{"id":4518,"date":"2014-05-27T21:51:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T21:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2014\/05\/27\/itil-customer-facing-vs-supporting-services\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T13:39:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T13:39:47","slug":"itil-customer-facing-vs-supporting-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2014\/05\/27\/itil-customer-facing-vs-supporting-services\/","title":{"rendered":"ITIL Customer-facing vs. supporting services"},"content":{"rendered":"

As an IT Service Provider, according to best practice principles, you should have a list of services you provide. This document is called the Service Catalogue<\/a>, and it\u2019s the first thing you must have in order to be in the business (you can get more information on the topic from our following blog posts:\u00a0Service Catalogue \u2013 a window to the world<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Service Catalogue \u2013 Defining the service<\/a>). Yet, I\u2019ve seen many examples where IT service providers (mostly internal IT departments) don\u2019t follow this practice, and the Service Catalogue is partial, outdated, or completely missing.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s relatively simple to create a Service Catalogue<\/a>, you may notice that each service consists of many parts that have to be individually managed in order to provide the service in question, and which are completely invisible to the customers. And this is the topic of today\u2019s blog post.<\/p>\n

Customer-facing services<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s look at the following example: as a customer, you\u2019ve purchased an e-mail account that consists of a unique e-mail address, the ability to send and receive e-mail messages with other e-mail users, and a certain amount of server storage space in order to save your messages. Once that storage space is full, you lose the ability to send and receive new messages until you delete old messages or purchase more storage space. In the case of any issues with the service, you as a customer will contact service support and expect issue resolution within the guaranteed time frame. These are terms and conditions you accepted when you purchased e-mail service from your favorite e-mail service provider.<\/p>\n

From the service provider\u2019s perspective, e-mail may be just one of the services they provide. They may also provide user environment, an application store, printing service, network service, data protection service, backup and restore service, etc.<\/p>\n

All of these are\u00a0customer-facing services<\/strong>, listed in the Service Catalogue<\/a>, available for end-users to purchase and consume. More importantly, these are the services that the Service Provider provides support for, and are subject of predefined service level agreements (SLAs<\/a> \u2013 related topic:\u00a0SLAs, OLAs and UCs in ITIL and ISO 20000<\/a>).
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