How do you create a customer-centric IT strategy?
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It’s about understanding that you put yourself in the customer's shoes. You do that by understanding your user stories, but also putting your own selves in their shoes and trying to understand the business and aligning a lot more. I think the successful IT teams that I've worked with are the ones that have understood the business really well, that go to market really well, and understand the business cycles. That’s what makes them successful.
One of the things that I'm very intense about on my team is the user story. If you understand the user story and you articulate and confirm the acceptance criteria, you understand what's going to define success. Focus on the business value we're delivering. It's not just a thing we're doing simply to move items around a board. We are having an impact. So it's constantly putting yourself in the user scenario. It’s thinking about things in that user experience, in that journey. It's speaking in the ways that you hear a lot of product and design teams think today. And then speaking about and applying that, in our case, in business systems, because there is a lot of applicability there. Focusing on that user story is how we get the team aligned.
It's absolutely critical for IT teams to have customers at the heart of the story… their own story in terms of an IT department, but really at the heart of the strategy, as the line between internal and external customers becomes thinner and thinner from a technology user experience standpoint. Setting a vision of and actually stating what that experience looks like is absolutely key.
I created a vision for my team. One of the main parts of the vision is, we need to provide a delightful experience to all the employees and excellence in the service, in every employee interaction we have. And it was a journey. It didn't happen in one day or one month, it happened over a period of time when we implemented the tools and the training. There are many metrics that we have, but the major ones are NPS and FDR. I'll talk about NPS first.
So around two years back, we decided that we have to track how the customer's experience is with IT. We already used NPS for our external customers, so we took that as a measurement for our internal users as well with the everyday service we provide. We have since been measuring every interaction we have with our end users in the form of tickets, projects, and more. After every ticket is closed, we send a survey and users can respond with comments and give us the rating (whether it's a promoter, detractor, or passive). Most of the time we get a promoter, but there are some times we get passives and detractors. The comments are very useful because they tell us where our IT processes are broken, whether we have a process problem or a people problem, and/or whether we need to do any IT training.
The second major metric that we use is FTR. That, we do only for select, important services like email or any other major service. We determined, what is the experience a user would expect when they consume that service? We try to make it qualitatively how the measurement should be for an email service or for any other service. And then we try to see how the actual implementation is and where the gaps are.Then we fill those gaps to improve that FTR.
Initially I had to discuss almost every user story or ticket with my team members on a weekly basis, or even with every interaction. I had to ask them, "Can you put yourself in customer's shoes and then think, is that the response you would give to them?" So after a couple of iterations, they understood that. Because of the focus that we had on the NPS (with all the responses we get and the user scores) our team members also feel the value of what they are doing for the customer.