ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder ValueThe Seven Steps of the Customer Journey

It’s crucial to know what your customers want and need – and to deliver that value as effectively, efficiently, and rapidly as possible. That’s why it’s essential to not just create and deliver well-managed IT-enabled services, but to also develop and sustain strong relationships with all internal and external stakeholders.

The ITIL® 4 framework, particularly the last course to be launched in the Managing Professional (MP) stream  – the ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value certification course – has been specifically designed to enable you do this.

What Does Drive Stakeholder Value Mean?

The core concept behind the ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value certification course is to convert demand into value through IT-enabled services. To drive stakeholder value, all stakeholders – inclusive of users, customers, sponsors, service providers, and any other parties involved in the service – must contribute to the co-creation of service value.

The structure that facilitates this collaborative creation of value is the customer journey – the complete end-to-end experience that customers have with service providers and/or their products through specific touchpoint’s and service interactions. For example, the act of subscribing to a virtual server from a public cloud service provider is a touchpoint within a customer’s journey. Researching and then subscribing to the service, integrating it, and getting it up and running in the service consumer’s organisation would constitute the full journey as the service consumer sees it.

The customer journey can be broken down into seven steps…

The Seven Steps of the Customer Journey

1. Explore – understand markets and stakeholders. The customer journey often begins before the service provider and service consumer have established a relationship because both parties may already be ascertaining their respective needs and market opportunities.
2. Engage – foster relationships. An important precondition for co-creating value through services is a functioning relationship between the service provider, service consumer, and other stakeholders.
3. Offer – shape demand and service offerings. Both parties should build a business case and articulate, shape, and match their demand and supply in the form of requirements and service offerings.
4. Agree – align expectations and agree service. It is crucial to align expectations, plan value co-creation and tracking, and agree on the service scope and quality before investing.
5. Onboard – get on board or leave the journey. Whether the parties come to an agreement or not, they must undergo a transition that involves the integration or separation of both parties’ resources.
6. Co-create – provide and consume. The service consumer makes use of accessible service provider resources, consumes the goods provided, and acts together with the service provider to co-create value based on the agreed service offerings.
7. Realise – capture value and improve. Value must be tracked and driven based on the value co-creation planning, and improvements must be applied to continually maintain and increase the service value.

Mastering the customer journey helps to maximise stakeholder value through co-creation by focusing on and understanding both customer and user outcomes and experiences.

Learn More about the Seven Steps of the Customer Journey
The three-day ITIL Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value certification course discusses the main steps of a customer journey, providing guidance on how to co-create the most valuable journey. The course agenda concentrates on key ITIL 4 practices that include relationship management, portfolio management, service request management, business relationship management, and more.

Pink’s certification courses are available as live, instructor-led virtual public courses; live, instructor-led virtual team courses (exclusive to your organisation); or through self-paced online courses.

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