After three decades navigating the complexities of organizational resilience, one truth stands clearer than ever: you cannot truly protect what you do not deeply understand. And for any business, especially in today's dynamic landscape, what you do is ultimately about what you do for your customers. There is something that I see insufficiently matured or missing in many companies: building a comprehensive “service map.”
Think about it. We pour resources into product development, marketing, and sales, yet how often do we collectively pause to articulate, across all departments, exactly what services we provide to our customers? It sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, the reality is typically a fragmented understanding, siloed information, and a distinct lack of a holistic view, except by a few key people.
Why is this clear view so critical? Because your customers don't interact with your internal departments; they interact with your services. They don't care about your organizational chart; they care about how seamlessly you meet their needs. Without a clear service map, you have blind spots. You miss opportunities for optimization, you introduce friction into customer journeys, and critically, you compromise your ability to recover when things go wrong. Resilience isn't just about bouncing back; it's about understanding what's truly essential to protect your customer relationships.
Let's make this real.
What services do banks offer? It’s far more than just “banking.” They provide:
Retail Banking: Current accounts, savings accounts, debit/credit cards, personal loans, mortgages.
Investment Services: Wealth management, brokerage, mutual funds, pension products.
Business Banking: Corporate loans, treasury services, payroll solutions, trade finance.
Digital Services: Online banking platforms, mobile apps, and payment gateways.
Advisory Services: Financial planning, retirement planning, and estate planning.
Let's hone in on an often complex offering: a pension savings product where you contribute monthly. This isn't just a “product” on a shelf; it's a living, breathing service with a distinct customer journey.
Imagine the customer journey for this:
Customer Initiates Payment (or Automated Process Triggers): On the designated payment date, a SEPA Direct Debit instruction is initiated, pulling funds from the customer's linked bank account.
Funds Transfer & Clearance: The funds travel through interbank networks, cleared and settled between the customer's bank and the financial institution’s holding accounts.
Internal Reconciliation & Allocation: Upon receipt, the funds are reconciled against the customer's pension account number and allocated to their specific pension product.
Investment Instruction: Based on the product's pre-defined investment strategy (e.g., a balanced fund, equity fund), an instruction is generated to purchase units in the underlying investments.
Market Execution: The instruction is sent to the relevant trading desks or automated systems, which execute the purchase of shares, bonds, or other assets on the stock market at prevailing market prices.
Confirmation & Update: Once the trade is settled, the customer's pension account is updated to reflect the new units purchased and the updated total value, often visible via an online portal or statement.
For every single step in this service, your organization needs robust capabilities to make these steps visible and resilient to all stakeholders who “work around that service.” This isn't just for IT; it's for compliance, operations, customer service, and even marketing.
Let's look at the same for a realtor company specializing in rental properties:
Service Map for property owners and landlords:
Property Listing & Marketing: Creating professional listings, photography, virtual tours, and advertising on various platforms (online portals, social media, and local networks).
Tenant Sourcing & Vetting: Conducting viewings, screening potential tenants (credit checks, employment verification, previous landlord references), and background checks.
Lease Agreement Management: Drafting, negotiating, and executing legally compliant rental contracts.
Property Maintenance & Repairs Coordination: Arranging routine maintenance, coordinating emergency repairs with vetted contractors, and overseeing work quality.
Property Inspections: Conducting periodic property inspections (move-in, routine, move-out) to ensure property condition and compliance with lease terms.
Compliance & Legal Guidance: Advising on landlord-tenant laws, health & safety regulations, and handling eviction processes if necessary.
Security Deposit Management: Collecting, holding, and returning security deposits in accordance with legal requirements.
Services for tenants:
Property Search & Matching: Assisting prospective tenants in finding suitable properties based on their needs and budget.
Viewing Scheduling: Arranging property viewings and providing access.
Application Processing: Guiding tenants through the application process and necessary documentation.
Lease Onboarding: Explaining lease terms, facilitating key handover, and conducting move-in inspections.
Maintenance Request Handling: A clear process for tenants to report maintenance issues and track resolution.
Emergency Support: Providing contact points and procedures for urgent property-related emergencies.
Lease Renewal & Move-out Support: Managing lease renewals, providing guidance on move-out procedures, and facilitating security deposit returns.
Many of these will require automated systems. The customer-facing ones even more so. You need to understand the customer journeys for each entry in your service map.
You need:
Comprehensive Monitoring & Alerting: Real-time visibility into every step of the journey, flagging anomalies or delays before they become customer-impacting issues. Build monitoring capabilities into the systems and build the operational capability to follow up on alerts and events. There are now products on the market that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Be prepared to open your wallet. This is not cheap. I hear AI already rolling off the tongues: this is not cheap. For smaller service maps and customer journeys, consider using built-in tools and hiring a small team of people that can leverage the next points. For large institutions, let alone manufacturing, automation and continuous testing are key.
Centralized Knowledge Management: A single source of truth for service definitions, processes, dependencies, and known issues, accessible to everyone who needs it. No more tribal knowledge. For condensed setups, it can be as simple as a folder on a hard drive that contains your knowledge base articles (aka Word documents that explain the process, how it was set up, what you need to operate it etc.). Most businesses will use some form of knowledge management system that is a bit more sophisticated, perhaps even built-in to the IT Operations Management (ITOM) tooling. It's a shame it's called IT ops tooling, because you can equally use this for business process documentation. Just remember the last bullet below: DR and BCP. Your knowledge system is useless if you cannot get to it!
Robust Development & Operations Processes: Seamless collaboration between development, operations, and business teams to make sure services are built, tested, deployed, and managed efficiently and reliably. It does not really matter if you want to use DevOps, or change/run, or scrum and squads, or anything in between. Pick what works in your culture. Also, it is not one-size-fits-all. Some systems are core and require a more strict regimen; others must be able to turn on a dime. But whatever you use: keep your service and the customer journey through it front and center. Build it so that you have clearly separated “stations” where something is done to fulfill the system. Make the mental analogy with a factory. It will keep each station atomic, so that when the time comes to make changes, you can do so without having to re-invent large parts of the value delivery chain.
End-to-End Security Protocols: Protect sensitive customer data and financial transactions at every touchpoint throughout the journey. I mean, duh. You must. This is non-negotiable. This includes your backups. Large or small company, you must maintain backups. Use the 321 method: 3 copies of your data and setups on 2 different platforms or data storage carriers and 1 offsite. Your backups should include at least 1 immutable copy. That is a copy that cannot be altered. Large firms partner with their hosting companies to include that in the service offering; small companies have cheap options. I use 2 separate backup providers (total cost around €100/month at the time of writing in 2025) and my own disconnected storage carriers. I even use a backup provider and disconnected storage for my family's data (around €25/month).
Effective Disaster Recovery (DR) & Business Continuity Planning (BCP) Capabilities: Understanding critical service components, their recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs) to ensure rapid restoration of service even after major disruptions. This isn't a theoretical exercise; it needs to be tested and proven. Your expectations also need to be realistic.
There are more elements to consider when building your service map and the customer journeys when it comes to resilience. Things like performance metrics, scalability, peak usage management, and so on. McKinsey wrote years ago, design for the storm, not the sunny days. That is right, but keep the design within the commercial service parameters. It is equally bad to overbuild to a $5 million system, if your expected revenue is less than $100,000 a year, than it is to use a $10,000 system to support a $5 million revenue stream. (I remember the Excel sheet from hell that actually supported a macro-economist at a large brokerage.)
Start mapping your services today. Start with what you feel are the most critical ones. You'll uncover inefficiencies, mitigate risks, and strengthen the very foundation of your customer relationships. You may even save some money.
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