Bring Your Service Desk up to Speed in the “Right Now” Economy
Introduction: As the world moves toward a new normal rhythm of business, we find communication and collaboration transformed in the workplace and beyond. Some changes are unlikely to go back to where they were before the pandemic. And, based on employee sentiments for the biggest tech companies in the world, that’s just fine.
Studies suggest the new normal will be 2–3 days per week in the office, with 2–3 days of remote work. Many brands are already setting the tone with long-term hybrid work plans. This means you can expect to be supporting your co-workers in a blend of on-prem and off-prem communication preferences indefinitely.
Remote and hybrid work environments have pushed unified communication technologies to the forefront of the digital transformation conversation. Easy, always-on contact has become a default customer service expectation in daily life. Employees expect that same, frictionless communication with external customers and coworkers. But the IT help desk, which has been working with remote workers for some time, hasn’t kept up.
It’s time to meet your internal customers where they are.
Let’s talk about what steps ITSMs can take to meet these new expectations, and how to know when they’re working. Throughout, we’ll introduce the processes and tools that will help you align your service with your internal customers’ expectations.
New paradigms in workplace communication.
There have always been many complex facets to workplace relationships and communication:
- natural vs. learned communication styles
- personality types
- organizational design (flat vs hierarchical)
- communication channels
- SLAs for response times
- corporate culture, and more.
The communication styles that people bring into the workplace are formed by these and other factors, some ingrained and some situational, over the course of a lifetime.
Meeting folks “where they are”.
It’s not just about physical location, it’s also about communicating in venues or fashions THEY prefer.
Some people are more visual communicators, others auditory. For some, textual communication works best. Some perform well communicating in real time, while others think more abstractly. Preferring to collect your thoughts, aggregate, and present them, should not be disregarded. To further complicate things, all of these different styles come into play in the context of the channel in which the conversation takes place.
The best B2C brands of the “right now” economy have become so by catering to these nuances and being fanatical about customer centricity. Customer communication platforms and support teams meet their customers where they are. Whether that’s taking a credit card via a smartphone’s camera or taking a food order over a smart speaker. This is why the B2B perception of accessibility is catching up with the B2C times.
The accessibility standards of old are due for a refresh and should be inclusive of all abilities and communication styles. This is why the UX/CX function has become critical to winning customer loyalty.
Work relationships are built or eroded with every conversation in every channel, whether in person or virtual. Particularly in the new reality of virtual communication, the conversation is the relationship. It’s shaped and molded with every word, context, and communication channel that it comes in. Clear, timely, empathetic conversation is the foundation of healthy work relationships.
“Right Now” Economy
The on-demand platforms that permeate our lives have raised the bar on what technology can do for great customer experiences. We expect meals on our doorstep when we’re hungry, endless entertainment options on demand, and a driver out front when we’re ready to go. Real time, or “right now,” is the standard for external customer service.
Real-time communication is now the baseline expectation in modern customer experience. And those same CX expectations carry over to internal customer experiences as well. Customers expect help now, wherever they are. In this environment, who wants to wait days for a ticket to be resolved by the IT help desk?
Batching and queueing emails or tickets is not a modern customer experience, regardless of whether the customer is internal or external. That means meeting them in the context where they are, in the channel they feel best communicating in, and, of course, when they need the help, not when we pull their ticket in line.
Building a Modern Engagement Layer
Whether the tools are in an integrated solution ,or spread over a combination of standalone products, the engagement layer should include:
- phone (voice and SMS)
- messaging
- screen-sharing
- ticketing tools
Meeting the customer where they are means they shouldn’t have to download screen-sharing apps or call a phone number on a disparate system. If there’s one thing that will escalate the situation, it’s making the customer repeat their problem in multiple communication channels. Channel switching should be effortless and should all happen seamlessly in the engagement layer.
Shameless plug: We created PingPilot as a tool to help businesses build stronger, more human connections with customers and internal stakeholders. Conversational ecosystems that cut out middleware and put the conversations in the hands of your service desk.
Omnichannel Escalations
“Escalation” has two meanings for the ITSM professional:
- It’s the technical term for the failure of a lower tier of support to handle a problem
- It also speaks to the rising frustration level of the customer experiencing this situation
Often the focus for the support team is figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it. But even the best IT support professionals lose sight of the feelings of frustration and uncertainty caused by the impact on their customer’s work. If the support process doesn’t include empathy conversations can quickly turn cold and out of touch.
With the right tools, IT support desks can escalate in real time and change channels accordingly. With an integrated engagement layer, all touchpoints are available along the journey to resolution. These options, used wisely and timely, will help keep the relationship going in the right direction. BONUS: The increase in productivity alone is worth the investment.
Proof of impact — measuring your relationships.
When we begin optimizing our ITSM organization’s engagement layer, it’s important that we measure the impact. That means more than the traditional follow-up email survey. Like a multi-day ticket, a lengthy form is out of step with current CX expectations. Sentiment needs to be measured without friction, in or near real time. Much like in quantum physics, that act of measurement changes the outcome.
Long-form follow-up surveys have a place in our measurement toolset, but only when we want to dig deeper on a certain experience or group of similar (cohort) ratings or reviews. Maybe it’s for those who gave the worst ratings or for all who experienced the same IT issue. One thing is certain: we should avoid asking everyone to do it before getting a measurement.
The friction it introduces is a sure way to limit feedback and increase the feedback loop’s cycle time. Robust, quick feedback loops will help us stay in touch with the efforts of our communication improvements — but they also provide quick insights into all the other changes we make in our ITSM architectures. Whether switching vendors, changing workflows, or implementing change management programs, the engagement layer is where the conversation happens, and it is where we should measure the quality of those relationships.
Most importantly, the review should happen in the channel that they took place. If it was text-based, they should receive a text message that can measure that experience. If it was over the phone, they can use a phone keypad to give a 1–5 rating.
By avoiding a channel switch for the rating mechanism, we can ensure a maximum sample size, respect our busy customers’ time, and show that we care about measuring the quality of the conversation they just had.
To engage the most people, reviews should require no more than 3 clicks for the rating, with an optional written review. Avoid channel switching by using an engagement layer that’s intelligently integrated from end to end.
Conclusion
As ITSM professionals, we play an important role in helping our organizations thrive in the evolving hybrid work environment. We need to take action to better serve those that trust us to solve IT challenges.
As the new normal for the hybrid work landscape gets clearer, one thing we know is that our customers’ expectations of IT have changed. They now hold us to a new standard driven by outside influences. Internal customers have seen what unified communications and unified collaboration have done for their function and external customers — not to mention the increased convenience in their own lives — and now they want that same experience from us. It’s time to meet our customers where they are and start having better conversations.
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