itSMF UK recently held a Member Meet-up at Burges Salmon in Bristol, bringing together organisations and individuals from across a number of different sectors who all had one thing in common: the desire to provide excellent customer experience. Chris Kingsbury shares some of the outputs and feedback from the amazing discussions generated, led by expert speakers Chris de Souza from CGI and Neil Keating from Bright Horse.
Is customer experience the only metric that matters?
In the ITSM world, we are obsessed with metrics. We want to be able to quantify and measure everything, and using SLAs, OLAs and KPIs to gauge the performance and ultimately the success of our service management functions has been a staple of almost all processes and practices for some time.
In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of customer experience metrics, focusing on customer satisfaction rather than traditional service levels. But our obsession with metrics does not go hand in hand with excellent experience, which traditionally is a more qualitative than quantitative value.
To open the day in Bristol we shared a TED talk by Rory Sutherland (Rory Sutherland: Perspective is everything – YouTube) who talked about how the operators of Eurostar considered spending £6bn to make the trains faster to improve customer experience; however for a fraction of the cost we could have had free reliable Wi-Fi or supermodels serving free champagne for the duration of the journey.
Have we stopped caring about customer experience in the UK?
It’s important to note that good customer service does not denote a good customer experience, and this topic formed a large part of our discussion at the Meet-up. Many of the tools we use to improve customer experience, such as IVR, self-service or chatbots, could be seen by our users as an inconvenience even if they result in more efficient service delivery. It’s important to consider when making ‘improvements’ whether they actually contribute towards a better service or simply deflect contacts from our service teams.
The value of customer experience could also be simplified down to “is our customer having fun?” Nobody enjoys queuing, however many people are happy to wait for hours at a theme park to get on a ride, mostly because time and money have been invested in to making that experience interactive and fun. We can ask the same question in service management, how can we make the whole experience more engaging as a whole?
Finally consider the value of first-hand experience. We often tell our users what they want or need, but don’t often put ourselves in their shoes. Consider the last time you experienced the customer journey; are you waiting for the next time you have an IT issue? By going through the process yourself, you might begin to understand why users get frustrated over the phone, avoid using self-service or hate interacting with a chatbot.
Use of XLAs
Helping understand what customer experience really is was another key part of the day. Looking at coffee and the café business in more detail helped to put that into context, especially understanding the difference between a service and a true experience:
- Commodities – Coffee beans
- Product – Instant coffee
- Services – Café
- Experience – Starbucks
A café will provide me with coffee as a service, but Starbucks realised that they could turn that coffee into an experience and, more importantly, that people would pay more for that experience. However, it’s worth noting the continued evolution in this space. We’ve started to commoditise good quality coffee at home, meaning those providing good experience need to continue to evolve and offer better experience to maintain their position as a leader.
Customers don’t like to complain and can live with issues up to a point, but unreported causes of dissatisfaction and will often manifest in frustration, anger or bad sentiment across an organisation. To mitigate this, utilising an XLA model which captures both structured and unstructured feedback can help to proactively identify those issues, as well as gauge the overall sentiment of the customer experience. There are a variety of tools out there which can help automate elements of this process, however a manual process may suffice at first to capture customer sentiment.
Understanding what our organisation and stakeholders expect is a key part of measuring success in customer experience. Take the airline industry, for example. A Ryanair customer will have very different expectations to someone flying on Virgin Atlantic, partly because of the cost and partly because of the differing requirements between a short-haul and long-haul flight. It’s important we consider this when creating our metrics around customer experience.
Conclusion
Customer experience, we concluded, is a huge part of delivering excellent service management but is not the only thing that matters. It is vital you have a process for managing and monitoring your customer experience levels (more commonly known as XLAs), but being able to align these new measurements with your SLAs, OLAs, KPIs and stakeholder strategies is crucial, and communicating with your end users and following their journey is a key part of understanding that perspective.
We had a very collaborative day discussing the possible ways to improve customer experience. Many thanks to Chris de Souza from CGI, Neil Keating from Bright Horse and Burges Salmon for enabling an excellent and productive Member Meet-up.
Chris Kingsbury
An ITIL qualified Service Control professional with a sound customer service background plus the ability to liaise and communicate at all levels. Delivering ITSM Advisory Services specialising in Configuration Management but able to work around all Service Management functions. For 8 years the UK business lead and budget controller for my Configuration Management for the whole of the UK at a global Service Management company.
Chris is also Chair of itSMF UK's South West and Wales region and hosts regular ITSM-related member meet-ups.
