Finding the Voice of the Help Desk Customer

Do you know what your service desk customers think about the quality of service they receive from you? You may think that you understand their expectations and current performance. You may be unsure, but hope that you are doing well. Finding the voice of the customer and defining your service catalog and service levels around their expectations will guarantee a level of satisfaction higher than will shooting in the dark.

To help you become more certain of the voice of the customer, you should use a disciplined approach to find the voice of the customer.

First Things First
Start with a bunch of large PostIt Notes and brainstorm with your team. Ask, "What do our customers expect from our help desk?" List as many things as you can in 15 minutes. Write each idea on a separate note and place it on the wall. Encourage free thinking by emphasizing the speed of the exercise and discouraging discussion of the ideas. Let your team know that you will have further discussion later. If people slow down, ask exploratory questions like:

• What do they expect about response time?
• What do they expect about resolution time?
• What do they expect about their conversation?
• What do they expect about communication on their case?

The Many and the Few
Now that you have your long list, ask the team group similar ideas by physically arranging them on the wall. This is a get-out-of-your seat exercise that can be fun and very beneficial. Try to keep the number of groups under seven and eliminate groups with only one idea by combining and rearranging with the team. When you feel that your groups of ideas make sense to most people, ask the team to give a descriptive category name to each group.

The result of this exercise is a list of critical to quality (CTQ) goals. These are your starting point for finding the voice of the customer. Most help desk goals center around:

• Availability of analysts
• Turn around time for requests
• Empathy and customer service skills
• On-going case communication

Your help desk may have more or less of these, but they are common CTQ goals for a help desk.

Trust the Trustworthy
Now you have a concept of what the voice of the customer may be. It's time to take it for a spin. Ask your peers and those who you think will give you an honest assessment of your CTQ goals. Don't try it out on your customers yet. Get feedback and refine your concept of customer satisfaction. Ask your confidants if you are missing anything that is important to them or if any of your ideas are unimportant. Let them share their horror stories without retaliating. Be open to allowing them to shape your concept of the voice of the customer.

Talk to the Big Names
You are now at the point where you need to break out of closed doors and share your CTQ goals with some of your business-critical customers and some of your most frequent customers. This is where you will need to brace yourself. Gracefully accept their feedback and share with them that you want to serve their needs better. Let them know that you will follow up with them periodically to check on progress. Once again, you should not dictate to them what is important to them, but let them know that this is a starting point. Allow them to shape your concept of the voice of the customer.

CTQs for Every Occasion
Now that you have refined your CTQ goals, start sharing them with your team, your manager, your peers, your customers, and everyone with whom you come into contact. Create posters and hand outs. Base your customer surveys on the CTQ goals. Get excited about them and share your excitement -- you have found the voice of the customer.

Get to Work
Now that you have found the voice of the customer, captured in your CTQ goals, develop strategies and tactics that help you to satisfy customers in these areas. Find opportunities to implement best practices that will reduce your expenses while improving customer satisfaction.