What does customer experience mean to the service desk?

Customer Experience Flow

What's at the core of Customer Experience? Essentially, it's all about quality: nothing more, nothing less. But don't think this means you need to provide 5-star deluxe service and free gala dinner with every password reset. Users don’t want to be put on a pedestal - they are demanding flow. What's flow? Essentially, it's being allowed to be productive without interruption. Forrester links Flow to employee experience. It's a main driver in the perception that work is running smoothly.

And then there's the Mihály Csíkszentmihály study on flow. It's not new, but it's more important than ever: flow is about autonomy, mastery and purpose. It's being in the zone. Flow means people can be most productive and that requires flexibility and access to resources.

Why should you care? Because this represents a shift in how users experience excellent support. 24/7 connectivity, BYOD, cloud support is now vital. People want to be able to work from everywhere, but still be supported. And Service Management as an industry needs to respond. But you know that. Now what?

By the way, if you want help helping your Customers achieve flow, check out our Workforce Enablement toolkit.

Moving the focus to Service Excellence

You need to focus on excellent service. And that's not just because you want to be nice. There's an economic incentive to it.

The link between customer experience (CX) and revenue has been proven, and so has the link between CX and employee satisfaction. The effects of CX and employee experience on the finances is apparent.

Happy employees are more likely to make the right choices. Likewise, these employees are more likely to stay with the company. This is why employee experience is so important. Service Excellence really is anything you can do to help your employees in making those correct decisions to serve their customers better, and thereby helping the business thrive.

The impact is becoming more and more clear. When looking for a new job, everyone looks to Glassdoor to see what others working there think - but, more interestingly, so are suppliers and business partners! Why? Simply because they know that happy employees have an impact on the service they are going to receive from them.

Why employee engagement and customer experience go hand in hand with digital transformation >>

Quick steps to better Customer Experience

What steps can you take? You have to know how your customer wants to be helped, then offer that to them. Services need to be more available. A good example is BYOD and working from home policies, where employees gain more freedom in choosing what they want to use gives them more convenience.

Empower your customers by giving them enough freedom and the correct tools to self-correct many of their services issues they experience. Doing so might include creating a knowledge base, a self-service portal and a high quality service catalogue.

And... have we talked about the Customer Journey before? Yes, a lot. But in order to deliver better Service, it's vital that you personalize the approach by creating customer persona’s and tailored customer journeys.

Walking through your processes and mapping the customer journey is an excellent way of understanding which parts of your Service Delivery can be improved easily. It shows how the true experience is the net result of good interactions minus bad interactions. This is one obvious reason why many companies are moving away from SLAs to XLAs, for instance, as they notice that even when the SLA is being met, the customer is still not happy.

Want more?

Wanna learn more about better Customer Experience? We wrote a book on it! Download the Customer Centricity ebook for invaluable tips and tricks to make your Services stand out.