Generation Y is testing the IT department’s raison d’être. What’s the meaning of an internal function when it doesn’t add value (enough)? In the eyes of many young professionals, IT is just a bunch of naysayers. When you can get around them, you do so. With more and more highly demanding customers, the IT organisation has to respond. Not only with a vision on the long run, but with superb service asap. This requires an important milestone: adding complaint and idea management to the ITIL family.
We are facing a new phase of IT
Business units are able to start their shadow-IT: solutions are easily built without IT departments’ approval. Cloud computing offers a wide range of opportunities like SaaS for do-it-yourself-IT. Great, yet digital anarchy arises. Employee tweets can harm companies and fierce discussions on the violation of privacy laws in clouds occur, like the infringement of the fourth amendment in the US. For reasons of compliance, security, but also data integration and architecture, corporations have to strike a balance. The days of the Corporate IT department are not over, yet one thing is sure; we have to become much more customer-oriented. Having a 2015 or even 2020 vision and scenario planning are important, but the future starts tomorrow. How can we show our internal customers we truly care? By being a service hero.
ITIL, a steppingstone for being a service champ
To step up and deliver excellent service, we can use a framework most IT departments already use, namely ITIL. The development of the IT Infrastructure Library started in the 1980s and after three decennia it is the world’s best set of practices to manage enterprise IT services. When implemented within the organisation, people will begin to understand what it is the IT organisation does and how IT works. The third version (ITIL v3) provides guidance to start running IT like a business. All five volumes contain the word ‘service’: service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. The challenge is to use the ITIL framework and act accordingly to become a real service champ.
What do actual service businesses have in common?
They are customer-focused. In IT, customers are still referred to as ‘users’. The term ‘user’ reflects the past when computer users where completely dependent of the mighty IT department. Nowadays, users are computer-literate, they demand service and not just help and therefore have to be upgraded to ‘customers’, for the IT department to understand what their needs are. Furthermore, we need an outside-in view on the definition of service quality. Quality in the old IT-world stands for phrases like ‘the minimum percentage uptime’ or ‘availability of the network’. This is inside-out thinking: input not outcome. In the new, customer-centric world quality stands for the impact IT has on business processes, employees and the customers the business serves. New metrics are right in your face; they show if and how much the business is hurt or users are dissatisfied. The hard part in being truly service-minded is to be open to harsh criticism. We already have ITIL as a best practices framework, but why isn’t there a process for complaint management? Adding complaints to your ITIL will be a breakthrough. Encourage critical customer feedback! And because organisations need not only to acknowledge its shortcomings, but also what it does well: suggestions, ideas and compliments. I know a story of a helpdesk that couldn’t handle ‘thank you’ calls because there was no possiblility to register them as a ticket. It’s a striking example to show how little we are open to any customer feedback.
How to open up for customer feedback?
What processes and metrics are in place to manage from a user-perspective? A litmus test is having a proper complaint management process. Are users able to report complaints and suggestions? And secondly, what’s done with this information? Often incident tickets are closed to meet an internal metric – percentage closed within timeframe – without knowing whether the customer’s problem is actually solved. When you measure user satisfaction, low-scores imply complaints. Next to direct complaints, the implied ones are maybe even more important. Filling out a complaint-form is a formal step that not many customers do. Yet using these negative satisfaction ratings – with user satisfaction surveys – to resolve issues and prevent them in the future, is an effective way to structure a customer feedback loop. Resolving a complaint can be done in three ways: 1) decide and do: 2) decide, do and research for continuous improvement of ITIL processes, and 3) research for rout-causes, decide and do. This follow-up is relatively simple to automate in existing service management tools. Direct complaints, implied complaints and also suggestions have to be managed as electronic work orders, which are routed and escalated to higher levels in the organisation if they stay open for too long. When resolved (direct complaints and suggestions) the person who raised the complaint is notified. A feedback loop is no rocket-science and already common practice in other service industries like retail, airline and car rental. When reinventing IT, please start with customer feedback. Without that it will be hard to get a buy-in from your stakeholders to move up the value-chain.
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