once you have your optimal solution, you should now consider implementing it using an automation tool. This way, the issue is fixed automatically the next time it occurs.
When you use the five-step problem-solving approach, you save precious time and achieve better solutions.
Most executives want to achieve business profitability faster. In this quest, service monitoring will help them with the following:
- Building and maintaining customer loyalty through transparency
- Increasing service quality and availability
- Improving market reputation
- Attracting new customers
- Increasing sales to existing customers
- Enhancing customer service
- Improving employees’ skills
- Reducing customer complaints
- Reducing personnel costs
- Improving service and business processes
Building a solid foundation for Service Monitoring
Layered architecture for proactive monitoring of Service availability.
The basic and primary goal of a layered architecture such as Ceeview’s is to align the services and business processes with the application and IT infrastructure layer. If you want the best performance, flexibility, and usability level, you can model each layer independently. Finally, you can link them together, visualizing dependencies across the layers for drill-down and impact analysis.
The layers are:
- Service and Business
- Application
- Infrastructure
Service and Business layer
A Service Layer is usually constructed in terms of discrete operations that must be supported for a client. Ceeview’s powerful dependency mapping capabilities allow you to build a detailed business process and service models that help you quickly understand the impact of IT systems failures.
Service monitoring helps you in three levels; resolving outages more effectively, managing incidents effectively, and providing clear communication with those affected by the issue.
Ceeview offers advanced monitoring of your infrastructure and displays outages using customizable role-based dashboards and alerts that give an overview of outages, giving you a 360-degree view of service health.
- Application layer
Ceeview takes a proactive approach to application monitoring by focusing on your customers. This means making sure that your users are getting a great experience with no performance issues and delays. Ceeview uses full-stack application monitoring which helps you identify and resolve application issues quickly.
Finally, Ceeview combines AI with traditional monitoring tools to improve performance. This helps in Application impact analyses which prevents minor issues from turning into major outages.
- Infrastructure layer
Most service monitoring solutions simply report when an infrastructure component has failed.
However, Ceeview goes above and beyond. How? By constantly analyzing the real-time status of all the components your IT services rely on. It uses an advanced health correlation engine and its layered architecture to pinpoint Application and Service problems.
Business and Service impact visualization – Dashboards
Visualization helps you to understand data thoroughly. To get the most out of it, your visualization solution (dashboard) should cover the following:
- It should enable you to identify impacted services quickly. You should be able to visualize the dependencies within the different layers.
- It should be tailored to individual needs. For instance, the solution should be tailored to Service Managers, Administrators, and Customers.
- It should enable you to import and visualize your events, metrics, and KPIs.
- It should have the ability to integrate with 3rd Party Tools.
To sum it up
Using service monitoring across multiple channels, organizations can help their customers make better decisions, services, and processes.
Organizations can learn from their customers and improve their decision-making, services, and processes. Their main priority must be service monitoring, measuring, and managing performance and service quality across multiple channels.
If organizations begin seeing quality service monitoring as a strategic process, they will improve their customer experience, leading to better services.