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.

Service Catalogs and Service Level Agreements

The first step in creating Service Level Agreements (SLA) or Service Level Objectives (SLO) is to create a service catalog. At its most basic level, a service catalog is a list of all the services your help desk will provide. In most cases, an SLA is used to define the support requirements of a team to which the help desk escalates cases.

The helpdesk may have internal goals for first call resolution, average speed of answer, and so forth, but PC repairs and debugging application issues often fall into a black hole when they are assigned outside of the help desk. It is these escalated cases as well as the issuing of new user IDs, PCs, and software, that will benefit the most from defined SLAs or SLOs.

Creating a service catalog to begin defining your service levels is always easiest where you have a help desk case management system and good data to measure. If you have already divided your cases into meaningful categories and/or subcategories, you can start by reporting on the categories that have the highest volume of cases in a given month. This will vary from company to company.

After you have listed your categories from highest volume to lowest, review the list and think through the value of a defined SLA or SLO for each. If it doesn't make sense, also determine if your category is appropriate. You may need to look at more detailed information or redefine your categories to make them more or less descriptive.

With your list of case categories that should have defined service levels, report on the actual performance against those service levels. You may find that installing software takes one day to turn around, but creating new user IDs takes three. You may find that deploying a new laptop or mobile device takes two weeks when you thought it was only taking a few days.

Now that you have a basic service catalog and a baseline of performance metrics, you are ready to begin the process of defining service level agreements with your support teams. Implementing SLAs is outside the scope of this article, because it is an intricate process that requires working through management and people issues that may lie outside of customary organizational boundaries.

Get started now on your service catalog, since it is your first step to achieving SLAs. It makes escalated support performance objective and helps put you in control of case management.

Daily Service Desk Metrics

The service desk or help desk is a high transaction function. In a perfect world, every case would be resolved in 15 minutes or less. While this is a lofty goal, it demonstrates the transactional characteristics of the service desk.

To keep such transactional work on track, it is not sufficient to have a monthly or weekly meeting to review performance. To be successful you need a daily view of performance metrics.

What metrics should be reviewed daily?

• Critical incidents
• Non-critical case priorities by support team
• Count of open cases in individual's queues
• Service level performance
  
• Case aging

It is important that you automate these metrics quickly, since manually generating them every day will lead to putting them on the back burner when workload increases. Look at options in your help case management system or at external reporting tools that will send you daily reports via email.

But wait. There's more to do. Pulling these daily metrics are only the starting point. You need to set up a daily forum for reviewing the metrics with the managers of your support teams. This holds everyone accountable to meet their goals and to prioritize according to predefined standards. This meeting works best if it is held first thing in the morning to help set the course for the day.

Keep an eye on the daily performance metrics. Your monthly performance will look good, and what's more, your customers will be satisfied.

-Steve McElwee

Create Clear Channels

How easy is it for your help desk or service desk customers to understand how to communicate with you? Many times, it is assumed that the end users know how to follow your predefined processes and that they will follow them naturally. The exact opposite is generally true.

Contacting You By Phone
Let’s start with your phone prompts - when end users call your help desk. Your prompts must meaningful and relevant in two directions.

First, your voice prompts must have value for the customer. The customer must understand how the prompts relate to them. If you say, “Press 1 for business applications,” you’re likely to find that just about everything can be called a “business application.” Instead, try to be specific and use terms your customers will understand.

Second, your voice prompts must have value for service. If you have five options, and all get routed to the same queue, and everyone has the same skill set, you’ve just spent your customer’s time and not added any value. Instead, you should use your voice prompts to improve first call resolution, by grouping skill sets on your team around the voice prompts. Since most companies have a large number of applications and technologies to support, this routing will help your customer satisfaction significantly, since there is more likelihood of getting fast resolution.

One way to improve service is to use two levels of voice prompts. At the first level, find out why the customer is calling:

1. Report a problem you are experiencing or get status on an existing problem.
2. Order new PCs, peripherals, or software or get status on an existing order.
3. Request logins for new or existing employees.
4. All other requests.

Your second level can then point your customer to the queue that has the best skills to meet your needs. For example, if the user selects number one, above, the options may become:

1. For problems connecting from outside of our office.
2. For problems with Microsoft Windows, Office or other software installed on your PC.
3. For problems with web-based applications.
4. All other requests.

Once you are satisfied with your voice prompts, consider what answers you can give directly in the phone prompts. For example, if you have a standard answer for all questions regarding wireless support, record the answer directly into one of your phone prompts. The user gets an immediate answer and you don’t need an analyst to take the call.

Contacting You On the Web
After you have settled on the options users will have when they contact you by phone, be consistent for Intranet or web access. If you’re phone prompts work well, users will appreciate a consistent structure when contacting you through your web site. The only difference should be that your web channel should promise faster service through automation. This reduces the number of analysts needed to take calls and elevates your team to higher levels of service.

Think about the linkages between your phone prompts and web portal. If you carefully plan both, you will find that your phone prompts can direct customers to your web site for faster, automated self-service. You will also find that you can point customers from your web portal to the phone system for special requests.

Conclusion
There is much to be gained by using clear consistent channels of communication with your help desk or service desk customers. With some up-front planning, effective skill set grouping, and simple implementation, you can help guide your customers through your processes and provide outstanding service.

-Steve McElwee

Six Sigma for Help Desks

You've heard the hype about Six Sigma. How companies like GE, Allied Signal, Motorola, and Amazon.com have dramatically improved the quality of their products and services by using it. Did you know that Six Sigma is a perfect fit for Help Desks? If your Help Desk is not meeting your or your customers' expectations, Six Sigma will help you quickly make measurable improvements.

Let's take a look at how to use Six Sigma for improvement projects. The process moves through five stages: 1) Define; 2) Measure; 3) Analyze; 4) Improve; 5) Control. All of the stages have Critical to Quality (CTQ) goals in common. Let's look at how this works in each of the stages:

Define
Here you will define the scope of the project, the problem/opportunity, and the team members. You'll also identify suppliers and customers. Most importantly you will define your CTQs and how you will measure them. These are the most important measurements that you must do well to be successful.

Accessibility

• Abandon rate
• Time to answer

Turn Around

• % First call resolution
• % Resolved within help desk
• Turn around days per request

Courtesy

• Customer satisfaction

Communication

• Customer satisfaction

Now that you have defined your CTQs, your ready to move to the next stage.

Measure
The measure stage builds on the define stage by measuring your current performance against the CTQs. Sometimes this is easy, especially when you have systems like a help desk ticketing system and phone system that routes and logs calls. Sometimes, you will need to create new sources of data, such as data collection worksheets or customer surveys.

Analyze
With the results of your measurements against the CTQs at hand, you are ready to analyze the data to find problem areas. One of the most popular tools in this stage is the problem pareto graph, which shows you the bigest problem areas you need to focus on. You may find that for some of your CTQs, your current performance is fine and no further work is needed.

Improve
For those CTQs that do not meet your standards, you will use brainstorming and prioritization matrices to find improvements specifically related to the CTQ. You will look at parameters like cost, impact on the CTQ, and ease of implementation. By assigning each improvement idea a score, you can focus on the top improvements, which are most likely to succeed quickly.

Control
Your improvement projects are wrapped up, you've seen measurable improvements, but you're not done yet. You need to keep things on track by monitoring your performance against the CTQs as a normal part of operating your Help Desk. If the measurements fall below your goals, you may need to walk it through the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control phases again.

Now you're an expert in Six Sigma. Well maybe not an expert. Here are two resources to help you along.

  

Measuring the Whole Picture

The biggest key to running an effective Help Desk is measurement. The volume of requests from end users is too high to use subjective measurements. Each request has important data that must be translated into meaningful performance metrics.

In the world of projects, you see the execution unfold over several months. You know what the handful of sponsors and participants of the project think about how the project is going. Sure, measurement is important in project work, but you measure much of it at the post mortem.

In the transactional world of the Help Desk, requests may be opened and closed within minutes, hours, or days. The customers making these requests may number in the thousands every year. As a result, capturing the right measurements is crucial at the transaction level.

So what do you measure? There are four critical to quality (CTQ) goals that should be satisfied by every Help Desk:

• Accessibility
• Turn Around Time
• Courtesy
• Communication

Accessibility measures how long customers wait on the phone before an analyst answers. It may also be the amount of time between an email or web request and a ticket being created and communicated back to the customer. The abandon rate helps to add the customer’s level of satisfaction.

Turn Around Time measures how long it took to resolve the customer’s request. This can be broken down into various categories: percent of first-call resolution; percent of cases resolved on the Help Desk; and average days to resolve a request.

Courtesy is a very subjective measure, but an important one, nevertheless. When users call your Help Desk, they have probably already tried solving their own problem. They may have asked their coworkers and be at the breaking point of frustration. So they call the Help Desk. It is important that you measure how courteous the analyst expresses herself through listening, empathy, and professionalism. How do you measure this? Through customer surveys. You may also use call monitoring to create sample data for coaching, but ultimately, the customer knows best.

Communication is another metric that is difficult to quantify. Again, rely on your customers to let you know if you communicated frequently enough, clearly enough, and with the right level of detail.

Now that you have your main metrics, keep in mind that sometimes improving in one CTQ may make another worse. For example, if you emphasize courtesy and create a high touch environment, your accessibility may go down as analysts spend more time on the phone. Keeping all four areas in view simultaneously will yield the best measurement of customer satisfaction and overall effectiveness.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) Boot Camp

Service Level Agreements, or "SLA's" are tricky but useful mechanisms for managing the risk of an on-going relationship with IT service providers. Unfortunately, most SLA's that show up in service contracts as worthless, cosmetic paper additions. SLA's can be extremely powerful tools to help you and your service provider get the most out of a relationship.

What is an SLA?
A service level agreement (SLA), in its most basic form, is a contractual commitment to meet specific goals. If, for example, you sign up for a hosting contract with a provider, you may desire an SLA that measures the up-time of your website. If you outsource your help desk, you may want an SLA that measures the time it takes to answer the phone. Usually, an SLA includes a penalty and/or reward framework. For example, many web hosting companies offer a refund based on the number of hours your website is unavailable. On the flip-side, an SLA may include an extra bonus to your help desk provider if all calls are answered within 30 seconds. The following are typical examples of SLA's:

"All help desk call will be answered within 90 seconds"
"95% of all bills will be printed and delivered on time"
"The website will be available 99.99%"
"Project X will be delivered within 2 weeks of the planned schedule"

What isn't an SLA?
An SLA is not a way to cut your costs. Rather, SLA's are mechanisms for managing risks, sharing pain, and benefiting from success. Many SLA's are setup as "outs" to contracts that allow customers to penalize technology providers for non-performance. Although penalties do reduce costs and they do send a strong signal to service providers to improve their service, neither you nor the service provider "win" if an SLA is missed. Think of an SLA as a shared goal.

SLA Philosophy
The best SLAs are setup to allow both you and your service provider to share in the success and failure of an agreement. If you intend to turn over the operation of your billing system to a service provider, getting the bills out on time is critical. Whether you do it yourself or partner with someone, if you fail to produce invoices, you delay incoming revenue. In this example, your SLA should inspire your vendor to deliver on performance levels that have an actual impact to your business. Let's say your current billing accuracy is 90%. If you increase this accuracy to 95%, you have directly improved your company's bottom line. If you intend to outsource this function, your SLA should include a shared billing accuracy reward to the service provider if they help you improve revenues.

Make It Count
Some web hosting plans offer an up-time measure that, if not met, will result in a refund to you. Unfortunately, this "refund" may be calculated as a credit based on the time that your site was down and your monthly hosting fee. For example, if you pay $100 per month for hosting services, and your site is down for 1 hour, your credit may only be 14 cents! $100/720 (number of hours in a month) = $0.14. If, on average, you sell $50 worth of goods through your website each hour, 14 cents isn't much of a blow to your hosting company. I recognize that my example is slightly exaggerated. Many hosting companies offer a more material penalty and most web sites do not generate $50 in sales per hour. But you can see how this penalty and SLA is mis-aligned with the business model. If you know you make $50 per hour in sales through your website, your hosting company should incur a much greater penalty for not keeping your website up and running! Whether you negotiate an SLA with a hosting company or a large IT company, create an SLA that is specific to your business and truly establishes risk sharing (i.e. we "win" or "loose" together).

Devil In The Details
A good SLA has four critical components: description, target, measurement, and penalty/reward. If you have an SLA that is missing one of these components, you run the risk of losing the benefit of having the SLA to begin with. In the web hosting example above, the SLA sounds good, but the actual measurement and penalty weigh heavily in the favor of the hosting company (they have little to loose!) Make sure your SLA's are well defined and agreed upon before you ink the deal. Here's an example of a good SLA:

Description: Billing - All bills will be rendered, printed, and mailed on a timely basis to ensure unbilled revenue is minimized.
Target: 90%
Measurement: Ratio of number of planned bills / number of bills actually produced. The calculation is based on the number of records in the billing input file compared against the billing output log file which lists the bills actually rendered.
Reward/Penalty: If billing accuracy is below 90%, penalty is calculated as 1% of the unbilled revenue for that billing run. If billing accuracy is above 90%, a bonus is calculated as 1% of the additional revenue billed.

In this SLA example, your service provider stands to loose or gain substantially based on their performance. Similarly, your company stands to loose or gain substantially based on the performance of the service provider. Depending upon your daily billings, 1% could be significant. Note the specificity of the SLA measurement and calculation in my example. If you are not very specific with the calculation methods, actual performance against service levels are open for debate.

Negotiate Up Front
Many businesses strike deals with IT companies and leave SLA's as an open item. Many IT service providers will want to establish a "base line" period where SLA's are measured and then negotiated. In many cases, this request is reasonable, especially if an IT company has little to no understanding of your environment and your current performance record. However, if you wait to negotiate service levels until after you ink a deal, you loose tremendous leverage with your provider unless you really think you can walk away from the deal. Ideally, choose a provider that is willing to negotiate a service level up front. In my experience, these SLA negotiations are much more difficult on the back-end.

Raise the Bar
A service level agreement should be changed periodically. Let's look back at my billing SLA example. Let's assume that after 1 year of service, your provider is billing at an accuracy, on average, of 95%, and in turn, you are rewarding them consistently for beating the original service level. It's time to raise the bar! If your provider can increase your accuracy from 90% to 95%, maybe they can increase your accuracy from 95% to 99%. Raise the SLA bar (target) to 95%, and only reward them if they beat this new level of quality. By providing the right incentives to improve upon service levels, both you and your service provider can benefit.

The Shorter, The Better
I have seen service contracts with dozens and dozens of SLA's. If you establish multiple SLA's, you and your service provider will have broad visibility into performance levels. However, establishing many SLA's can water down the over-arching performance of a service provider. Put simply, a service provider can "make-up" poor performance on one SLA by beating the performance target of another SLA. To keep things simple, pick the few critical success factors of your business and establish applicable service levels that your provider can truly focus on.
Service Level Agreements should be established as a "dashboard" for you and your service provider to share in the success and failure of your arrangement. SLA's are less effective if they are established as contract "outs" or as penalty frameworks, because they fail to drive a partnering relationship. Negotiate SLA's which, if met or beaten, truly benefit your company and your service provider. Always define SLA's to the lowest level of detail possible before you finalize the arrangement since negotiations become even more difficult after the deal is executed. And never commit to an SLA that could hurt you but not your provider.

About The Author
Andy Quick is co-founder of Findmyhosting.com (http://www.findmyhosting.com), a free web hosting directory offering businesses and consumers a hassle free way to find the right hosting plan for their needs. Feel free to contact Andy at andy@findmyhosting.com in case you have any questions or comments regarding this article. http://www.ArticleCity.com