By Scarlett Bayes, Senior Research Analyst, SDI
You’re the superhero, and your customers are the civilians you’re working to save from peril! But instead of saving them from an actual, life-threatening villain, you’re saving them from bad experiences.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) has long been an important metric for service desks, and we are definitely seeing a shift in the industry which indicates that service desks are placing more importance on the experience of their service for their customers. Excellent customer experience can build a community of SUPER customers, or advocates, who can influence and promote new services or processes to the business.
Fostering an environment where the customer is at the centre of the service can also lead to more a meaningful service and happier customers, and this can be relayed to the business as an indicator of value and success. Furthermore, CX can be a more effective way of monitoring the usability and efficiency of self-service or chatbots support channels, i.e. channels where the customer does not directly contact a member of support staff. Traditional metrics relating to these support channels may only skim the surface, particularly if these channels are monitored in the same way as customer-facing services, like telephony. However, by gearing KPIs or XLA targets towards a more customer-centric focus, the service could gain a better insight into the channels and highlight areas for improvement.
The industry is moving towards a more customer-centric way of delivering a service, and therefore XLAs are growing in relevance. A big part of CX is the quality of the service as well as its efficiency. Therefore, it can be useful to have some KPIs around the quality of the service. Some indicators of quality include consistency across IT support services, keeping customers updated on the progress of their ticket, analysts exhibit and use Emotional Intelligence, and analysts having good knowledge about products and services.
Soon, the traditional SLAs the service desk and its customers are familiar with, may shift to focus more on the customer experience. While traditional measures are still essential for monitoring your service desk’s performance, perhaps merging these two approaches and measuring both service desk performance and service quality may help your service desk become SUPER effective, providing you with a Kryptonite-Defeating CX Strategy and saving your customers from struggling with IT issues.
