Facing intense market change in the digital era, technology companies must not only accelerate business innovation and continuously refine and launch mature products, but also improve service quality and post-sales operational efficiency. This ensures that customers receive a superior service experience, thereby strengthening business competitiveness.
A leading technology company leveraged the CanWay BlueWhale IT Service Management Center (ITSM) to establish an efficient post-sales service process system and build a customer service management center. This enabled digital post-sales service management and further supported business innovation. This section examines how ITSM can be used to build a post-sales service management system, covering both practical tool implementation and the theoretical process framework.
01 Business Story
The Technical Operations Center of this company is primarily responsible for supporting technical collaboration and assistance requests from numerous frontline project teams, ensuring the smooth operation of products and services. Typically, the center supports dozens of products that serve hundreds of customers, covering areas such as product deployment and troubleshooting. Given the large number of products and extensive customer base, the Technical Operations Center handles dozens of technical support requests daily.
However, due to the lack of professional tools, technicians spend a great deal of time each day on cross-departmental communication and coordination, resulting in low response and resolution efficiency. It directly leads to poor customer satisfaction. At the same time, frontline project teams are under immense pressure from customers, with the overall collaborative chain being lengthy. Despite consuming considerable human resources, it struggles to gain recognition.
Technical Support Process
02 Analysis of Pain Points
The company's customer issue management process primarily relies on WeChat Work and online knowledge base, yet this approach suffers from the following pain points:
Lack of SLA tracking, making it difficult to ensure timely response and resolution
Fragmented channels cause poor collaboration and high communication costs.
Unclear assignment of ticket ownership, leading to a dilemma of “shared responsibility means no responsibility”
Absence of a progress dashboard, hindering effective follow-up on issues
The process should connect customer requests, frontline service delivery, technical support, and product improvement.
03 Solutions
1 From Reactive Support to Proactive Service: Building a Unified Service Management Platform
Serving over 300 technical personnel nationwide, the company has integrated the entire product lifecycle from pre-sales and deployment to maintenance. This company establish the ITR Service Management Center that connects frontline delivery with backend product R&D.
2 ITR Service Practices Based on the ITSM Platform
Drawing on Huawei’s ITR service practices and adapting them to its internal context, the company implemented the approach with the support of CanWay BlueWhale IT Service Management Center (ITSM). By leveraging ITSM process templates based on the ITIL framework and a powerful process orchestration engine, the company rapidly established its ITR Service Management Center.
Note: ITR is a customer service system development methodology and management process proposed by Huawei. ITR stands for Issue to Resolved and is a customer-centric, end-to-end service process that closes the loop from issue identification to resolution. The detailed process is described below.
04 Results Showcase
1 Self-Service Portal to Enhance User Experience
The ITR self-service portal provides convenient self-service access through an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
2 Unified Service Entry to Improve Collaboration Efficiency
Through a unified service entry, access processes are simplified, enabling all related services and approval processes to be handled within the ITR Service Management Center, thereby enhancing cross-departmental collaboration.
3 Visual Workflow Diagrams for Clear and Intuitive Progress Tracking
With the visual workflow diagrams, the progress of issue handling is clearly visible, allowing real time tracking of key stages and steps throughout the resolution process.
4 SLA Timing Reminders to Ensure Timely Resolution
The ITR Service Management Center supports flexible SLA timing reminders, which are triggered at critical stages of task progression to ensure the tickets of service requests, troubleshooting are responded to and resolved within scheduled time.
5 Accurate IT O&M data Statistics to Support Continuous Process Optimization
By analyzing key metrics such as ticket volume and resolution rates, the operational status of after-sales services can be clearly revealed, providing robust data support for making service decisions. This contributes to improved service efficiency and enhanced customer satisfaction.
6 Mobile Integration for Rapid Respons
ITR supports mobile terminal integration, enabling team members to handle tickets anytime and anywhere, thereby accelerating response times.
7 Integration with the R&D Collaboration Platform to Enable DevOps
The company established an R&D collaboration platform, such as the CanWay BlueWhale Agile Collaboration Platform. Project-development requests and defect tickets from the ITR Service Management Center can be transferred automatically to CTeam, enabling efficient information coordination between IT O&M and R&D.
05 Values & Benefits
This enables 100% recording of customer requests with visible progress, while process configuration can be completed within two hours.
The overall incident response time for dedicated second-line support staff has been reduced from an average of 6 hours to 2 hours, with a reduction rate of 67%.
The average issue resolution time has been shortened from 1 week to 3 days, increasing overall resolution efficiency by 43%.
Provides authentic feedback on product quality, enhancing the accuracy of product reviews and providing clear guidance for R&D priorities.
Customer satisfaction has improved significantly, with a 99% repurchase rate for maintenance services.
It provides data for operation statistics, enabling refined operation management. And it quantifies the technical output of service teams, facilitating effective management and assessment.
06 Scenario Applicability
CanWay BlueWhale IT Service Management Center is applicable to scenarios in enterprises and public institutions where users initiate service requests frequently. The ITR Service Management Center is a best practice dedicated to the optimal implementation of after-sales service processes based on CanWay BlueWhale ITR Service Management Center. It is suitable for efficient and standardized issue resolution and customer service management scenarios, including customer service management, product support and maintenance, after-sales service, technical support, and product development and improvement.
07 Disassembling the After-sales Service Management Process – ITR Process (From Problem Identification to Resolution)
The post-sales service management process of the company adopts Huawei's ITR (Issue to Resolution) process practices.
1 What Is ITR
ITR is positioned as end-to-end value workflow that spans from the occurrence of a problem to its complete resolution at company level, while also preventing the recurrence of similar issues. Through efforts such as service standardization, SLA criteria refinement, process streamlining and optimization, enhancement of service organization capabilities, and service productization, ITR focuses on two core objectives:
Enhance professionalism, efficiency, and service competitiveness to drive product sales.
Reduce costs and increase effectiveness, shifting from reactive to proactive service and transforming service from a cost center into a profit center.
2 The Process of ITR
The ITR process enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty, drives continuous repurchase and incremental orders, advances the productization of enterprise services, and transforms service offerings into new growth drivers and profit centers for the organization.
Needs of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM):
From production to sales, products are continuously improved through service-based feedback on issues.
Enhance stability and reliability
Reflect real market demands
Requirements of Project Management (PMO):
Project delays lead to higher management costs, ultimately affecting business revenue.
Process management of project delivery
Cost management of project maintenance
Goals of Customer Success (CS):
The product experience during usage directly impacts customer satisfaction and influences long-term customer engagement.
Ensure reliability of production environments
Management of customer satisfaction
ITR Process Framework Diagram
Incident Management Process: Restore normal IT service operation promptly, ensure service stability, monitor and optimize the entire handling process, restore service as quickly as possible within cost constraints, and improve user satisfaction.
Change Management Process: Ensure that changes are recorded, assessed, planned, tested, implemented, and reviewed in a controlled manner. Eliminate or reduce change-related risks and minimize the impact on customers and users.
Problem Management Process: Proactively analyze incidents to identify and eliminate their root causes, thereby reducing or preventing the recurrence of faults. Improve service quality and reliability.
Request Management Process: Handle all service requests initiated by users within the agreed scope to support the defined service quality and achieve business objectives.
3 The Design Concept of ITR
Identify key requirements for post-sales service
Establish rules for key process activities and their inputs and outputs;
A cross-functional integration mechanism connects customer service, technical support, R&D, and management so that information, decisions, and actions flow efficiently across the entire service lifecycle.
