Automated IT Software and Customer Services: The Key to Today’s UX

Service experience is more important than the service itself!

Successful service experience goes beyond simply delivering the right business outcome.

As your user base has all sorts of individuals, it is necessary to make sure that your solution is the perfect fit for all of them.

It should satisfy their professional needs in the best possible way and also deliver a service experience that meets the contextual needs and professional expectations of the end-user.

Now, there are a plethora of services that an IT department of a firm provides to its users.

But, if you think that just the services will do, I do not think you have quite hit the mark; there is more to that and it is, in reality, the customer experience that counts.

End-user expectations are influenced by real-world experiences that act as a yardstick against which the end-users benchmark the service experiences they get from their IT department.

For instance, if the users expect minimum effort while using your IT Service delivery tool.

You need to check that there is no fault in your tool. It should be easy to use and control.

Moreover, if users need help, there should be a proper automated process to deal with their issues. For example,

If a person calls customer support and asks question related to:

• Finding the self-service tool and its use
• Status of the CRM upgrade
• Status of their submitted service request

These requests should be effectively and quickly handled to ensure good user experience.

If they pick up the phone and call the Service Desk:

• “I can’t find the service I want in the Service Catalog”
• “How do I get to the self-service portal?”
• “What’s the status on the CRM upgrade? I checked the service portal and there’s no information there.”
• “I submitted a service request last week and I haven’t heard anything since then.”

These calls to the Service Desk aren’t caused by hardware problems.

They’re caused by faulty processes, a failure to share information, moreover, you should focus on developing automated and integrated features to reduce user effort.

When you have this approach while delivering a digital service experience that is more than the user expectations, you will get fewer complaints from the users.

Further, this will improve the service experience of the user, along with boosting agent productivity. Let’s move on to the next part for the better insight!

What are the enablers for IT service experience delivery?

It is known that with the decrease in the failure demand (user complaints), the productivity of the service agents increases. This also helps in decreasing transaction costs.

For delivering a hassle-free IT service experience, keep the following in mind:

Provide a functional outcome:

Offering a functional outcome means you need to analyze your user IT service experience first.

For this, check where the users are facing issues and how these issues can be resolved. Moreover, also check what do the users expect?

They are the people who deal with the tool the most, so they must know more about it.

In the case of an ITSM tool, look for places that can save the users’ time. For instance, let the users enter minimum details; the rest you can fetch from the already stored data. This will save time.

Instantaneous solutions:

No one likes to wait much! To deliver super-fast solutions to the users, you do need to automate the process.

The ITSM tool should be able to support Multi-level workflow to reduce time spent in routine tasks, Automatic ticket/request creation from email, OOB closed-loop automation for basic tasks that help provide an instantaneous solution and elevate user experience.

These aspects of an ITSM system will enhance the user experience while saving time if implemented correctly.

Be transparent:

The best service is the one that keeps the users informed about everything on time. Now, it is understandable that you cannot automate every process using workflow.

For example, an ITSM tool may have some authorization steps that have to be manual; it cannot be automated.

In this case, it is necessary to inform the users about the happenings behind the scenes.

Like, if a person is on an authorization page, he or she needs to enter their details (though they are limited).

After this, they tap on ”OK” or “Proceed.” Post this; the system should keep them informed about the happenings behind the interface of the device. If they have to wait, do let them know what is coming.

Reduce user hassle:

No one likes to do more work just to log into an app, whether it is a Service Desk tool or any other. If you make your users do hard work for small things, they may not stay for long.

This affects your user experience. Hence, it is necessary to automate most of the process.

For example, if someone wants to log in to their ITSM tool and raise a service request, they should require to enter minimum details.

ITSM system should use data it already has from Active Directory system to source the information it needs to process, authorize and deliver the service.

Modern IT service management

Now, what happens when a problem arises? First off, you need to make sure that your tool is self-sufficient to take care of the problem before it happens. Continuity of service is a must here!

You need to ensure that your ITSM tool initiates a re-stabilization process as soon as it detects even a minor irregularity in the service.

In the worst-case scenario, if the service or tool goes down, you need to have countermeasures ready to remedy the problem in minimum time.

Unlike primitive methods that required users to stay for long on calls with service desk agents to solve their issue, it is better to incorporate an end to end automation and prioritization in the user support system.

This will help users to get resolutions to their issues sooner.

What a modern IT support experience looks like?

Well, modern IT service is all about complete automation and time-saving methods. Some of the aspects that should be an indispensable part of the modern day IT service are:

• Providing the service desk users with a solution that is seamless to interact with. This will help them in smooth navigation on the solution’s user interface and thus ease their efforts.
• Service request fulfillment is important for IT organizations focused on providing business consumers with a convenient way to interact with the IT organization by presenting incident and request tracking services, access to knowledge resources, and an orderable service catalog.
• Bring them out of the trend of lengthy phone calls to further enhance user experience. Introduce them to streamlined methods to communicate with the solution providers. Provide them the facility to lodge & track their complaints. Moreover, offer them knowledge resources to study orderable services.
• Out-of-the-box, preconfigured forms, fields, workflows, and reports that are compatible with industry best practices and standards for IT support. intuitive, graphical, interactive workflow design tools. On the service end, it is necessary to develop a state of the art tools equipped with intuitive as well as an interactive interface. This helps in better comprehension of all the necessary aspects of the tool like forms, fields, workflows, and reports.
• Robust Knowledge management for self-service that creates a federated knowledge base for relevant content and offers life cycle management, as well as an integrated workflow to other ITSM processes. Lastly, it is crucial to make sure that the IT tool has an integrated set of relevant knowledgeable content. Moreover, make the tool ready to work with other ITSM processes. This will help scale the tool if required in the future.