Introduction

The Business Relationship Management process falls in the Service Strategy phase of the ITIL® (2011) lifecycle. The process owner for this is the Business Relationship Manager (BRM), who acts as a representative of the business to the IT organization and conversely as a representative of the IT organization to the business. It is a dual role.

When IT services are outsourced to external service providers, the BRM role becomes very prominent and critical. Usually, the BRM is appointed by the service provider organization, and in certain organization setups, one BRM may be assigned to multiple customers. When IT services are provided in-house, the role of the BRM is less prominent, but still necessary. In this case, the BRM will need to have more knowledge about the business and be able to make more DECISIONS related to the business.

1. When we talk of the ‘customer’, who are we referring to?

In the world of IT, the ‘customer’ refers to the business. In an outsourcing scenario the customer to the IT service provider could be the IT department of the organization that is outsourcing the services. Because of the transitive nature of the customer – provider relationship, we tend to always call the contracting party as the customer.

If we take a ‘macro’ view, then the customer is the final consumer of the service. Good service providers take this macro view – this helps in innovation even within the domain of an existing service.

E.g. in the case of a citizen services portal, the customer for the IT company developing the portal is the local government (e.g. the local council or municipality), but in the broader perspective, every citizen using the portal is a customer.

To reduce the confusion, it is better to distinguish the two entities as follows: the customer is the entity that the IT service provider is contracted with. This entity provides the requirements for the service design and the service provider is bound by IT Service Level Agreements to this entity. The end consumer is the user, and possibly there are business SLAs that bind the customer to the user. E.g. a resolution time of 24 hours to a complaint logged by the user of an Internet broadband service.

2. What are the duties of a Business Relationship Manager (BRM)?

The Business Relationship Manager (BRM) is a ‘customer-focused’ role. They manage relationships with the existing customers and engage in establishing a meaningful and effective working relationship with the customers. They are also responsible for managing new opportunities of providing new IT services to existing customers and to newer customers.

BRMs are responsible for ensuring that the outcomes of a provided IT service meet the requirements of the customer. They may need to explain the achieved outcome using the business jargon of the customer. This IMPLIES that they may need to understand the technical aspects of the service as well as the business of the customer.

Any complaints related to the IT services are always routed through the BRM or at least keeping him informed. He is accountable for ensuring that the complaint is addressed promptly by the service operations teams and will provide updates post-fix. Complaints have a wide range – shortfall of service levels, shortage of manpower, re-opening of an incident or too many of them, improper Service Desk communication etc. Periodically, the BRM must initiate a Customer Satisfaction Survey and follow-up on the satisfaction ratings received.

BRMs are also known by other names – Account Managers, Business Representatives and Sales Managers.

3. A customer has been renewing the contract with you every year for the past 10 years due to excellent services you are providing. Do you need to assign a BRM?

Yes, absolutely.

When we talk about the BRM role being responsible for managing the relationship, this extends to more than just ‘wining and dining’ with the customer!

Having a relationship means that there is a continuous dialogue between the customer and the service provider. While the CONTENT may vary across relationships, there are a few basic topics that must be addressed on a continuous basis and not just at the time of adding new services or during contract renewal. A BRM must make himself aware of the latest situation within the customer organization, and correlate this with any service that is currently provided. Is any change necessary? Being the representative of a technology service provider, he may also educate the customer about the latest technology and its usage in similar industries.

Without a BRM from the service provider, the customer may be clueless regarding how to make a formal complaint for the contracted services – if a BRM has kept a proper working relationship, then many complaints may get redressed prior to escalating. The BRM must also work with the customer to set up a ‘satisfaction’ survey at regular intervals. Apart from the formal aspect of filling up a form, a lot of feedback may be gathered informally in casual conversations. Such feedback helps in keeping the services well-aligned to the expectations and ensures that the customer does not consider any other competing service provider organization.

4. The customer satisfaction survey results are low. As a BRM, what would be your next steps? 

Low customer satisfaction ratings are usually a big topic at any service providing organization. The first step is to of course analyse the ratings and the comments if provided. If enough justifying comments have not been provided, then the BRM should contact the customer and set up a meeting to understand more. Here is where many organizations get it wrong. They end up asking

‘why the ratings are low?’ instead of asking questions about the service quality.

The BRM must be the person at the centre of this conversation. I have seen operations teams getting defensive, and worse, aggressive with the customer. This should be avoided, as it only takes the relationship towards a downward spiral. The defence, if any, should be based on facts – like the service level metrics that have been collected throughout the duration of the service provision. The BRM should first check if any customer complaints had occurred, and redressed.

Sometimes, customers may have expected more service improvements as opposed to just ‘keeping the lights on’, especially when the services are stable. They would say that they would no longer rate highly only for managing the business-as-usual, but would like to see more value being delivered through problem management, root-cause analyses, automated releases etc.

Creating a forum for having such conversations should be done all along and not just after the satisfaction survey and is the responsibility of the BRM. A low rating may also indicate that this has not happened before, and therefore, a failure on the part of the BRM.

5. The customer satisfaction survey is excellent. As a BRM, how can you add further value?

Yes, absolutely.

Let us assume that you have received a customer satisfaction rating at 4 out of 5, 5 being the best. While this may be a great score, there is still a room for improvement, to try and achieve a 5 by 5. As with most of the things in the real world, it may be easier to climb the lower ratings than the higher ones – so moving from a 4 to 5 is far more difficult than, say, moving from 2 to 3.

Most people who engaged in service transition and operations could tell that a 98.98% response time adherence is better than a 97%, but what if you have been consistently meeting the 98.98% mark over the last 6 months? It means that your STANDARDS have gone up, people have become more productive and committed. That’s all good news, but what if you realise upon investigation that 80% of your incidents are repeat, and the people have just become too good at resolving them – they could literally resolve incidents with their eyes closed, right? Now, as a BRM, think if that is indeed a great way to achieve a 4 of 5 rating? Are you really protecting the interests of the customer? Not really.

So, you need to take some steps – e.g. asking the customer for some investment for making a change to the application code – stating that this could possibly mean a lower support cost. Show them the ROI.

Well, this is just an example; but as a BRM, you need to continuously seek ways to better satisfy your customer by offering value-adds. Maybe you shall reach that number of 5 out of 5!

6. Can you measure the Business Relationship Management process?

Like other processes in ITIL, the Business Relationship Management process can also be measured and the BRM has KPIs too.

The most obvious is the number of customer complaints that were accepted for redressal. Lesser the better! We can also measure the number of appreciations that have some in – of course, in this case more is better. There may be specific situations where skilful relationship management saves a complaint. These are harder to measure but must go to the credit of the BRM.

There can be other customer complaints that are not accepted. This is a tricky metric, as often BRMs will label a customer as ‘a difficult customer’ when the latter keeps complaining, whether justified or not. Many organizations may not measure this at all, but there may be subtle reasons behind an ‘ever-complaining’ customer, that the BRM must investigate.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSS) are yet another source of relationship management information. The rating itself is a KPI, of course, and the higher they are, the better. For existing customers, consider the trend over time – is it changing for better or for the worse. A couple of more subtle CSS metrics are the number of surveys conducted and the number of responses that are received. A higher number of conducted surveys indicate the proactiveness of the BRM. The latter is a little more complex and interpretations vary. Mine is that a customer is likely to be enthusiastic about responding to a survey when he is enthusiastic about the services and the service provider. Now, the BRM has a lot to contribute to build that enthusiasm.

7. What is the purpose and the value add of Business Relationship Management?

The Business Relationship Management process is a part of the Service Strategy phase in the ITIL Lifecycle. Interestingly, this process was only included in the 2011 release of the ITIL.

The purpose of this process is to identify the specific needs of the customer and be able to distinguish such needs across customers. An effective working relationship between the customer and the provider must persist throughout the duration of the service provisioning. Understanding the needs is important, but it is equally important that the service provider engages in explaining the value of the service offerings they already make, or can make in the future, should the customer agree to pay for the same. Business Relationship Management also puts in place the checks that enable both the customer and the service provider to consider that they understand the needs and offerings before the contract is signed and the services delivered.

Where the Business Relationship Management process adds value is in aiding the service operations teams, e.g. the application or the technical management teams to focus on day-to-day activities that require expertise and ensures alignment and provides a big picture view when necessary.

8. What are the objectives of Business Relationship Management?

The Business Relationship Management process is a part of the Service Strategy phase in the ITIL Lifecycle and this exists with the purpose of providing effective collaboration between the service provider and their customers.

The most important objective of this process is to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction throughout the engagement. This is to ensure that the business with the customer is sustainable on a long-term. Whenever necessary, customer requests for services must be catered to and newer services added to the portfolio may be proactively offered to customers.

The Business Relationship Management process ensures that the service provider organization recognizes the changes in the customer environment as well as industry-wide changes in technology that could possibly impact the services that they offer to the customers. E.g. as the industry shifts to cloud-based solutions, a service provider may develop some capability in this space and present this as an offering to an existing customer whose data centre it currently manages.

The Business Relationship Management process should also have provision to engage the appropriate stakeholders in dialogue and amicably resolve any service escalations through conflict management techniques.

9. Can you describe the high-level activities for managing your IT service strategy?

The IT Service strategy is the centrepiece around which service design, transition and operations revolves. Hence it is very important to define and perform the service strategy activities with careful planning and utmost rigor.

First, you need to identify and define the market where you want to make your offerings. You need to understand the customers in this market and what opportunities they present to you. Different customers will have different needs, even when they are building similar products – that is because their business mission is different. You need to be able to classify these needs and opportunities and visualize them – so that you can develop your offerings accordingly.

Using the visualization of the opportunities that you have, you need to start making a SKETCH as to how you want to offer your services – scan your existing service catalogue, find out if the outcome of an existing service would fulfil the desired outcome for the new market – most likely, tweaking would be needed, or a complete new service would need to be built.

Both tweaking and building a new service capability requires investment, and therefore, this is a decision that senior management must take with inputs from the BRM. Upon implementation, new service assets will be created. These services will now be included in the service catalogue and the cycle will repeat from here on. This is the closed loop of Service Management in service strategy.

10. A BRM may request for multiple reports from the Service Transition and Service Operations organization. What will be most useful?

The BRM must be kept in the loop regarding the ongoing service transitions and operations. In most service provider organizations, this will be achieved by defining suitable communication channels as a part of the service design.

However, while there may be a specialised department in large service providing organisations, the BRM for a customer is an individual with limited capacity for processing information. Often BRMs may handle more than one customer.

The relevant information about service transitions will be related to the change management – how many changes went live, the pipeline, how many changes had to be backed out or remediated, and a high-level summary of the post-implementation review findings. Information regarding the skills and capability of the service provider resources is also useful as it provides the assurance to the customer about service stability. E.g. experience levels of subject matter experts, technology trainings provided.

Information and metrics about the Service Operations processes may include the incident and service request trends, service level adherence reports, major incident reports and any automation efforts for better event management.

BRMs should also have all the information regarding to customer complaints, the current statuses on the complaints, the estimated time to complete (ETA, ETC) and the lessons learnt. They should not just have the current data, but also relevant historical data and the context of such data at their disposal. Often BRMs will present their own dashboards using the above information when they engage with the customer.