Being in business since 2006, the gold standard to measure performance has always been the “SLA”, or service level agreement. Depending on various items including the agreement in place, the user, and whether the service is mission critical or not, there would be a corresponding service level agreement. These service level agreements were usually measured in terms of response time. For example, respond by 9AM, plan by 9:30AM, resolve by 10AM. In sum , a ticket resolved by 10AM was job well done – 100%. Who says our job was done 100%? An enterprise CRM that calculates times based off of ticket status? Times are changing in IT. Although these SLAs are still measured, there is something else that matters as much, if not more, the customer experience.
To elaborate, customer experience may be described as how customers feel about the service and support your IT organization provides. In other words, simply responding to or fixing someone’s issue is not enough. While this can definitely be relative to the speed of resolution, various non-quantitative factors come into play. This may include service desk agent aptitude and attitude, to the quality of the resolution.
Think of users who contact the IT help desk as customers. In the outsourced arena, users requesting support are usually customers, however within internal IT departments, that is often not the case. Treat each support request as a paying customer.
All support reps should be instructed to never be defensive, just apologize on behalf of the IT dept for any issues. Remember customer service is the goal!
Some other items that all IT departments can do to promote customer experience is to complement the most technical individuals and teams with those that have more customer relationship manners. Another change of pace for most IT departments is to encourage and welcome suggestions on how IT support can be improved.
It is definitely a work in progress, however it is time IT departments start surprising people and providing some good customer service!