- [Narrator] The Happy Signals
Global IT Experience Benchmark Report
found that the perception of lost time increases
by roughly one and a half hours
every time a ticket is reassigned.
Clearly with each handoff,
the user experience degrades precipitously.
Think about your own experiences with getting handed off,
then handed off, then handed off again.
It isn't fun, is it?
Here's what the Happy Signals report says
that users say about lost work for each handoff.
Have a good look at this.
Even with zero handoffs, they report time lost.
and look at how that time loss grows with each handoff.
Once you're past zero handoffs,
and certainly after one hand off,
the experience is irreparably damaged.
So you must reduce handoffs, but how?
The first thing to do is to end hot potato handoffs.
In hot potato handoffs,
the first person contacted washes their hands of the contact
and never revisits it.
If you're doing this and reassignments are a problem,
begin practicing end-to-end case management instead,
where the first person contacted always keeps an eye
on all tickets leaving their queue
to ensure they are progressing
and to intervene if they're not.
You can do this by making it a policy,
but also by embedding it
in the capability of your core ITSM tool.
If you must hand off,
what you've done proactively to stage your channels,
omni channel management, will come into play
and will be absolutely crucial.
Think about when you've had to repeat the same things
over and over
when you've been handed off by a service desk agent.
If there must be a handoff, make sure it's clean.
Work to stage interactions at touch points
to ensure each participant has the information
from prior interactions so the user sees
that they are caring for the relevant context,
so they don't have to start over
with each person they talk to.
Staging is step one and then comes the moment of truth,
where each representative must carry out their part.
When that moment of truth arrives,
each representative must carefully capture information
about the contact and ensure that information is transferred
and ready to hand in the event of a handoff.
You can prepare each representative
to perform well in such moments
through drills and exercises.
There is no substitute
for working to reduce the number of handoffs
in your handling processes.
There are three places to look for opportunities to do so
when you conduct your ticket analysis
that drives your agile improvement sprints.
Let's have a look at each of these in turn.
First, look at outliers,
workflows that have the highest number of handoffs.
What can you do to knock them down?
Second, look at the workflows you run most frequently.
They must be prime candidates for handoff reduction.
Think about it.
If you do these often
and you can take just one handoff out of them,
wouldn't that make a great deal of difference?
And lastly, the other tickets
to work down the number of handoffs on
are those whose associated workflows
are experienced the lowest user experience scores.
Surely these warrant your attention.