What can we do to improve the customer experience?
Despite which processes you have and whether or not you utilize them or the maturity of them is low or high, all the customer really only wants to have a great service experience. Actually work with your customer to find out what their current experience is. Sounds simple enough but for the most part we need a method to survey or poll our customers to see where the gaps in our services really are.
There are several ways in which this can be done, either through a survey, some type of Social IT, actual customer’s interactions, or a combination of these. It’s also important to be specific; the whole purpose is to get feedback from the customers and not to assume what the issues are.
Once you have identified the areas for improvement you can organize them in a way which will show you the ones which have the highest impact as well as if there are any low hanging fruit in which you can pick off. Depending on the information you gather you may want to review them with the Business Stakeholders in your customer base if this applies to ensure that the right things are getting fixed. For example an area which gets the most response may be important to the end users but from a priority level may place second to a new business initiative. Once you have the business case put together you can take these to the IT Leadership for review this will allow you to get alignment on these improvements. While it may be the mandate of ITSM to improve quality of service and drive down the costs, alignment ensures that you are all going in the same direction towards customer satisfaction.
Keep in contact with your customers while these enhancements are underway. While many of these improvements are not going to happen overnight it is important that your customer base know that you have heard their suggestions and are working to improve the situation. Doing this will also allow you to improve the dialog for future improvements but also improve the engagement from the customer base on completing any “customer satisfaction survey” you undertake in the future. Remember this is not a one-time activity; this will be an ongoing activity which should improve the relationships between IT and the customer.