Measuring the Quality of IT Support
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The document discusses the importance of customer satisfaction in IT support, highlighting the inadequacies of traditional SLA metrics that can create a disconnect between perceived and actual service quality. It advocates for the adoption of the Net Promoter System (NPS) as a more effective method for measuring customer satisfaction and driving service improvement. Additionally, it emphasizes the necessity for regular feedback and cultural alignment within support teams to enhance customer experiences.
Measuring the Quality of IT Support
- 2. Contents What does good IT support look like? Why is good IT support important? How is IT support quality typically measured? What’s wrong with SLA metrics? Focus on customer satisfaction instead Introducing Net Promoter The benefits of Net Promoter Introducing CIOPulse The value of using CIOPulse How CIOPulse can help you succeed Why ITSM surveys don’t cut it Next steps About the author Copyright & legal 3 4 5 6 12 14 16 18 19 20 33 34 35 36 2
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- 6. Relying on time-based SLA metrics as an indicator of how satisfied customers should be, can lead to The Watermelon Effect. The Watermelon Effect is where the traffic lights on your SLA reports are all green (so you expect your customers to be happy), but your customers are still unhappy (red faced and frustrated!). This mismatch of perceptions is pretty common and you’ve probably experienced it yourself. 6 What’s wrong with SLA metrics?
- 7. Research from Forrester shows how prevalent the misalignment is – there are about twice as many IT teams that think they provide great IT support than there are businesses who feel they are getting it. 7 What’s wrong with SLA metrics?
- 8. 65% of IT teams think they provide good IT support Only 35% of businesses feel they get it Forrester 2012
- 9. One of the causes of this problem is that the metrics used in Service Level Agreements are a deeply flawed way of measuring service quality. They mislead IT support teams into thinking they understand how the customer feels about the service they provide. Our customers’ experience of IT support is shaped by many factors, not just how quickly we responded or resolved their issue. Factors such as how they were treated, whether they could understand what they were being told or asked to do and whether they felt well informed about what was going on and what would happen next. Even something like time is not absolute. From personal experience, we all know there are many factors that can make the same absolute wait time feel longer or shorter. 9 What’s wrong with SLA metrics?
- 10. What’s wrong with SLA metrics? Ultimately, these experience factors are all about expectations and perceptions, not absolutes. The perceptions of those at the receiving end of the service – our customers. And the outcome of their judgement is their level of satisfaction. David Maister, a researcher on the psychology of waiting times, described this rather succinctly with the formula: S=P-E, where S stands for satisfaction, P for perception and E for expectation. As P and E are both psychological in nature, S can be attained when a customer’s perceived experience of a service, P, exceeds their expectations, E. Absolute measures of time take neither expectations nor perceptions into account! 10
- 11. What’s wrong with SLA metrics? Finally, there is the problem of customer expectations increasing over time, as predicted by the Kano Model. For example, electric windscreens and air conditioning used to delight car buyers. Now these features are expected as a bare minimum. Over time, customers expect more in order to be satisfied. As a result, when you rely solely on purely objective measures, customers may perceive that service levels are declining even when your measures tell you they are not. 11
- 12. If you want to measure service quality, the best way to do that is to ask your customers. Valarie Zeithaml put this rather nicely in her book, Delivering Quality Service: “Only customers judge quality. All other judgments are essentially irrelevant”. We need to stop putting so much focus on traditional, time-based SLA metrics and start focusing on customer satisfaction. The extent to which you can keep your customers happy determines whether your customers trust you or bypass you, forgive your mistakes or haul you over the coals, increase your budget or squeeze it, keeps you as their service provider or outsources you. And if you’re always asking your customers to not just rate your service, but to tell you what you need to do to improve (a key practice of the highly successful Net Promoter System®), you’ll find this feedback to be a very powerful way to drive continual service improvement. Focus on customer satisfaction instead 12
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- 14. Introducing Net Promoter Net Promoter® is an open-source methodology used by 65% of the world’s top 200 companies to grow their businesses by increasing customer loyalty. At its heart is a metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS®) that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services. An NPS is calculated by asking customers a question along the lines of, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”. Based on their rating, a customer is categorised as a Detractor (when they give a rating of 6 or below), a Passive (7 or 8) or a Promoter (9 or 10). An NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. This results in a score ranging from -100 (all your customers think you’re terrible) to +100 (all your customers think you’re fantastic). 14
- 15. Introducing Net Promoter The real power of Net Promoter comes from two very valuable follow-up questions that ask the customer why they gave that rating, and what the number one thing is that they’d like to see improved. The answer to these questions are pure gold and, when analysed and themed, provide an excellent basis for planning service improvements. Net Promoter is often overlooked or rejected by IT teams because of the irrelevance of the “likely to recommend” question for an internal service provider. But that concern is easy to address by simply changing the wording of that question to something along the lines of… “On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied were you with the support you received?” With the question reworded, you’re free to enjoy the benefits that Net Promoter has to offer. 15
- 16. The benefits of Net Promoter Here are five reasons why IT teams should use Net Promoter to measure and improve IT customer satisfaction: It is a globally proven service improvement methodology trusted by brands such as Apple, Google, Rackspace and Zappos. There are a mountain of case studies that show how effective it can be. Unlike traditional surveys for gathering customer feedback, a Net Promoter survey – with only three questions – is ridiculously quick and easy for customers to complete. The Net Promoter concept is simple to understand by staff at all levels. Net Promoter includes some fantastic practices that help you turn customer feedback into improved service quality. It is not just a customer satisfaction score but a method for improving that score. An NPS is standardised so you can benchmark your NPS against others. 1 2 3 4 5 16
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- 23. To create a customer-centric culture, customer facing support staff need plenty of feedback to ensure their behaviours are aligned with the culture you want to create. Support staff need to understand what good looks like and feedback from customers provides clear examples of good and bad customer experiences. Customer feedback is therefore critical to the performance management process. This is never more important than for your less competent support staff. There is a rather scary phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, relatively unskilled staff mistakenly assess their ability to be much higher than it is. Your worst support staff think they’re your best! Feedback can be used to ensure employees self- perception of their own ability is more closely aligned with reality, and from there they can grow. Building a customer-centric culture requires that feedback is regular. Waiting for the annual performance review won’t work. This is why organisations such as GE, Microsoft, PWC and Accenture have declared that they’re moving away from annual performance reviews to more regular feedback. 23
- 24. 24 The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. Wikipedia
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- 27. “Unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” Bill Gates
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- 36. 36 Trademarks Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc. CIOPulse is a trademark of Silversix Pty Ltd. Copyright You have permission to share this, print this and distribute it for free to anyone you like, as long as you make no changes to its original contents or digital format. Disclaimer This eBook is general in nature and not meant to replace any specific advice. Please be sure to take specialist advice before taking on any of the ideas. Dave O’Reardon disclaims all and any liability to any persons whatsoever in respect of anything done by any person in reliance, whether in whole or in part, as a result of this eBook.