Customer Sat: The only KPI that really matters.

Bill Gates once famously said, "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." This, of course, makes perfect sense. If a customer complains to you about their experience, one of your processes, or rates your service poorly, it's essentially pointing a big arrow right at what needs fixing.

We in the IT service delivery world keep track of many many metrics. Often times, we monitor things simply because we have the ability to do so. Pie charts, bar graphs, spreadsheets, lines zig-zagging across monitors all trying to help us feel the pulse of our business. There are many companies who's sole product is exactly those graphs and charts that integrate into your ticketing systems. It's easy to get lost in the numbers when there are so many options out there.

What about just having one monitor up on the service desk wall that's a speedometer-style customer sat score?

Is there a better pulse of the business? Do all the other numbers really matter to the boots on the ground? Well, yes and no. For starters, you can brag about first call resolution, never missing an SLA, or how many tickets you've closed until you are blue in the face. If the customer is not happy: those numbers do NOT matter. I have spoken at length in previous articles about the human element of IT service delivery. The personalization of the interaction, the empathy that staff should give their clients, these are not things that you can see on a chart. However, they most certainly influence customer sat. Things like these are the reason it's important to hire the right people. Client-facing service is not for everyone! Unfortunately, that is often discovered when it's too late, or you've already invested valuable resources hiring and training the wrong person.

I was told a story one time by a colleague that really hits home on this. A businessman had this great idea to set up an IT Managed Services company, that only hired the best Tier 3 support engineers he could find. No Level 1 help desk techs, no dispatcher, no front line of defense, just the best technical brains in the business. His theory was, that if these were the best engineers around, no matter how difficult (or simple) a problem was, they would close the ticket on the first call. FCR is the support center golden goose, is it not?

He did it, and the company failed miserably...

But why? Because quite often, cliche as it may be, those same high-level engineers often lack people skills. Sure, the problem was probably fixed, but the communication was either cold, too technical, or frankly non-existent. The actual end-user customer experience was poor. Dare I even bring up the real story of a former co-worker, who was escalated a firewall issue that had a client site down for over four hours. After fixing the problem, which was admittedly complicated, his only notes on the ticket were: "Tada!"

Needless to say, Tada! is not something you can send a client as an explanation for their outage, and a summary of the work completed. Maybe with some training or documentation, L1 or 2 could have resolved it in a half or a quarter of the time, and the customer would have been happier that you run a tight, well-documented shop.

Now, if your customer sat is suffering, then yes, it is absolutely necessary to dig down and, just like with an IT problem, find the root cause. In some instances, the customer will be straightforward and let you know where you've fallen short. Other times, it's all those other metrics that will give you a clue. Are tickets getting stale because your technicians are taking too long to respond? Are there time entries exceeding 30 minutes for a simple password reset request that should have taken no more than 5? It's then that all the behind the scenes numbers matter, and will help you get back in the green.

My take is, LEAD with, and focus on, customer satisfaction. If you zone in on that, make that the thing that people see day in and day out on their screens, and keep that value instilled in your staff, then the impressive dashboard of numbers, and revenue, will surely follow. Technicians will no longer keep customers on hold since that'll drop sat. They won't let tickets get stale because that will drop sat. They will be polite and empathize with the users because that will improve sat.

The customer experience comes first, all the time, every time.

Suggested reading for your staff:

Legendary Service: The Key is to Care by Ken Blanchard. https://amzn.com/0071819045