Business Relationship Management
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Overview
Objective: Business Relationship Management aims to maintain a positive relationship with customers. ITIL Business Relationship Management identifies the needs of existing and potential customers and ensures that appropriate services are developed to meet those needs.
Part of: Service Strategy
Process Owner: Business Relationship Manager
Process Description
Business Relationship Management has been introduced as a new process in ITIL 2011. The latest guidance places customer satisfaction surveys and the management of complaints as part of Business Relationship Management. As a result, the corresponding processes have been moved from Continual Service Improvement to Business Relationship Management. The process overview of ITIL Business Relationship Management (.JPG) is showing the most important interfaces (see Figure 1).
The role Business Relationship Manager has been introduced in ITIL 2011 to perform the activities in the Business Relationship Management process.
Sub-Processes
These are the Business Relationship Management sub-processes and their process objectives:
- Maintain Customer Relationships
- Process Objective: To ensure that the service provider continues to understand the needs of existing customers and establishes relationships with potential new customers. This process is also responsible for maintaining the Customer Portfolio.
- Identify Service Requirements
- Process Objective: To understand and document the desired outcome of a service, and to decide if the customer's need can be fulfilled using an existing service offering or if a new or changed service must be created.
- Sign up Customers to Standard Services
- Process Objective: To capture customer requirements and agree service level targets with customers who request the provision of existing standard services (no modifications to existing Supporting Services are necessary in order to fulfill the customer's needs).
- Customer Satisfaction Survey
- Process Objective: To plan, carry out and evaluate regular customer satisfaction surveys. The principal aim of this process is to learn about areas where customer expectations are not being met before customers are lost to alternative service providers.
- Handle Customer Complaints
- Process Objective: To record customer complaints and compliments, to assess the complaints and to instigate corrective action if required.
- Monitor Customer Complaints
- Process Objective: To continuously monitor the processing status of outstanding customer complaints and to take corrective action if required.
Definitions
The following ITIL terms and acronyms (information objects) are used in ITIL Business Relationship Management to represent process outputs and inputs:
- Complaint Status Information
- A message containing the present status of a complaint, typically sent to a customer who earlier made a complaint.
- Complaints and Compliments
- Complaints and compliments from the customer side which are addressed in the Business Relationship Management process.
- Complaints Log
- The Complaints Log contains the full history of all received customer complaints, complete with activities triggered by those complaints.
- Customer Portfolio
- The Customer Portfolio is used to record all customers of the IT service provider. The Customer Portfolio is the Business Relationship Manager’s view of the customers who receive services from the IT service provider.
- Customer Survey Questionnaire
- A questionnaire for surveying customer satisfaction, aimed at getting insight into overall customer satisfaction and customers' views on specific (aspects of) services.
- Customer Survey Response
- The response to a service provider's customer survey, typically a completed questionnaire.
- Desired Service Outcomes
- The desired outcomes of a service, stated in the language of the customer. Based on this information, more detailed documents are created to specify the requirements in the service provider's language.
- Outline of Service Requirements
- The desired outcome of a service, stated in terms of required service functionality (utility) and service levels (warranty). Based on this information, detailed service requirements are specified during the Service Design stage.
KPIs
Roles | Responsibilities
- Business Relationship Manager - Process Owner
- The Business Relationship Manager is responsible for maintaining a positive relationship with customers, identifying customer needs and ensuring that the service provider is able to meet these needs with an appropriate catalogue of services. The Business Relationship Manager works closely with the Service Level Manager.
- Customer
- Someone who buys IT services. The Customer of an IT service provider is the person or group who defines and agrees the service level targets.
| Responsibility Matrix: Business Relationship Management | ||
| ITIL Role | Sub-Process | Business Relationship Manager | 1st Level Support[3] |
|---|---|---|
| Maintain Customer Relationships | A[1]R[2] | |
| Identify Service Requirements | AR | - |
| Sign up Customers to Standard Services | AR | - |
| Customer Satisfaction Survey | AR | - |
| Handle Customer Complaints | AR | R |
| Monitor Customer Complaints | AR | - |
Remarks
[1] A: Accountable according to the RACI Model: Those who are ultimately accountable for the correct and thorough completion of the ITIL Business Relationship Management process.
[2] R: Responsible according to the RACI Model: Those who do the work to achieve a task within Business Relationship Management.
[3] see → Role descriptions
