- [Narrator] How do we shift our service desk
to a modern agile posture
that better matches the cadences and ways of working
in our digital enterprise?
Let's have a look at where we can start,
the steps involved,
and the approach to take.
The most fundamental part of your transformation is a shift
in your base operating assumptions.
You must adopt those of a modern service desk,
that is,
you must assume that both your services
and service levels can and must continually change.
This is a large change in mindset for those used to working
to fix services
and service levels over relatively long periods
of time,
often measured in years.
So organizational change management will be vital here.
To transform to modern,
you must promote agile continual improvement to the status
of a core service alongside incident and request handling.
And this transformation must cascade down.
For example,
have a look at your supplier contracts.
Did they mention continual improvement
as something they will do?
Or is it relegated to the marketing boilerplate
in their proposals?
If it is,
you've got some work to do to transform.
The first and most critical step is to shift how we measure
and show back success.
As shown here,
we start by capturing and communicating,
through reports and dashboards,
the number of contacts preempted.
Of course,
in conjunction,
we have to start to work to eliminate unnecessary,
low value inbound contacts,
and we can start to do so
through our digital experience tools.
Next,
we must shift to measuring how we are doing based primarily
on the quality of user experiences.
Note the term user experience is used here
to mean the experience of the user consuming our services,
as opposed to the other way it's used in the industry
where it's used to mean the experience
of a consumer interacting with our app or our web property.
We must know who our users are and capture
and manage their experiences.
We can start by answering these four basic questions.
Are they promoters, passives,
or detractors?
Are they happy, unhappy,
or somewhere in between?
Where do we interact with them and how can we stage
and carry out those interactions for success?
Transforming in the people dimension
involves developing people
in the five areas shown here.
First and foremost,
they must have an experience focus.
This is much more than just a general mindset.
It is really making the user experience the primary measure
of success by investing in their understanding
of their users and their jobs to be done,
and organizational rhythms.
It is investing in learning experience-centered practices,
techniques, and tools.
Things like shift left,
visible management,
agile improvement in sprints,
omni-channel management
and technologies like HappySignals,
Nexthink, Eternity, CallMiner,
Qualtrics, and Automation Anywhere,
or their equivalent.
It is about up-leveling their soft
and their troubleshooting skills.
Here we see a list of the processes
of a modern service desk.
To modernize,
we must make sure each of these processes has an owner
within the service desk.
This can be done as a full-time role or as a specialty area
that is assigned in addition
to the primary part a service desk staff member takes.
It can even be assigned on a rotational basis.
The key is to make sure somebody owns each
and is maintaining a dashboard of metrics for their process,
coaching others on the process,
and driving improvements in their processes outcomes.
A modern service desk is not modern
if it doesn't feature experience management tools
like HappySignals, Nexthink,
Eternity, CallMiner, and Automation Anywhere.
You must stand up these tools
or their functional equivalents
in order to operate on a modern footing.
Because without them,
you have no basis for the visual management of experiences.
Modernizing the tool chain also consists
of integrating the tools with command line interfaces
and APIs,
of implementing top use cases over time,
and optimizing the use of the core ideas
and platform,
configuring it for modern things
like end-to-end case management
and persona-based presentation
and using it as an integration hub
for experience data,
dashboards, reports, and remediations.
All tools,
for example the IVR,
must drive cost efficiencies.
But for the modern service desk,
the primary aim must be great experiences.
To transform the service desk as well as the IT function,
you must shift its focus away from internal IT metrics
and over to ensuring great experiences.
This takes organizational change management
as it's a mindset shift,
but it also takes tooling that makes the experience visible
to all.
People need to see the experience to get it
and get on with it,
that is,
to make it the central thing that brings order,
predictability, and direction
to the organization by informing its decisions,
actions, and communications,
and driving the right behavior.
Transforming also must be done to channels.
If you're not talking on the channels users are using
or talking on emerging channels
or still talking on channels they no longer listen to,
you have some work to do adding,
changing, and retiring channels to transform.
Transformation also requires leveling basic metrics
across channels.
Typically, it means moving from a situation
where there are rich metrics and reporting
for the voice channel,
but little or nothing on others.
Transform by having a core set
of metrics tracked across channels.
Transforming absolutely requires beginning
of virtual shift left motion,
preempting contacts,
and tracking and reporting contacts preempted,
and moving contacts from more expensive
and less efficient human assisted service channels
to better experiences through self service.
While cost efficiency can be a factor,
the driver for shifting left must be better experiences.
Transforming requires omni-channel management.
If it's all about the user experience,
and with modern, it is,
then you must provide a continuity of context among channels
to provide a proper experience.
The same goes for persona-based user-facing
and agent-facing presentation.
Automating that requires knowing personas,
a very good thing,
and implementing embeds that understanding
into your systems.
A modern service desk assumes both services
and service levels continually change.