By Hank Marquis

Our Lights Are Green, But They're Unhappy!

When I Was a Consultant Working with BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) Firms I Found the Same Patterns in Multiple Clients.

When designing new services, most IT functions will consider the features of technology products needed to accomplish the job. Some will engage digital employees for input on service design. Fewer still build out service concepts and consider the external customer's experience.

We need to, but I believe we don't because our perception of service delivery isn't inclusive. Here's why and how to do it.

A Service Concept links your business strategy ("what") to your IT solutions ("how") by connecting employee and customer wants and needs to your firm's overall goals. Here's a case study of why you need a service concept and how switching your perspective transforms how we think about satisfaction and who and what we measure completely.

The lights are all green, but they're unhappy with us!

Summary: By shifting the IT design perspective to include employee feedback regarding external customer satisfaction, the company was able to improve satisfaction for both and increase revenue by several hundred million dollars compared to the same period in the year earlier.

Challenge: Several quarters after launching a new financial account access and management solution, IT had a problem. Customer churn, dissatisfaction, and recovery attempts alluded to IT system instability.

IT's operational metrics were correct; there were no unplanned outages.

I recall hearing about how, "Everything is working fine. My dashboards are green—see?— yet they still complain we're down!"

Building out the service, they followed "best practice" and chose a maintenance window during their lowest demand period. The IT maintenance window was on the weekend, early on Sunday morning. That's when they took systems down and did moves, adds, changes, etc.

Guess when most high-worth customers check their account balances?

If you guessed Sunday morning, you'd be correct. Do you know how they found out? By talking with sales employees, the ones talking with upset customers, and specialists who work on client recovery (they try to get clients back.) They'd known about this problem for some time.

Neither Sales nor IT leadership knew this, though, which isn't uncommon. In fact, it's classic service strategy (Gap 1) stuff—which is why they started there.

But wait, wait—it gets better!

Do you know why the IT maintenance window was Sunday morning? Because that's the time IT designers and leaders assumed would have the least demand. They hadn't considered business impact because they didn't have a service concept. They didn't realize that the lowest demand is not always the least important. (Of course, the actual reason was not taking their strategy and design all the way out into the marketplace and end-customers, aka no service concept.)

A simple fix, right? Not at all.

The solution was to move the IT maintenance window to Wednesday evening when the fewest customers would check their account and balances. It took weeks to sort out. Then it took months of work and intense schedule manipulations to align IT workers, for weekday evening availability.

The results.

The revenue increase was nearly $500 million year over year. So I ask again, have you ever heard of a Service Concept? Do you consider the entire value chain that your IT services support? Do you know what you must deliver for digital employees—and their customers?

The moral of the story.

IT is more and more a service provider within a service provider. Without full perception and awareness of the end-to-end value chain, it's easy to have no idea how much you could help the business—to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars from the reduced churn and better word-of-mouth marketing by happy customers.

Changing your perception can totally change how you think about satisfaction and IT. A perception shift can help us to hone in on what's important to each person and why.

When we start to invest in understanding digital employee expectations and perceptions, our employees and customers shift from being faceless "users" and become real people with unique stories, feelings, and goals.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Have you ever considered your organization's impact this way? Do you have completed service concepts that would let you?
• Do you, as an IT leader, engage your contact personnel? Or do you wait until a diluted message percolates over from your peers? Or worse, down from the CFO or CEO?

When we change our perspective, we can quickly figure out what we need to do, for whom, and why. We spot hidden solutions to problems, uncover new opportunities we may have missed, and make better choices.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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