CSP S3 E5 -Kevin Metzger - Your Service is Your Product

In this compelling episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, Kevin Metzger presents a transformative perspective on service delivery, framing it as a product rather than just a process. This paradigm shift enables organizations to apply proven customer success methodologies to their service delivery framework, ensuring consistency, scalability, and enhanced value delivery.

Detailed Analysis

Kevin Metzger delves deep into the concept of treating service delivery as a product, emphasizing that for service-based companies, the delivery mechanism itself is the product being sold to customers. This innovative approach allows organizations to leverage established customer success concepts such as customer journey mapping, ideal customer profiles, and product fit within their service delivery framework.

The discussion highlights several critical components of successful service delivery:

1. Standardized Operating Procedures: Establishing consistent frameworks for customer interactions, reporting structures, and billing processes creates a repeatable and scalable service delivery model.
2. Onboarding Excellence: Drawing from insights shared by industry experts Donna Weber and Melissa Caldwell, the episode emphasizes the importance of structured onboarding as a crucial service delivery function.
3. Custom Delivery Within Framework: While deliverables may be customized for individual clients, they should operate within a defined methodology that ensures consistent quality and outcomes.
4. Communication Patterns: The importance of establishing clear communication protocols and ensuring all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities in the service delivery process.

The episode concludes with a preview of an upcoming discussion about the role of AI and agents in enhancing service delivery, suggesting exciting developments in the field.

This strategic approach to service delivery provides organizations with a scalable, measurable, and refined methodology that can be continuously improved to deliver increasing value to clients.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, and welcome back to the Customer Success

Kevin Metzger: 0:02

Playbook Podcast.

0:08

I'm your host, Roman Trebon, and this is our second mini episode of the week with our guest and my co host, Kevin Metzger. On Monday, Kevin shared his number one tip for driving team building success. It was all about communication. It was a great episode. So if you haven't listened, go back and check it out. Today is a Wednesday, and that means it's time for our one big question segment. Kevin, welcome back.

Kevin Metzger: 0:33

Thanks, Roman. Excited to be here again. It's nice being a guest on our show. Table's kind of sitting on the other side of the seat.

0:41

I'm excited to dive into this week's one big question. And the big question for the week is how do you

Kevin Metzger: 0:47

look at service delivery? Yeah, Roman, I look at service delivery as your product. If you're a company that does service delivery, that is your product, how you deliver your services and the consistency in which you do it is what you are selling to your customers. So if that's the case, then you got to look at service delivery and look at that product from a customer success perspective. And when we talk about customer success, we talk about the customer journey. We talk about the ideal customer profile. We talk about product fit. Well, All of that applies to service delivery. You know, a lot of these terms come out of other areas of the business. Part of the reason they come out of the other areas of the business, because there are terms that were defined for, uh, whether it's service delivery or for product management or whatever it is, they were defined there. And then we adopted them and said, Hey, this is our functional area of customer success, and we're adopting them into the functional area of customer success. And so you can look at service delivery as a product and define customer success around service delivery in the same way. What does it mean when you define a service delivery as a product? Well, an easy way to kind of look at it, if you're coming at it from a true product perspective is looking at the onboarding piece, right? Onboarding is a service delivery function. You know, when we talked with Donna Weber and Melissa Caldwell, they did a good job of defining how to look at onboarding from customer success perspective, um, defining all of the pieces that you want to look at when you, the structure in your service delivery, you need to have consistency in how you meet with the customer, how you define your reports, how you. Perform with your billing, how you perform with invoicing approval, all of this is part of the service that you're providing to the customer and doing that in a consistent manner and ensuring that your SLA is are moving forward. They're all. There are, are, are being achieved and that you're reporting on them the right way. They're all ways of driving a product definition around your service. And a lot of times people say, well, but wait a second for service delivery. A lot of our, our. Deliverables are custom to a customer. Well, yeah, they are custom to the customer, but they fall within that framework that we've been discussing, right? They fall within, Hey, when we define our customer objective upfront and when we define our customer objective upfront, we then move into our initial kickoff meetings and in our kickoff meetings, we talk about what the deliverables are going to look like and what the reporting structure is going to look like. And we make sure that everybody's on board with that. And we make sure that we've got. All of the right people assigned to the correct areas. And everybody knows all the communication patterns that are going to happen. If you have all that defined in a standardized operating procedure for how you deliver your services, you've now got a Product that you can sell into any customer around the services that you deliver for if it's technical, if it's consulting, whatever it is, you've got a delivery methodology and you're selling that delivery methodology regardless of what you're packaging it around. That's my answer to the one big question. What is service delivery?

4:25

No, I like it, Kevin. And I like you talking about service delivery as a product, right? I mean, I think if you have that, if you treat it like a product and you actually productize it, it's the same thing. If you had a system, right, you you're measuring, you're refining, you're scaling it, you're continuously offering value to clients. That value can have different offerings. So I love that. That's the one big question. I'm excited for Friday, Kev. Because on Friday, you're coming back for our third episode where you're going to talk about how AI and agents are really going to take this to the next level. What's coming, uh, moving forward when it comes to AI, Kev, I loved our one big question, deep dive. On Friday again, we'll wrap up this three part series by talking. Kevin's going to share how AI is going to assist in service delivery and what you can expect this year. I'm excited for that, Kevin and everyone. Thanks for listening. And as always, Kev, I'm turning it over to you. Keep on playing.