Service Transformation Event Resources – 26 September 2018
Thank you for attending our event in London and contributing to the discussions.
We had a fantastic day listening to inspiring stories from our speakers, expert insight from our sponsors and thoughtful input from everyone in the room, hosted by SDI’s CEO Tessa Troubridge.
If you’d like to revisit any of the speakers’ content you can download the presentations below:
Beth Coleman, Catalynk – you can see Beth delving further in to this topic at SDI’s online conference, Shine18 on 31 October
Paul Stanley, Meredith
Emma Faller, Surrey County Council – find out more about the SDI Health Check that Emma mentioned
Bruce Duncan, Deloitte – Bruce talked about their peer to peer benchmarking. Find out more about benchmarking with SDI and MetricNet
Workshop Takeaways
The group workshop talked about the considerations and ideas for tackling common challenges that they identified as being central to successful service transformation. Here’s a summary:
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Knowledge Management
- Knowing where to start is a big challenge, as is having too many sources of knowledge and old knowledge bases
- Consider how you’ll find out what the common search terms are, and what articles are being used – how are you going to measure usage?
- Tracking is very important!
- If you can track usage and search activity you can use this as part of showing ROI on creating the knowledge base
- Ensure there is enough information in the articles – continual review anytime someone accesses
- Consider how to approach potential ‘people’ barriers such as not wanting to give up their knowledge – market the benefits and show the team what’s in it for them
- Analyse for duplicates and accuracy
2. Rapid increase in scale (of operations, team, geographically)
- Challenges are setting a consistent standard across larger teams or multiple locations and staying in touch with the customers’ needs
- Use Service Delivery Management specifically to ensure focus on delivering to the customer
- Make sure someone is representing the customer
- Give people dedicated roles so that important areas / factors are focused on and given ownership
- Use SLA’s or similar – set internal benchmarks, use measurements as leverage
- Staff retention can be a challenge – think about how to keep high performers and retain the knowledge
- Focus on achieving and maintaining a defined standard to help with consistency
3. Supporting new ways of working
- Challenges around adapting to increasing expectations for flexible working
- Consider how to make induction work well for remote workers and how team training will work
- Home workers – think about security (devices, network, data transfer etc)
- Performance management needs to adapt when people are working remotely / from home
- Having robust, well defined processes can help
4. Automation & Chat Bots
- Change of culture – acceptance of new ways of working can be challenge
- Think about the ethics issues around bots and the different etiquette – this can be a positive, for example people don’t have to be polite so can be more direct
- Who is the audience? Need to understand your audience / customer to ensure the channel will work for them and what their priorities and concerns will be
- Service desk staff may have concerns around job security – but studies show more jobs will be created by automation in future – roles will shift though. Think about training / reskilling
- If more of the entry level tasks become automated or done by chat bots will we lose that route in to the business / IT that the service desk traditionally offers?
- Crucial to making chat bots and automation successful is having a good knowledge base
- Think about where your tipping point is – i.e. at what point the cost and disruption is outweighed by the benefit that your organisation will see
5. Merging Service Desks
- Knowledge Sharing is key – intra-team and inter-team
- Consider how different cultures will merge – how you will get everyone on same page
6. Creating Customer-Centric Culture
- Your approach may depend on what kind of desk you are and who your customers are (eg internal v external)
- Communication channels and managing the messaging is key
- Challenge – motivating the team to improve the customer experience – need to show them what’s in it for them and the ‘why’
- Reward the team (positive reinforcement) – happier people will give better service
- Use Customer Journey Mapping – look at where your gaps are, where more engagement is needed
Talk to us about how SDI can help you with service improvement and change projects by taking a look at our Service Improvement Plans.
Thanks to our event sponsors:
