With Valentine's Day upon us, reflecting on employee and end-user experience seems fitting. Too often, IT organizations focus on technical skills and outcomes and too often overlook the actual experience of working with IT. Code could be flawless and the infrastructure could be cutting edge, but none of that matters if the support experience is poor. This experience should be stellar for the end-user, and must be ingrained in the culture of the team and organization, as well as the IT employees providing the support.
Creating a Positive Support Culture
As with any team, creating a strong culture starts with hiring the right people. One of the biggest mistakes I have seen is organizations that prioritize technical skills over soft skills in IT support roles. College graduates are often instructed to pad their resumes with "skills" and certifications for this very reason. I quote skills, because these are skills the applicant FEELS they have, but have not been measured or assessed against any standardized approach. Therefore, they are truly a filler space on a resume. Regardless of how many certifications, technical courses, or "skills" an applicant lists on their resume, they will inevitably not have the direct technical knowledge or skills that are required within your organization. Therefore, I have found that hiring based upon soft skills and technical aptitude has provided the highest success rate. We hire a great motivated person and then teach them the needed technical skills.
If an end user has a great discussion with the support team but their request goes two weeks without contact or resolution, their support experience is still poor.
Creating Raving Fans
Every support interaction matters. However, it's also important to note that the support team will not hit a homerun every time, it's not possible to bat 1.000 for any extended period of time. The key for our team is to constantly look for opportunities to improve. These opportunities should be driven by end user feedback and ticket reviews. One method we have used to identify opportunities is to leverage our senior support team to flag any support ticket which had an opportunity for improvement. Then we hold a weekly meeting to discuss these opportunities and identify solutions to improve the experience. Collecting data on end user experience can be achieved through numerous methods, but the method that works best for your specific organization is the way to go.
Measuring Success
What is measured matters. If first contact resolution is a KPI for your organization, the support team will find ways to resolve a ticket on a first contact (even if they need to manipulate the system). Inherently, people want to be successful and achieve the expectations of their leadership. Therefore, anything that is measured will become the target for success within the team. Reflecting on whether a stat matters to the desired outcome is essential. I recently saw a discussion around call quality scoring where an organization was deducting "points" from support employees that said "yep" instead of "yes" in a phone call. This make me wonder if that really reflects what matters most to the organization.
People work with people, and having an authentic interaction builds that personal bond.
Creating Raving Fans goes far beyond the technical skill or aptitude of the support team. Creating real interaction and connections is key. People work with people, and having an authentic interaction builds that personal bond. If a technical issue is resolved but no personal connection is made, the support experience will be good but not great and will not create Raving Fans within the organization. In our company we actually created a method for employees to share if they are a Raving Fan of any individual or team throughout the organization. This is outside of our standard customer service survey associated with our support tickets. Finding an outlet to share this feedback has been powerful for or company, and a practice I'd definitely recommend.
Shout it From the Rooftop
When positive feedback is given, shout it from the rooftop! The team will love hearing the positive feedback from end users, and from their peers (keep the constructive feedback for one to ones). We ask our team members to submit shout outs to their peers and share those weekly, in addition to our end user survey feedback. This is so ingrained in our team's culture that when a Raving Fan email is sent out for someone on our team it is quickly posted by someone within the team (usually not someone in leadership) to our chat and kudos are spread like wildfire. Share this positive feedback and spread the love!
What is measured matters.
In our organization, end user experience is our gold standard. Therefore, we select metrics to measure which directly impact the end user experience. We look at how long it takes for someone to answer a phone, respond to a ticket, resolve a ticket, whether it got reopened, and customer satisfaction (to name a few). All these metrics have a direct correlation to the experience of the end user. I don't care that the ticket was reassigned, so long as the proper answer was provided in a timely manner. Choosing what metrics are measured matters.
The quality of your employees can only lead you as far as the quality of your support processes. If an end user has a great discussion with the support team but their request goes two weeks without contact or resolution, their support experience is still poor. Therefore, creating processes that remove roadblocks and overhead for support employees is critical. In any process, we ask ourselves whether the steps taken are necessary and whether the team has the proper training and resources available to quickly and accurately resolve issues. If there is an opportunity to improve, we create a plan to implement the improvement. Over time, these enhancements improve efficiency and create a better end user and employee experience.
Share this positive feedback and spread the love!