September 2014
Welcome to the h2index newsletter.  We have designed this to keep you informed about our work and let you know about opportunities to get involved in our research and forums.

In this issue
MainAre you customer centric?

"How do we improve user experience" was the question posed to h2index by a sector-leading global company earlier this year. This followed a two year restructuring of its end user services (EUS) delivery, which included moving to one global supplier for all telephone and on-site IT support, and weaning staff away from support by local staff to contacting a remote call centre.

 

Frustrating users of EUS more than anything else is the practice of transferring requests to another area. This finding came from h2index's survey of many of the company's users across the world, and survey of external organisations' EUS, including interviewing many of their managers. Our experience in other organisations chimed with this result, so one of our key recommendations was to maximise the number of issues resolved within the service desk.

 

Once a support ticket leaves EUS to be dealt with by a different department, it is often handled slowly because it is hard to handover and maintain operational focus. If the service desk handles the issue itself, the results are usually better and the user is happier because they know who is managing their ticket. To process more issues internally, EUS may need to increase its technical knowledge and reorganise itself, and become customer-centric.

 

An example illustrates the significance of elapsed time for the user. Some employees generate tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business every day. If they can't login for a day due to an IT fault, the cost of their lost business is out of all proportion to the cost of solving the IT problem. Often fixing the fault only takes ten minutes, but the employee can't work for 24 hours. If EUS focuses upon the user, it has to find ways of removing the 23 hours and 50 minutes of delays and handovers. Keeping the issue within the service desk is one way of doing this.

 

Some organisations we have observed are taking an even more radical approach to reducing this elapsed time by dramatically improving self-help. To do this, they are actively trying to become more customer centric by understanding exactly what their users want and working out how to deliver this.

 

h2index believes that these ideas will lead to a step change in users' experience of IT for the better. We call these improvements the "big green button" changes.

 

 

 

The idea is how to design self-help so that users find the solution swiftly and simply click one green button to solve the problem. For example, if a customer can't connect to a document store (say), give them one big green button called "Connect" which does everything for them, rather than an incomprehensible list of instructions. (For more discussion about self-help, see the next section.)

 

Simon Bennett, partner h2index: "Becoming customer centric is a new frontier for EUS managers. Over the last decade, they have mastered processes, technologies, suppliers and contracts. Continuous (small) improvements continue to happen, which is good. The basics are all in place. Now the best managers are considering "where next" and realising that the only way of improving further is to concentrate entirely on the customer."

 

 
SecondsPeople love chat, but take care with self-help

Chat and self-help use are steadily increasing as large multinationals continue to develop their IT support. This was the clear message from a recent survey of 18 large global companies' IT support services undertaken by h2index for a large financial services company. All the companies are somewhere on the spectrum illustrated in the channel mix diagram below. Companies are clearly moving from left to right across the spectrum and the smartest people are deliberately aiming to reach the "extreme" position.

  



Reducing costs and improving user experience are the drivers behind this change. Channel mix is one of the levers IT managers can experiment with and they are trying to vary the channels that users employ to gain support. The four main channels are phone, chat, self-help and email.

 

Traditionally, email is dominant and the remainder of the support is by phone. Most of the respondents were at least at the "current" stage of trying out some chat or self-help, and working hard to reduce the level of costly email support. As they progress, the level of chat and self-help increases until email reduces to virtually nothing and self-help is the dominant channel.

 

However, self-help and chat do not suit everyone and have widely differing satisfaction ratings as can be seen in the channel satisfaction diagram below. This shows the satisfaction levels with the four channels at the three key stages of the process of a support ticket:
  • Contact - making the first request for help
  • Qualification - diagnosing the problem
  • Remediation - fixing the problem

 


 

Chat is now widespread in most companies, but it was a rarity only 10 years ago. People are also increasingly comfortable using chat to speak to their bank and a range of consumer services. As one respondent reflected: "Those who like chat, love it". This is illustrated in the channel satisfaction diagram. Chat vies with phone as the most "satisfying" channel at all three key stages. However, some people will probably never feel comfortable with chat.  

 

Self-help is also making inroads in corporate IT support and people are increasingly using Google to find solutions to domestic problems with their broadband and other technology. However, self-help in the corporate world receives not only the lowest satisfaction scores in all three key stages in the diagram above, but it is also the lowest by a significant degree. Users have had bad experiences with poor self-help and it going to take some superb systems to change their minds. IT managers need to take care implementing self-help and work out how to deliver customer focused solutions. (For more discussion about radical improvements to self-help, see the previous section.)  

 

Phil Hopley, partner, h2index: "We see some people putting out self-help systems that are effectively the same technical knowledge base used by IT support. Unsurprisingly users don't find this helpful and won't use it. This is dangerous because once people have had a bad experience, it is hard to woo them back. But there are companies who are working hard to understand what users need and provide self-help that swiftly and easily fixes problems."

 
section3Unified communications forum

We will be holding our second unified communications forum of the year in early November 2014.

 

We work hard to ensure that the organizations in any one forum are of similar scale, face similar issues and involve senior representatives directly responsible for the specific topic.

 

If you would like to join any of our forums, please reply to this email.

 
If you found our newsletter useful, please forward it to colleagues who may also be interested.

We are always delighted to receive feedback.

Kind regards

Phil Hopley and Simon Bennett

www.h2index.com

 

+44 (0) 1737 830993