Service desks teams use internally focused performance-based metrics more than many might think. These metrics are essential and remain relevant, but they do not provide any insight into the user experience. To gain actual insight into user satisfaction, you need to change your metrics. The question becomes: How do I efficiently change my metrics? Then, how do you best go about it?
Living in the Age of Customer Experience
The customer experience is vital to the outcomes of your service team. The word "experience" is critical. The quality of the user experiences is paramount.
When we look at our internal customers — our employees — their expectations are continually changing. For them, they want to stay in the flow, remain productive, and make meaningful progress in their work.
Customer experience is the sum of the employees' perceptions of working in an organization, "perception" being most important. To understand the experience, service desk members must ask their users to define their experiences. Part of this journey is managing the emotional parts of the customer journey. However, even if you meet expectations, but somehow, the emotional experience goes south. Then, while the issue may have gotten resolved, this doesn't mean the user is happy. Perceptions are not the same as results. So, even if the service desk meets all pre-defined success metrics, this doesn't mean user satisfaction is excellent.
Taking the pulse of the user is vital to organizational success.
What is the User's Experience?
The service desk delivers support to users, but they must measure the services provided and which are the most important to them. When measuring the user experience, you may find that your services need improvement.
For example, one organization I recently worked with let their customers ask them questions whenever they needed assistance. Thus, users found that the service desk remained open for users, who soon understood that their concerns were always valid; this only occurred because the service desk asked users how to support them best.
There are likely dozens of things that your department can address, but the team can't handle everything at once. Start with what's most important to the user so they can experience the best benefit for your effort. You can achieve this in several ways. For example, consider focus groups. These are what you think they are: teams sitting down with a group of users to ask them about the services provided. You are asking about specific goals and measuring outcomes.
Even though these groups can be a good starting point if you have nothing in place and can be easy to implement, they can require a fair amount of trust otherwise these groups can turn them into ranting sessions. Get through the negativity to regain confidence before diving into what you want out of these focus groups.
Periodic Measurements and Continuous Measurements
Periodic measurement is examining your services regularly, through a survey, for example. Alternatively, continuous measurement is the use of a brief survey to ask for feedback from customers about the services they just received after every interaction. Periodic measurement only provides a general overview of aspects that apply to multiple services, such as how friendly the department is and how well the communication is. These assessments are a great place to start because they help provide a picture in terms of user experience.
Because periodic measurements can be pretty general, how you phrase your survey questions to users matters. "How do you rate our services?" will not suffice. You must dive into various aspects or themes of the service so that you can gauge authentic user experience.
There are usually five main themes that the customer thinks of when experiencing a service ...
Read How To Drive and Measure User Experience - Part 2, covering the five main themes and more.
The Latest
On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...
The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps. To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience ...
Users have become digital hoarders, saving everything they handle, including outdated reports, duplicate files and irrelevant documents that make it difficult to find critical information, slowing down systems and productivity. In digital terms, they have simply shoved the mess off their desks and into the virtual storage bins ...
Today we could be witnessing the dawn of a new age in software development, transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is AI a gateway or a precipice? Is AI in software development transformative, just the latest helpful tool, or a bunch of hype? To help with this assessment, DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry to comment on how AI can support the SDLC. In this epic multi-part series to be posted over the next several weeks, DEVOPSdigest will explore the advantages and disadvantages; the current state of maturity and adoption; and how AI will impact the processes, the developers, and the future of software development ...
Half of all employees are using Shadow AI (i.e. non-company issued AI tools), according to a new report by Software AG ...
On their digital transformation journey, companies are migrating more workloads to the cloud, which can incur higher costs during the process due to the higher volume of cloud resources needed ... Here are four critical components of a cloud governance framework that can help keep cloud costs under control ...
Operational resilience is an organization's ability to predict, respond to, and prevent unplanned work to drive reliable customer experiences and protect revenue. This doesn't just apply to downtime; it also covers service degradation due to latency or other factors. But make no mistake — when things go sideways, the bottom line and the customer are impacted ...
Organizations continue to struggle to generate business value with AI. Despite increased investments in AI, only 34% of AI professionals feel fully equipped with the tools necessary to meet their organization's AI goals, according to The Unmet AI Needs Surveywas conducted by DataRobot ...
High-business-impact outages are costly, and a fast MTTx (mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR)) is crucial, with 62% of businesses reporting a loss of at least $1 million per hour of downtime ...