Virteva has served mid-sized organizations with Service Desk services since 2013. This experience has led us to develop repeatable processes that ensure a high-touch experience for existing and new customers. That’s how we have maintained an average NPS of 87, which increased during COVID while according to Qualtrics, NPS declined across 20 industries between 2019 and 2020. It’s also one of the reasons our customers consider us an extension of their team, not just an out-sourced Service Desk. These key areas enable this success and should help any IT Operations team improve IT User Experience in 2022.
- Having the right mindset: The first and most important characteristic is your mindset. No amount of technology or talent can overcome the wrong mindset. Today, IT leaders must not only embrace but also enable their teams to have the mindset of continuous improvement. Too often we hear that IT teams have a user experience problem, sometimes their Service Desk is called the Helpless Desk, we’ve heard it all. When we dig in deeper, we find that continuous improvement mindsets are not present with the current teams. High-performing IT teams need to be connected to their customers, make data-driven decisions, and think strategically about running IT-as-a-service. If the mindset is to just put out the fires, answer the next call, or take the next order, then IT teams will continue to be reactive and not proactive.
- Knowledge-as-a-service: We hear from many organizations that service delivery can be “inconsistent”, that good service “depends on who you get”, and that “IT doesn’t understand how to help me”. In many situations, that’s because there is no source of truth for Knowledge within the Service Desk. With the pace of change required for organizations to remain competitive, it’s very challenging to communicate change effectively to the Service Desk. Our approach to Knowledge brings an operational lifecycle to the process from creation, modification, and retirement. Having a mature Knowledge Base allows for newly trained Analysts to operate with the capability of a seasoned vet.
- Develop an Effortless Experience for your users: I found the book Effortless Experience to be very insightful about what the definition of customer experience is. Leveraging the data found in their studies, we’ve applied the same principles to our service delivery. While I recommend the content to any service delivery leader, the act of applying a set of standards to your team is what is most important. Showing what good looks like is important for everyone to understand so that your users have a consistently great experience.
- Personalize the Experience: At Virteva, we create a specific phone number for every customer, that has a custom IVR greeting, and then a custom welcome message from one of our Service Desk Analysts, who was trained specifically in your company, to create a personalized experience. This is just one of the ways we’ve personalized the experience for our end-users to be as positive and consistent as possible. How can you personalize your end-users experience? The answers will vary across different organizations but is an important question to consider the ways your service delivery team can accomplish this.
- Operationalize Negative Experiences: No service organization is perfect, however, we believe that it’s how you respond to negative experiences that is more important. At Virteva, we’ve developed a Customer Care process where we log every single negative user interaction and document the root cause of why it happened and what we are going to do to keep it from happening in the future. We use this data to share with our customers transparently so they understand what’s happening within their IT Operation. The value of this program is that every customer benefits from negative experiences from other customers. It’s like compounding interest benefits of user experience across all our customers. One end user’s negative experience can lead to continuous improvement across 50+ customers on our Service Desk, which has been happening since 2017 when we started the team.
