Effortless. Frictionless. Proactive. Intuitive.
This is the kind of experience users not only expect, but demand from their IT service organizations - and ServiceNow promises to deliver.
But implementing ServiceNow is only the first step to making this expectation a reality. The real magic happens with the people and processes you have running your operations on the ground floor.
To learn more about how to reach that level of “effortless” that ServiceNow promises, we spoke to Zach Brand, Director of Connected Solutions here at Crossfuze, about how our Service Desk team uses ServiceNow.
Here’s what we learned:
Align the Organization, Leverage Technology
To reduce customer effort, it’s important to look at the whole process holistically. It’s easy to get caught up in technology, but technology, people, and processes all work together to achieve success.
But even with all these pieces aligned, is it possible to provide a truly effortless experience?
“We can get pretty close!” says Brand, “But it’s a journey, so it’s not going to happen overnight. If you treat it as a destination, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Crossfuze Service Desk In Action:
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when many businesses pivoted to a remote work model, one Crossfuze client needed additional support for the influx of new remote users they now had. As their users moved out of the office en masse, the Crossfuze Service Desk helped take on the corresponding influx of calls to alleviate the volume their team was receiving.
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According to Brand, achieving success in the customer effort journey requires leveraging the technology and also empowering your end-users and support team to take the technology and make it operationally fluid with the right self-service options and automation.
Measuring the Right Metrics: Beware the Watermelon
What’s a watermelon metric? It’s a metric that looks nice and green on the outside, but when you dig a bit deeper, it’s an alarming red - and it’s an indicator that your customers may be putting in more effort than they should be.
For example, let’s say a company’s first call resolution (FCR) is 70 percent. That sounds good, but it doesn’t reflect the fact that end-users are contacting the IT department for simple tasks like password resets, which could easily be fixed by building an appropriate service catalog item in ServiceNow. With that service catalog item added, the first call resolution drops to 55 percent FCR, which sounds bad. But if you’ve dropped your contact volume from 2,000 contacts a month to 1,200, that’s a step in the right direction. The less effort you’re asking of your users, the better the outcome.
Customer Effort Outweighs FCR
So ask yourself, what repeatable tasks is the Service Desk doing that end-users could do themselves? What about tasks that level 2 technicians and engineers are doing that the Service Desk could handle? Shifting those responsibilities around may shock your KPIs initially, but what matters is what customers really want: an effortless experience that gives them quick help and then lets them get back to whatever they were doing. That’s a KPI to focus on. And it’s a metric that can improve when you use quantitative and qualitative data.
And when you start capturing that data in ServiceNow, you’ll quickly see which issues are being reported and how they’re being resolved, whether the Service Desk is resolving tickets or escalating to other teams, whether tickets are being sent to the right people, and more.
And don’t shy away from sending customer satisfaction surveys through ServiceNow. That will tell you what the CX looks like, including how customers are interacting with the tool and where there are frustrations or sources of pain. You can then use this data to get to the heart of any issues and solve the root cause.
Get a Service Desk Assessment
At Crossfuze, we’re passionate about helping organizations get the most out of their ServiceNow instance. So we offer customers a Service Desk Assessment to help determine what you’re doing well, and where there are opportunities to improve. This assessment identifies benchmarks, gives a gap analysis, and evaluates current processes. We’ll then offer future-state recommendations and bite-size phases for companies to work their way in the direction of an effortless customer experience.
To start improving your service desk experience and get to the next level of ServiceNow maturity, send us a note: letstalk@crossfuze.com!
