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Summary
Despite high satisfaction rates with the service desk, data suggests that employees are living with ongoing problems that the service desk can’t fix. This isn’t IT’s fault, but rather the result of systemic devaluation of employee experience (EX). Putting EX at the core of technology considerations is critical to reducing employee and productivity disruption.
The State Of The Service Desk, 2022
The transition to remote work upended IT support and the service desk function. Thanks to Herculean efforts, IT teams have reestablished some semblance of operations normalcy: According to Forrester’s Future Of Work Survey, 2021, 66% of employees contact the service desk more than once a year, and 67% of employees who contact the service desk report being satisfied with their service desk (see Figure 1).
Despite high satisfaction, data suggests that employees are living with ongoing problems the service desk can’t fix. A third of employees we surveyed in the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Australia report avoiding the service desk (see Figure 2). Two countervailing forces create these contradictory results — the human-facilitated side of IT and the systems that technology organizations use to empower employees.
- The human side of IT is creating positive service interactions ... Humans delivering these services are doing their best to meet employee needs, but they often lack the resources, authority, analytics, or permissions required to help resolve long-running issues. Even with these limitations, practitioners are doing surprisingly well — in addition to high satisfaction, 47% of employees report receiving a fix in under an hour. In fact, for most technology issues, employees still prefer to interact with a human than use self-service mechanisms (see Figure 3).
- ... but systemic experience issues are making employees apathetic. While IT is satisfying employees in a given interaction, gaps persist. A majority of employees report avoiding the service desk and living with issues the service desk can’t fix, and only 47% of employees we surveyed report that the service desk adequately supports their remote work experience. While some issues today are outside IT’s control (e.g., home network troubleshooting), understanding the EX impact of these problems warrants deeper investigation, and most IT organizations aren’t doing this today. Only 40% of employees say their service desk actively seeks their feedback.
Begin Building A Better Service Desk
These systematic technology problems have a direct drain on productivity and EX. The reason that these problems have persisted is straightforward — the service desk, and IT in general, continue to face resource limitations and lack of support for EX considerations in purchasing.
According to the VP and global support lead at a professional services organization, “I had an old CFO (and the CIO agreed) who said to me, ‘If your satisfaction ratings are high, that means we should cut your budget.’” Meeting employee needs will require a shift in mindset around technology experience — from IT to finance — and a reexamination of the role the service desk plays in empowering employees. To begin this process:
- Begin collecting experience feedback (on more than just service interactions). With less than half of respondents reporting that the service desk seeks their feedback, there’s an obvious first step for service improvement. Many organizations are investing in mechanisms to understand experience drivers according to Forrester’s 2021 data, which shows that 65% of software decision-makers report adopting, having adopted, or planning to adopt end-user experience management (EUEM) solutions — many of which have native user surveying capabilities. Organizations that haven’t done so should make this a priority for this year.
- Recognize that Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) isn’t enough to understand EX in IT. For organizations already collecting experience feedback, focus on building out an end-to-end understanding of employee journeys. If you’re only measuring experience during interactions, you’re excluding the population that avoids the service desk. Once these reluctant employees are accounted for, you’ll have a clearer roadmap for fixing organizational experience gaps.
- Establish senior leadership accountability for EX, the service desk, and overall IT. According to Forrester’s 2021 data, 51% of infrastructure decision-makers report that their IT organization has a team goal for EX and that they personally are held accountable for these goals. Technology silos complicate this; for example, end-user computing can’t take responsibility for the performance of finance applications. But these internal distinctions don’t — and shouldn’t — matter to end users. Members of senior leadership who are responsible for employees’ technology journeys must all be goaled on identifying existing shortcomings and improving technology EX.
- Develop internal IT talent — tenure is undervalued. The longer IT professionals work within an organization, the more experience they develop with the various quirks of the environment. These individuals are some of your best assets for identifying shortcomings, and they provide you with a talent pool you can invest in upskilling to meet organizational needs. Clear career progression, including sponsoring certifications, can prove an organizational selling point during skills shortages.
- Write simpler knowledge how-tos to free up L1. Despite employees’ preferences for interacting with humans to resolve their tech issues, you need mechanisms to provide faster support. Employees we surveyed report that only 21% of service desk issues are resolved within five minutes. One part of accelerating support is making information end-user friendly. Most IT knowledge is overly technical and written from an IT-facing perspective. For your most common inquiries, write knowledge in coordination with end-users to ensure that it’s useful to those outside of IT.
- Leverage self-service mechanisms. Human support agents shouldn’t manage password reset processes. Your employees don’t want that, either — 66% would prefer a password reset managed by a self-service mechanism (like a catalogue entry or chatbot). Automating this task allows your practitioners more time for other issues like diagnosing broken devices, which users prefer resolving with a person.
Become proactive. Though it’s easier said than done, proactivity is the ultimate tool to reduce chronic IT issues. Proactive tech support isn’t a single solution or tool; it’s the adoption of foundational elements that you can build from (see Figure 4). Critical elements to these foundational pieces include increased environmental visibility, user experience surveying, on-device automated common issue remediation, and transaction tracing. For example, EUEM solutions can detect battery failures before they occur. This is the final component of helping your users reduce the chronic technology issues they face.
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Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers. If your business doesn’t already offer texting support, then here are the nine reasons you should.. 1. Customers spend a lot of time on their phones People in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on their cell phones each day. Mobile commerce, or purchases made on mobile devices, is expected to account for 45 percent of the total market in the U.S. by the end of 2020, according to Business Insider . Besides people using their phones for more than personal communication and shopping, they are also working from their phones. All of this points to the fact that your customers are already spending more time on mobile than anywhere else. And nothing is more accessible to a mobile user than texting. So it is high time that your business starts texting your existing support. Meet your customers where they are. 2. Your customers prefer texting Now that we know customers are already on their phones, but does that also mean they want to text businesses? Yes. Customers want to be able to text your support team simply because they prefer texting over long-winded support calls. Reportedly, 52 percent of customers prefer texting over other support communication channels. Another reason why texting should be preferred is that it has a 98 percent open rate . That means your customers will read your message nearly every time, which only makes it easier for you to resolve all of your customers’ support questions. If you meet your customers where they want to talk they’ll view your business more favorably too. Research shows that 65 percent of consumers feel positive toward businesses that they have the option to message. 3. Speed The average response time for texting is just 90 seconds. On top of that, 95 percent of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. This is way quicker than your average email response time and thus will make your customer feel valued. Part of what can help to speed this process up is a good texting platform that your customer support team can work with. Such a platform can host all of the support messages, where they can see, respond to, or share messages. Some texting platforms like Textline can even integrate with your favorite customer support tools like Freshdesk and Slack. These integrations make responding and managing customer support requests easier. Another reason why texting is simply better when it comes to speed is that texts are inherently short. You’re limited to 160 characters and so are your customers. Realistically, there’s only so much one can squeeze into one text that naturally forces the sender to keep the message simple and clear. 4. Reduced active wait Customers don’t like waiting. Nearly 60 percent of customers said they would hang up if put on hold for more than a minute. Texting eliminates that hold time and gives your customers more of their day back. The beauty of texting is that it’s quick, convenient, and doesn’t interrupt your customer’s day. Texting also comes with built-in expectations around timing and the natural flow of conversations. While responses are expected, there’s an understanding that it may take a bit of time. This differs from live chat, which expects near-instant replies. With texting, even if you think there might be a wait for getting your customers some help, you can use a simple text to let your customers know that you are working on an answer but it might take a bit of time. This will help them to continue with their day without sitting by the phone waiting. Let’s look at the following example of one such situation.
It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high. There are many factors that might impact your average response time, including: the number of steps that agents have to take to find customer history and previous interactions the difficulty in communicating and collaborating with other teams absolute ticket volumes, as well as ticket volume to agent ratio the frequency of complex issues that routinely take longer to solve To help you tackle these challenges in an efficient manner, we’ve put together this article where we deep dive into the average response times across channels, and also look at effective ways to improve customer responsiveness. What is responsiveness in customer service? Simply put, customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently a company responds to customers. From a customer support standpoint, it is the time taken by the support agents to respond to your customers. It’s important to note that customer responsiveness covers first response time, and also the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution. Customers would be delighted if they get connected to an agent immediately but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries. Striking a balance between speed and quality is the biggest challenge faced by customer support agents. However, by clearly communicating the expected wait and query resolution time beforehand, you can help set the right expectations with customers. This will also enable customers to gain trust in your brand, and help you build customer loyalty. But the real question here is – how can you deliver timely and consistent customer support when you handle different communication channels? The answer to this question lies in understanding the expected response times for each channel as well as knowing how to deliver better customer experience. How crucial is the customer response time for each channel? The average response time or average wait time differs for each support channel. Here is a breakdown of the average response time for each customer service channel. Email According to SuperOffice, the average wait time for an email is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Here is a representation of the percentage of different age groups expecting an email reply within 1 hour.
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