Many partners, especially those who specialize in specific competencies, may not appreciate the value of having asset management integrated into their service deliver strategy. This deliverable will focus on that.

Service Managers know that perhaps the most important tool they have is information.

Information about their customers. Information about the technologies they support. Information about needed resources. Information about their history with each customer. Information about the equipment their customers depend upon every day.

Increasing Integration

The heart of managing all that information lies in the IT Service Management (ITSM) system they use. While ITSM may stand for Information Technology Service Management, it also includes straightforward information management. When a customer requests service, you want as much information as possible at your fingertips to determine their entitlement to the requested service, the serial number and history of the unit under repair to facilitate parts ordering, and as much data as possible about the configuration, and more.

This requires integration. Not just service management functions but customer care, scheduling, performance monitoring, and installed base asset management.

Without integrating asset management, call agents are forced to look up needed information while the customer is holding on the line. This can cause tremendous delay and damage the customer’s experience of your service. The faster you can access more data the better. So when asset management data is integrated along with customer data and contract data you have pretty much everything you need to take every request in as quickly and efficiently as possible. And, yes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression!

Advancing Automation

More and more product sources are becoming enabled to share new product data with the AOM portal. As new products are being drop-shipped to a customer, the model number, serial number, and other particulars for each unit are transmitted directly into your database and available the very next time the customer calls about that unit, or you want to proactively arrange preventative maintenance.