Service operations consists of working with professional service teams, customer success teams,

customer support teams and customer experience teams.

Like most operations roles, service operations aims to support and amplify a team’s capacity in
addition to helping them scale. This is a challenging role because it requires balancing the needs of
internal stakeholders and external customers.

Most companies might not have a dedicated service operations team to accommodate the day-to-
day need for service operations. Rather, there might be specialists assigned to fulfilling service
operations needs on the company’s business operations or revenue operations team.

One of the core components in service operations is the setup and maintenance of infrastructure
used by the service arm of an organization. That means ensuring not just that the proper tools are in
place to maximize the team’s efficiency, but also that the tech stack is easy for their customers to
realize value from. Plus internal team members need to be able to easily use the tools and systems
in place to create a positive customer experience, monitor customer feedback and progress
customer engagements forward.

In addition to maintaining infrastructure, service operations will help with capturing and reporting
upon metrics around the teams they support, such as time to resolution, tickets closed, how well
services are being delivered, staffing efficiency for teams, customer usage of offerings and the ROI of
all of those functions.

What Tools Do Service Operations Work With?

While the exact tech stack service operations will help manage and optimize will differ depending on
your team structure, it will generally include the following:

Tools for measuring the success and sentiment of customers like feedback surveys and ticketing

Tools for providing self-service support to customers like knowledge bases

Tools for managing your team and their product or service delivery such as project management and
enterprise solution management platforms

Tools for customer communications, such as messaging or chat platforms

Tools for mapping and measuring the customer journey

Billing software that customers interact with

Learn how to satisfy and retain existing customers to scale your business with our Customer Success
Guide.
Ideally, your service operations team should lie parallel to the customer journey and oversee the
process from end-to-end. Thus, they should be assisting with the processes and platforms that
contribute to every touchpoint in that journey.

For example, the onboarding process falls under the umbrella of service operations. The touchpoints
between when a prospect closes as a customer and when onboarding is complete are the bridge
between sales operations and service operations. Setting up relevant internal projects, enrolling
those new customers into workflows, informing internal stakeholders of customer information,
providing customers with an internal point of contact information, integrating any necessary tools
and setting up the billing process are all responsibilities that would fall under service operations;
thus, service operations would use all the tools necessary to accomplish those tasks.

Once onboarding is completed, processes related to collecting feedback about client sentiment also
fall under service operations. For example, service operations would be responsible for ensuring NPS
surveys are sent to the right contacts at the right cadence. Then once a customer responds, there
needs to be automation to take the appropriate next step. For example, if there’s positive feedback,
a workflow might get triggered to notify the people working with that customer of the good news.
On the other hand, a negative survey response would need to trigger an escalation ticket notifying
the employees responsible for that customer’s success and experience to create a response plan.

While the specifics of determining who gets contacted for various outcomes may fall to the
leadership of customer success and service teams, ensuring that each automated step occurs
properly would be the job of service operations.