By Hank Marquis

Ace Your IT Satisfaction Scores!

While there is no set formula, treating digital employees as people can raise customer satisfaction scores. It brings out our best and, in doing so, builds new capabilities that improve job security, engagement, and satisfaction for everyone.

Reliability of your service is paramount

Reliability means consistency and dependability, IT's ability to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period. Your digital employees are betting their jobs and the future of their families on your IT services. You must ensure the basic functionality of your service. Customers care about functionality because they can't accomplish their jobs without it. Aim to improve uptime (being available) and gather and publish honest availability figures – then try to improve them. Of course, your service also needs to do whatever it does well. Customer Effort Score (CES) can measure this.

Assure your customers that you can be trusted

The level of safety and confidence felt—the trust earned when using the service—is Assurance. Security, privacy, and risk play into assurance. Focus on building confidence in you and your service. Evidence of assurance reflects security, safety, and trust. Examples of this evidence might include honesty about outages and service capabilities, the accuracy of support answers, etc. Track and publicly address complaints from customers and business partners to get better scores. This is primarily what Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures.

Tangibles still matter in digital workplaces

The physical aspects, like user interfaces, manuals, and hardware, are its Tangibles. This "packaging" around your service and how it's used is critical. Customers won't learn to like your service if you make it hard for them. Invest in your service's ease of use by focusing on the usability and intuitiveness of the interface, service documentation and help systems, the application and information architecture of the service, and classic CX and UX design best practices that aid users in getting their work done. You don't have to make it "magical" or even pleasant, but you need to make it easy to use your services. Your customers will thank you.

Show some empathy

Making your consumers your top priority, understanding them, offering convenient support, and publically acknowledging and respecting them shows Empathy. Customers, users, and partners who feel understood and valued by a service provider tend to share that feeling. Evidence of empathy might be encouraging open honesty and feedback, capturing and using the input of service users to drive new features, functionality, and services. Do you have multiple ways to gather user and customer feedback? Do you actually use that feedback to improve your service support and delivery? Do you include those who use your products, services, and solutions in your planning, design, transition, and operational activities? Or do you "do IT to them"? Human Resource led engagement scores reflects this.

Be responsive

Showing that you value their time in your delivery and support is being responsive. Customers value consistency, adequacy, and appropriateness of support. How completely and quickly your staff responds to requests for users and customers matters. Almost as important is how quickly the user interface responds. Improve your responsiveness in internal social media channel presence and employee engagement activities. Be sure there is little lag time for responding to emails — and yes, people still want to talk to people and at least chat! Customer Effort Score (CES) measure this too.

Good luck! I want all IT leaders and practitioners to get the highest score, but only you can make it happen. That part is up to you and how well your teams execute for your customers.

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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