Service Management is founded, like most endeavours, on the “eternal triangle” of People, Process, Technology. Perception Management focuses on the People part.

To be successful we must take a structured approach :


1. Step One – Understand what your customer values.
2. Step Two - Set and communicating expectations. Not just for the customers, but for staff within the service infrastructure.
3. Step Three – Define the service culture within the infrastructure responsible for delivering it.
4. Step Four – Develop a partnership mentality.
5. Step Five – Monitor Perceptions and adjust services and processes where necessary






























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Perception Management in IT Service

Perception Management is the process of ensuring that our customers’ perception of the service is positive. It has a distant relationship to the “spin doctoring” of advertising and politics but it is not, as some might fear, about lying to our customers. In our professional environment, it is actually about being honest with them and ensuring that they in turn are honest with us.

Example One
Perception Management is required by many of the IT Service Management functions. Take for instance the Help Desk, which advertises itself as “the single point of contact for IT Service issues, responsible in the event of service failure for the restoration of the service to the customer”. If there is an extended failure of a service, the customers’ perception may now be that the Help Desk service is poor. Since Help Desk staff are unlikely to have the training and experience to resolve complex system or application errors, they will take the blame and be perceived to have failed.

The ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) guidelines for the Help Desk use the phrase “responsible for overseeing, on behalf of the customer, the restoration of service.” Now our customers’ perception may change subtly – the Help Desk is performing an intermediary service for the customer; between the customer and the customers supplier. The service will be perceived as “good” if the Help Desk staff are good intermediaries (which we select and train them to be); they will be judged less for their resolution of complex problems.

Example Tips
A second example is the completion of problem resolution or the installation of new software & hardware. Often a service is considered poor because the customer was not kept informed of the efforts being made or never advised of the likely period required to perform the activities needed. Consider the analogy of taking a car to a garage. The owner will have an expectation that the car will be ready at a given time and perceive poor service if it is not, regardless of the complexity of the problems discovered by the garage. In both cases, setting realistic timescales and keeping to them is more important to the customers’ perception than the absolute timescale.

The goal of Perception Management has to be seen as “Continually Satisfied Customers”. The key perception that we wish is that we are the best supplier of service for our customer.

The basis of Perception Management
It is advisable to consider a definition of customer perception. Perception is "what is believed to be”. Therefore customer perception is what customers believe. Many Service Managers accept that customer perception is the major factor in service evaluation - but a great deal of them do little to influence it and may, by accident, do a great deal to harm it. The simple theory is that if a customer perceives a service to be a "good" service, then to all intents and purposes it is - equally true if the perception is that it is "poor".

If we wish to manage perceptions, we must understand why they are formed. Good perceptions are formed when humans compare their ‘model’ of an environment with a given situation and find a close match. Their ‘model’ may be up-to-date or it may be an extrapolation based upon a known state and applying rules they have learnt through experience. So to have a positive affect on perceptions we can do two things :

The easier of the two might seem to be to ensure that customers are informed of the correct ‘model’ – our ‘model’. Short of a Sci-Fi brain injection this would be difficult. Patently, our service cannot follow every ‘model’ so Perception Management is the art of bringing the two as close together as is possible.

Common Mistake Number 1
There exists a careful path to tread. One common mistake is to introduce Account Managers as a ‘fix’ to poor perceptions. The idea being that a personal contact will improve the perception of the service. These staff are often tasked with determining the business requirements of individual departments and negotiating Service Level Agreements with them, sometimes with the freedom to use external suppliers as well as internal suppliers.

I often see, as result of this, a Service Level Agreement forced on the internal service providers which sets out the expectations of the customer completely but with irrelevant or impossible targets and the most stringent of morale-sapping penalty clauses. The customers’ model has been accepted without debate and when the resulting service cannot match it, their perception of it will be “poor” despite the introduction of the Account Managers. The role of Account Managers is I believe necessary but must be viewed in concert with the needs of the service organization.

Pitfall Number 2
Second pitfall is excessive “spinning”. We have all seen examples of service we know to be poor being passed off as acceptable – from the taxi driver who tells us that the traffic is making them late, to the restaurant that tells us that they don’t serve chips because they aren’t good for us and the hand-driers that claim to be “for our convenience”.

Our customers are intelligent. They will have experienced what they perceive as “good” service or know others who have. We must explain and “sell” our services but equally we must strive to make sure that they are effective, efficient and what our customer needs and wants.

The simple fact that perception rules all is true. It is also true that a there is a simple set of Perception Management actions that will allow Service Managers to control an honest and positive customer perception.

Step One – Understanding
What pleases and displease my customer ? Is that fair ? Do I need to change this ? How can I change this ? Do I want to change this ?

Most customers prize accuracy of estimates far above the absolute value. “I can manage a 3-day delay – if you tell me now. Don’t promise 2 days and then be late”.

Which affects their perception of good service more, service hours or service failures ? What does your operations department set out to manage better, service extensions or service recovery ?

The best understanding comes from open discussion with each customer, to understand his or her values. Surveys can be useful but closed questions can give misleading answers and the answers to open questions are difficult to collate and analyse.

Step Two - Setting and Communicating Expectations
When attempting to set expectations we must be aware of the gap between what we can offer and what our customer wants. We cannot attempt to set their expectations far below their wants and still expect a positive perception. However, any service guarantees we offer must only be based on what we know we can do now. This may mean meeting minimum requirements now and agreeing a plan to meet our customers full needs as soon as possible. The customer does not care, and in some cases need not know, how we will deliver the service as long as it is delivered to the set expectation.

The expectations we set should cover all aspects of the service - IT system performance, problem resolution, change implementation, service review, reporting. This is not to say that this must all be recorded in an SLA (Service Level Agreement) but it is important to find out how our customer values each of these elements of service. Their final perception will be based on a combination of these factors.

Communicating the expectations can take many forms. The most common is through meetings and presentations but to be sure of lasting effect, some form of documentation is advised. The “How to use the Help Desk” brochure commonly seen is an ideal two-way record of expectation. It tells the Help Desk analyst what the customer expects (e.g. hours of operation, likely resolution times) and it tells the customer what the Help Desk expects (e.g. terminal ID, business impact statement).

Step Three – Creating the Service Culture
The Service Culture has to set the norm as “understanding and meeting the expectation”. If the expectation is different form the level of service normally provided and recorded, we may have to meet the expectation now and then seek to address the discrepancy later. At the very least we have to identify immediately that the expectation differs from the agreed service if we are to avoid a poor perception - “well, they fixed it eventually but I had to fight” rather than “ I realised that the request wasn’t standard but they were able to provide an acceptable response”.

Staff and managers alike have to understand the real meaning of empowerment. Staff must accept responsibilities for delivering the service, for meeting agreed targets, to take necessary actions to meet those targets without having to ratify all decisions with managers where those actions confirm their own expected levels of skill and knowledge. Managers, in turn, must display trust in their staff and allow them to make the decisions their skill and knowledge entitle them to do. Also, to encourage growth of staff by involving them in decisions about future strategy and to encourage a thirst for knowledge of the technology, processes and people (customers and colleagues) that can only enhance the overall service.

A caution here: an individual who over excels in service on one occasion may unwittingly set an expectation that cannot be met on another occasion or by other parts of the infrastructure. For example, the problem solver who makes a personal visit to a customer as a "special favour" or the help desk agent who will stay after normal hours to contact customers with information regarding less than vital problems. Whilst very commendable at a personal level, Perception Management must control and limit this. Along with building Service Level Agreements that set responsibilities for both customers and providers, flexible approaches to stimulate the cultural growth should be developed. Service managers must also decide which internal staff to train (and in what) and where partnerships with external resources are better suited to delivering key services. Costs, of course, will play a significant role in this decision, but the biggest potential cost is the cost of poor customer perception.

It is not enough that individuals and individual departments know their role: all parts of the infrastructure must know how to support each other and maintain the customer perception.

Step Four – Creating Partnerships
To ensure that we can manage customers’ perceptions of our service to them, we have to control all parts of that service and this requires three types of partnerships: