ITIL® 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value provides guidance on establishing, maintaining, and developing effective service relationships. It leads organizations on a service journey in their service provider and consumer roles, supporting effective interaction and communication.
It is one of four ITIL 4 publications, which build on the concepts introduced in ITIL 4 Foundation. Each of these publications focuses on a different aspect of service management.
Service value is always co-created by users, customers, sponsors, service providers, and any other parties involved in the service. To drive stakeholder value, all stakeholders must contribute to the co-creation of service value throughout the customer journey.
Definition: The Customer journey
The complete end-to-end experience that service customers have with one or more service providers
and/or their products through touchpoints and services interactions.
The ultimate purpose of the customer journey is to create service value; this is the optimal balance of service outcome, resources, and risk.
Customer journeys are important sources for customer experience (CX). Customer experience is the sum of the functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a customer.
Each service consumer is different and should be treated differently. Personas may be used to summarize key characteristics for customer and user archetypes and help the service provider to understand their needs and aspirations.
By following the personas on their journey from touchpoint to touchpoint towards service outcome, a service provider can experience the customer experience first hand. With this insight, combined with design thinking, behavioral psychology, and cultural insight, the service provider will be able to design and master customer journeys that lead to unique customer outcomes and experiences.
The customer journey can be broken into seven steps.
