Don’t get lost

Everyday, solving issues, putting projects into place, delivering change. Things that you do – are often one time things for end users.

It’s important to remember this when providing support, because what you might think is no big deal, is often a change, and humans are notoriously bad at handling change, especially when in a stressful situation, using only a subset of a system, that impacts their role and its outcomes.

I’ve been guilty of advocating wholesale change – and to an extent I still do – there shouldn’t be the old way and the new way of doing things – it leads to confusion, and nobody will embrace the new ways. But, for people to benefit from new ways of doing things – a level of understanding of the reasons and a time to prepare for the change is what’s needed.

The latter is where we often fall down in education, we don’t provide the time or the understanding of change. For example, we conduct projects when nobody is really around, so 6 weeks later they return and in their busiest time have a new system to adapt too.

One of the phrases I have learnt from working at Concero is the water melon effect, and aiming for the kiwi effect.

This can happen when you look at your metrics and they are green – but the experience is red. Similar to cutting open a water melon. What you want to aim for is a kiwi, green all through.

With the right work, the metrics will pre-empt poor experience – you’ve got to have reliable metrics that allow you dive into the specifics that build a picture. None of your customers will care about the data really, they care about the experience – but good metrics can lead to good experience

Unless… you are so focused on the metrics you forget the end user and the change. Unless you are so focused on quick responses – they are poor and a bad experience that stops the user further engaging.

Did you see that resolutions were too quick? Did you see how many times the ticket got reopened because the user didn’t get the resolution they needed? Did you see their CSAT score? Does the NPS not tie up with your other metrics?

Service levels and experiences go hand in hand, I’d rather miss an SLA and get a wow moment.

But we need both. And that’s about training and putting a structure in place for staff to be able to provide the right answer in a fast turnaround – delivered in the right way.

That means having the learning – via training, the knowledge via documentation and the customer service skills by employing and retaining the right people.

It means not getting lost along the way.