I&O Organizations Must Strike a Better Balance Between Business Satisfaction and Engagement Levels
I&O organizations struggle to support and deliver IT services that satisfy the business. Instead, they should strive to drive engagement, which can foster a deeper, more beneficial relationship and better position them to satisfy customers moving forward.
- I&O organizations continue to unsuccessfully satisfy consumers, resulting in alienation and disengagement from unmet expectations.
- Unsatisfied business users will shift to consumerization and cloud-based services, and thereby receive support outside the IT organization, making it hard for I&O to demonstrate value in rapid restoration of services.
- I&O organizations continue to use antiquated means to gather customer sentiment and satisfaction levels, failing to gather valuable feedback and trend analysis for IT strategic planning.
Recommendations:
I&O leaders:
- Enable the IT service desk to provide levels of highly personal face-to-face interaction between IT and the business where possible.
- Provide simplified means for users to share their engagement and sentiment levels with the IT organization.
- Look outside your IT service support management (ITSSM) toolset for solutions that better capture consumer sentiment, and use sentiment analysis to drive engagement from unstructured data formats, including focus groups, passive surveys and posts to internal social media.
By year-end 2017, voice-based, user-initiated contacts to the IT service desk will decrease 40% from 2013 levels.
Over a third of infrastructure and operations (I&O) organizations list customer satisfaction as their No. 1 business-related challenge.1 Many I&O organizations work diligently to improve satisfaction, holding strong to the notion that satisfaction, in itself, demonstrates higher levels of IT value to the business. This is not always the case. This is demonstrated in cases where I&O organizations that consistently meet their SLAs and beat industry average performance metrics still have dissatisfied users. This disconnect is driven by I&O's inability to understand what customers expect.
IT customer satisfaction is important, but it must be balanced against engagement. Business user engagement would be a better indicator of how easy it is to gather expectations and position I&O to best meet future requirements. Engagement presumes a greater dialogue and understanding of the needs of the business, resulting in better business performance and higher levels of business productivity. I&O has the most significant opportunity to drive engagement, given that up to 50% of business user perception of IT comes from experience with the IT service support organization. Providing meaningful and engaging experiences at the IT support level can pay big dividends to an organization struggling to remain relevant to the business.
Many I&O organizations struggle to balance satisfaction and engagement. This research discusses how to better achieve balance, in terms of how to shift approaches to driving engagement and to think outside of traditional mechanisms of gathering satisfaction and engagement data. Figure 1 summarizes how I&O organizations that shift from improving customer satisfaction to improving engagement levels will affect IT service support management strategies.
Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for I&O Organizations
Source: Gartner (September 2013)
IT customer satisfaction is a moving target. It rests on the premise that dissatisfaction results from unmet expectations. Many would argue that IT customer expectations are inflated, due mostly in part to their interactions with consumer-oriented IT services and applications that are easy to use, intuitive and work seamlessly across multiple devices. The reality is that enterprise applications and services that I&O organizations deliver and support are far from what users expect, hence the drive toward consumerization. Dissatisfaction often begins with the initial presence of an incident. Users have already been impacted and restoration (or the identification of a work-around) is a moment of truth with respect to "winning back" the admiration of business users. Users may expect a standard set of questions from the IT service desk and may actually appreciate the support they receive, but have been negatively impacted just the same. This commonly plays out in situations where the IT service desk is scored consistently high in transaction customer satisfaction surveys, but the IT organization is scored consistently low in periodic IT satisfaction surveys.
This is not to say IT customer satisfaction is not important, but rather to note that I&O organizations that place satisfaction at a premium are shortsighted. Transactional relationships that surveys reinforce should be supplemented with methods of engagement that are more evolved into relationship-oriented engagement. IT service and support organizations must look to ways to demonstrate value beyond fixing things when they are broken. Understanding how to do that begins with higher levels of engagement. Engagement helps demonstrate the value of IT to the business by putting the I&O organization in a position to better understand customer perception of the IT brand, articulate the services the IT organization provides and works to better position the I&O organization to meet performance levels.
Recommendations:
- Identify opportunities to increase business user engagement, such as business user focus groups. Improving engagement will provide a better understanding of how to improve customer satisfaction.
- Refer to "Use Social Media and ITIL BRM to Improve the IT-Business Relationship" to improve IT-business communication and collaboration.
As the business drives toward higher levels of consumerization and bring your own device (BYOD) programs, contacts to the IT service desk continue to decrease, taking away valuable opportunities to evaluate the means of business engagement.2 Because of this, Gartner expects this Strategic Planning Assumption to be in effect: By year-end 2017, voice-based user-initiated contacts to the IT service desk will decrease 40% from 2013 levels. Table 1 lists the reasons for and against this Strategic Planning Assumption.
Table 1. User-Initiated IT Service Desk Contacts Likely to Decline
Source: Gartner (September 2013)
I&O organizations can better engage the business with skilled personnel, who can build relationships and ascertain information in greater detail. Better understanding the needs and requirements of the business provides the opportunity for I&O leaders to better articulate current IT services to solve current challenges and to deliver IT-enabled solutions to solve new business challenges as they arise.3 The current collection of IT service desk analysts may not be the best resources to perform these services, so I&O organizations will rethink frontline approaches in support of traditional top-down engagement initiatives. Traditional IT organizational structures should be re-evaluated, so that addressing issues at the frontline with longer-tenured and costlier human resources yields returns in improved satisfaction, engagement, utilization, and productivity levels. Efforts to drive engagement can begin at any maturity level, and I&O organizations should take the opportunity to demonstrate capabilities that provide a higher level of service support, personalized delivery and context-aware engagement experiences. Some examples:
- I&O provides one-on-one technical assistance on-demand. So, to drive better usage of underutilized enterprise applications and build higher levels of workforce digital literacy, consider the development of a walk-up technical support center staffed with longer-tenured IT staff members who can provide assistance face-to-face and direct users to e-learning resources when applicable.
- I&O knows the roles, responsibilities and functions of individual users. So, to better understand how users interact with IT services, it needs to identify patterns and pain points as a necessary feedback loop to steer effective change with development teams to promote suggestions and enhancements for services.
- I&O job-shadows business users, attending meetings when appropriate. So, to be more aware and responsive to circumstances and changes to business priorities, it must be positioned to articulate how IT can help address those needs quickly and effectively.
These activities provide I&O organizations the opportunity to gain the relevant context to better meet the needs of users and to enhance the service experience. By being more closely engaged with the business, the I&O organization becomes better aligned to meet user needs and measure success in business terms. It then is viewed as relevant to the business. Higher levels of business-IT engagement should be sought regardless of I&O maturity level, which can easily be accomplished by modernizing the way in which the IT service support organization (serving as the IT-business intersection) interacts with the business.
Where higher-skilled, relationship-oriented I&O personnel cannot physically be located, use social media to extend their presence virtually. Social media can be effective in fostering peer-to-peer IT support, enabling the I&O organization to demonstrate its value to the business in an unconventional, but modern, medium. By extending its presence through a new digital channel, IT can learn what is important to and frequently discussed by end users. The IT organization can then use this information for strategic planning to help the business increase productivity and better leverage technology. I&O leaders should devote community management resources (in conjunction with superusers and experts) to monitor and govern communities to ensure bad advice does not proliferate.
Recommendations:
- Build an Apple-like "genius bar" inside the IT solution center that works in conjunction with the help desk to provide personal, face-to-face interaction between IT and the business when possible.
- To be relevant to the business, measure success criteria for new frontline IT engagement models in business terms, such as shortening sales cycles through improved usage of the CRM system.
- Gather user sentiment from unstructured data formats, including focus groups, passive surveys and posts to internal social media.
- Look outside your ITSSM toolset for solutions that better capture consumer sentiment, and use sentiment analysis to drive engagement.
- Provide simplified means for users to share their engagement and sentiment levels with the IT organization.
- 42% of organizations do not know how much mobility increases service desk workload, if at all.
- 66% of organizations reported that mobile device support represents anywhere between 1% and 10% of service desk contacts.
IT customer satisfaction surveys are still the primary way the majority of IT organizations gather user sentiment regarding the quality of IT services they send back to their businesses. Many IT organizations still cite low customer satisfaction survey response from business users, driven largely from satisfaction efforts conducted with less-than-optimal levels of rigor. Because of low response levels, many I&O organizations lack the broad customer insight required for tactical and strategic decision support. If business-IT engagement levels are low and continue to decline, I&O organizations will need to look to nontraditional means to gather feedback. Much like digital practices of marketing organizations, I&O organizations must extend their capabilities to promote their brands through multiple digital channels to reach business customers. Doing so can create a stable and purposeful feedback loop that is used to supplement traditional efforts to gather satisfaction levels. This will position I&O organizations to better meet expectations moving forward.
IT service desk and ITSSM solutions have been slow to provide solutions to derive context from incident management data, despite the wealth of context data that surrounds a user submitting an incident to IT. To this point, reference data (user's name, department, primary device, etc.) has been used to prepopulate incident tickets that can save time by auto-filling required fields and ensure more-accurate reporting. I&O organizations should place a premium on solutions that gather and report on context data (user's level of IT acumen, current physical location, last set of executions in an application), that better enable IT support personnel to improve the user's experience. For example, understanding user location and proximity to skilled resources to resolve an issue can shorten resolution times.
Similar to business-to-consumer digital marketing strategies, context data can be derived from social media. If organizations provide the means for users to use collaboration platforms to exchange information, ideas and feedback concerning, or about, the IT organization, I&O organizations would be wise to gather user sentiment as context to improve service support and delivery, and influence the way IT services are utilized within the business. Social software in the workplace tools, such as SharePoint, Jive and Yammer, will be effective in providing these platforms. The social analytics capabilities they provide will need to be adopted to understand metrics, such as total likes and connections, total reach, posted likes, wall posts and subscribers.
While transactional IT satisfaction surveys are easy to conduct, they are troubling because users often carry historical resentment with them when completing them. Furthermore, they only give I&O organizations the opportunity to survey users who have reached out to them through the formal support channel. I&O organizations must find innovative ways to gather sentiment and create fun and engaging ways for users to share feedback with IT, aside from formal transactional surveys. We know of an organization that provides five emoticons on its self-service landing page, and asks users to click the face that closest corresponds to their feelings regarding their visits to the I&O portal. While the data provided may not be overly strategic, the ability to analyze sentiment more frequently provides tactical insight into how to deal with users on a particular day.
Gamification can be effective in driving engagement by motivating people to change their behaviors and develop skills. Applied to IT service management, gamification can offer intrinsic rewards to business users to support colleagues with nontechnical issues, and to users who leverage lower-cost IT self-service channels for assistance. Gamification can also be a mechanism to provide visualization of business user IT acumen levels, where users can "level up" through training, also driving better utilization of business applications.
Recommendations:
¹ Polling from Gartner Webinar, "The Future of IT Service Support Management," conducted between January 2013 and March 2013 shows that 36% of organizations attending selected "providing high levels of customer satisfaction" when asked the question, "what is your IT service desk's biggest challenge" (n = 227).
² A survey of IT and business leaders was conducted in January 2013, and administered online using Gartner Research Circle, a panel composed of IT and business leaders, to reach the right type of organizations and respondents. Some results:
³ Business productivity teams/analysts (BPTs/As) are a departure from traditional IT service desk analysts, which react to issues that affect user productivity. BPTs/As proactively promote productivity by enabling higher levels of user self-sufficiency, in part because they are instilled with a broad understanding of business processes and the means to design and deliver solutions to the business to solve problems.
Source: Gartner Research Note G00247663, Terrence Cosgrove, Jarod Greene, 11 September 2013
