This image illustrates the vicious circle that many organizations find themselves in when internal and external agreements are not properly aligned. Because your IT staff are too busy due to this lack of alignment, they try to curb your customers' questions and requests and manage expectations. This causes dissatisfaction among end users. It is not uncommon for them to escalate the issue to your managers or perhaps even to you. Escalations then ensure that the user's interests prevail and the request is granted. This increases the workload of your IT staff once again, completing the circle of lack of control. Every time this happens, your organization loses more confidence that management is there to support them, provide them with a mandate, and ensure that structural improvements are made.
This is a simplification, but unfortunately it is the daily reality in many organizations. It may seem like an inevitable problem, after all, 'the customer is king', right? That is certainly true, but service and control should go hand in hand to keep your customers and your employees satisfied in the long term. So how do you effectively break out of this cycle?
Make the transition from SLA to XLA to truly serve your customer
We recommend that you make a change in the way you make agreements with your end users. The eXperience Level Agreement (XLA) is increasingly seen by organizations as the answer to the question of how to truly improve the user experience. And this requires that you focus your business operations entirely on user satisfaction. This change in thinking has consequences for how you do things. However, the effect is significant.
Make customer satisfaction measurable and visible
The first step in achieving this new 'state of action' is to continuously measure customer satisfaction and consider it as key management information. Without information, there can be no innovation: this is the central idea that you need to embrace. This will likely present challenges and requires an essential measuring tool:
Take control with an XLA Call System where services that users recognize form the basis.
Your call handling is probably facilitated by one of the common call registration systems. These systems are good at registering and forwarding calls, but only for sub-components of the service. However, this does not constitute control. Your system should primarily measure services 'as a service', provide you with maximum support in determining the right priorities, and be able to automate processing as much as possible. This automated processing leads to the rapid handling of incidents, changes, and other reports and will also ensure that your end users can handle calls themselves with self-service. Each handling adjusts the information about customer satisfaction, which is visible to your employees at all times. TransitieProfs has a revolutionary new call system that helps you take a solid first step towards control. The reporting options are endless, as are the possibilities for linking our system to your applications: everything is based on Microsoft. This gives you the tools you need to really start managing and improving.
Empower your employees to focus on customer satisfaction
Now that your IT staff finally have the tools and information they need to take control, it is essential to give them the right mandate. Give them the confidence to set priorities based on the improved information, together with the end users, and to organize the process in such a way that both your organization and your end users reap the benefits. And if this is also measurable and shows clear improvements, it will generate extra confidence and energy among all those involved. If escalations do occur, your IT staff will have an important say in resolving the issue. This gives them the confidence to come up with good solutions and receive the appropriate recognition for doing so.
For those with final responsibility: management requires an organization-wide approach.
To achieve true control, everyone involved must start working differently. Gaining control is not an IT party and must be embraced across the entire organization. Change must be organized by learning to deal with resistance and lessons learned, working on a digital strategy, and continuing to show administrative involvement. As the person with ultimate responsibility, keep making it clear to your departments which path you have chosen and why this path is so important. In short: set up the right governance structure. As CIO, CEO, or director, you will have to make and/or steer decisions yourself in order to provide maximum support for this important cause. Don't let anything stop you from regularly participating in steering groups and continue to actively support the new path for all your employees!
Author: Martijn Stekelenburg
