Experience Management – Why Knowing Where Improvements are Needed Isn’t Enough

It’s great to see the growing IT service management (ITSM) interest in employee experience, especially when IT organizations use experience data to improve their IT service delivery and support capabilities to enable employee productivity. There are many digital employee experience (DEX) management solutions available to help. These use technology to identify and report on employee-affecting issues in the IT infrastructure. Alternatively, organizations can use more traditional survey mechanisms to identify employee issues. Either way, IT organizations get invaluable insight into the quality of their services based on employees’ experiences.

However, it’s essential to appreciate that this type of experience data is only part of the story, with it delivering data on what’s working well and what’s not. What it doesn’t do, though, is highlight what matters most to employees and their productivity, i.e. greater insight is needed to prioritize and facilitate the potential improvement opportunities. This blog explains why using practical examples.

Experience measurement needs context

As I’ve already said, experience-related data is great for understanding what’s working well and what’s not (in both infrastructure and services terms). This insight opens the door to continual improvement, or should I say “opens many doors.” But importantly, it doesn’t tell your organization which door to walk through (in improvement prioritization terms).

It’s another variation of the traditional issue with continual improvement where there’s the danger that organizations don’t make their improvement investments in the right places. For example, how often have you seen improvement initiatives started based on:

• Volumes of things or costs
• IT’s view of what’s most important
• The seniority of key players
• The opinions of businesspeople who aren’t impacted by the issue
• Hopefully, shutting up the “loudest voice.”

Whereas what’s needed is the context of the employee experiences. For example, suppose the corporate PC image complexity causes excessive device boot times, where employees might moan about it, and DEX data highlights it as a poor experience. However, the issue might not be the right focus for improvement investment. While it impacts every employee and would usually be prioritized based on volumes (and perhaps a calculation of the aggregate lost time each year), understanding the context will likely show that it’s not the most important IT issue employees face. Because the productivity-based reality is that employees simply factor the unwanted boot time into their morning “startup” schedule, and the issue has minimal impact on their ability to work.

Alternatively, employees might be more adversely affected by something that some DEX solutions consider to be working well. For example, IT’s self-service capabilities. These capabilities were likely introduced to save costs, speed up issue resolution or service provisioning, or improve the employee experience. However, the reality for many organizations is that IT self-service, usually when adopted with the wrong motivations and insufficient organizational change management investment, delivers neither the anticipated speed improvements nor better employee experiences. Consequently, the lower-than-expected usage levels – with people still preferring to call the IT service desk – mean that, at best, the promised cost savings and return on investment (ROI) take longer to realize.

This latter example is perfect for demonstrating how technology can be viewed as being available and performing well but is still delivering a poor end-user experience.

The answer is combining technical data with end-user sentiment

So, while DEX solutions provide great data and insights related to technology performance, even using synthetic transactions to replicate the end-user experience, it’s not necessarily always a true reflection of the delivered employee experience. Importantly, it lacks the context required to understand what’s most important to employees.

This issue is why some DEX solution providers also undertake sentiment analysis, where employees are surveyed to understand how they feel about IT services, including IT support transactions. This data and insight is where “the rubber hits the road” for continual improvement – allowing your organization to understand the issues being experienced and, more importantly, which matter more than others from the employee perspective.

For example, while employees might have issues with IT service desk performance, simply trying to speed up resolution times or improving the level of customer-centricity might not be the answer. Instead, the sentiment analysis data might show that, while the speed of resolution or provisioning is important, the actual root causes of IT support dissatisfaction are different. It might be that issues are not being solved despite ticket closure. It might be that employees have to reexplain the issue and provide details repeatedly, i.e. they’re being bounced between resolution groups or people. These could both be significant enough problems to warrant continual improvement focus.

Hopefully, this blog has helped demonstrate that knowing where improvements are needed is insufficient to focus continual improvement efforts on what matters most accurately. And that while technology-based insights into performance are helpful, your organization needs human-sourced feedback to understand where improvement investments need to be applied.