‘Would you recommend this product to your friends and family?’ Successful businesses use this simple question to measure and improve their level of customer satisfaction. The question is also applicable to departments with internal customers such as HR and IT. Want to bet that their score is pathetic?
During a dinner lecture for top managers, I opened with the question of who would recommend their own IT department. ‘I would - to my main competitor,’ was the first jocular response. The sense of loathing was tangible in the restaurant. I now pose the question during various presentations. Positive responses are rewarded with the bumper sticker ‘I love my IT department’. My pile of stickers doesn’t seem to have shrunk much. That’s a shame, because a clear relationship exists between appreciation and the value that IT contributes to the business.
What can you do about a low recommendation score? Go back to the heart of things. What does the IT department actually sell? Capacity? Availability? Infrastructure? New projects? That’s not what the IT organisation truly sells. What you do sell is information for managers, places of work for employees and automated processes that support the work. Is the manager who urgently needs information while in a hotel room in New York able to instantly access this info from his PDA? Are users given access to resources, functions and services to be able to work at home, en route and at the office without any problems? Are operations dovetailed perfectly across the various applications and departments? That is what is expected, whether or not there’s a service level agreement. In brief, what the IT organisation truly sells is the fulfilment of expectations. So measure these and don’t get tripped up over the strategic agenda or keeping up with the latest trends. Remember, you have to walk before you can run.
Customer satisfaction about IT often entails more than your own organisation chart. If customers book online with transavia.com or construction firms order items via the portal of the Technical Union, the IT department works not only for the internal customer, but also for the end customer. After all, these are the people who pay our salaries. The most important lesson of the late management guru Peter Drucker is ‘the only profit centre is the customer’.
Internet, contact centres and the back office make the quality of IT transparent. If this digital backbone is inflexible and inefficient in its functioning, or simply makes stupid mistakes, it causes irritation among customers. Businesses in de e-commerce sector work according to the ratio of abandoned shopping carts (ASCs). No less than three quarters of shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is made. How do you respond when CRM no longer works effectively and you start missing out on new opportunities? Or when ERP goes offline and the deliveries in the supply chain are suspended? When IT has a negative influence on the number of customers, on cross-selling or the number of error-free orders in your chain, then IT is a negatively charged profit centre. In other words, IT is a loss centre.
Of course you can manage IT as a cost centre by directing your main focus to reducing the TCO. But bear in mind that IT can also have a major influence on the top-line and bottom-line of the organisation. Only then does a natural alignment between IT and the business remain a viable option.
Forget about all those enticing trends and shelve the brutal cost cutting for a while. Concentrate on the question: ‘what do I as IT contribute to the success of the customer?’ Brilliant investment plans and fantastic outsourcing agreements could undoubtedly be useful, but may not become a goal in itself. Because they yield disappointingly little when you don’t measure and aim towards customer satisfaction.
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