In today’s competitive landscape, organizations are realizing that the success of their customer service hinges on the happiness and engagement of their employees.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience encompasses every aspect of an employee’s journey within an organization, from the initial recruitment process to their day-to-day work environment, growth opportunities, and overall well-being. It goes beyond just job satisfaction and delves into creating a positive and fulfilling workplace culture that fosters productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

So why should service departments care about employee experience? Well, it’s simple – happy employees lead to happy customers.

Employee experience vs customer experience

Speaking of similar concepts – isn’t employee experience just customer experience (CX) for your colleagues? Well, yes and no. Yes, because, if you’re an internal service department, your colleagues are your customers. And no, because of one crucial difference: when it comes to improving your employees’ experience at work, you can have a far greater impact.

Let me explain. If you order something from an online shop, that retailer needs to make that ordering experience as smooth as possible. That’s an experience of no more than a few minutes, with only a few touchpoints.

As a service department aiming to improve employee experience, you can influence every minute of your colleagues’ working lives. From the drive to work in their company car, the coffee they sip when they arrive, to the programs and laptop they work with.

Customer experience is about optimizing the interactions your customer has with you when they are actively in contact with you. That’s important, too. But employee experience requires a more holistic approach.

Isn’t employee experience something for HR to worry about?

Well, yes, HR should also be thinking about employee experience. Engaging employees is one of the main challenges for any HR team. But improving employee experience is about more than drafting HR policies.

Just look at the examples mentioned earlier. Is your colleague comfortable in the company car you offer, or are they sweating because the air conditioning broke down 3 months ago? Do they like the coffee you’re serving or are they drinking it only because it’s free and there’s no Starbucks nearby? Can they work efficiently on their laptop, or do they have to wait 20 minutes for it to boot?

In order to answer these questions, service departments need to work together – from IT and Facilities to Finance and yes, HR.

The key to improving employee experience? Enterprise Service Management

Realizing that all service departments need to collaborate to deliver a great employee experience is the first step towards improving it: This is called Enterprise Service Management.

At most organizations, each individual department is pretty good at servicing their own customers. It’s only when a call or request has to be handled by more than one team or department that things tend to get murky. These teams often function as silos. Calls are being ping-ponged between teams, or get lost in service desk limbo. Not exactly a great employee experience.

So if you want to improve employee experience, start by actively collaborating with colleagues from Facilities, HR or IT. You don’t speak that often? Grab a cup of coffee. You already work together regularly? Sit with the other team for a day – you’ll learn a lot.

Employee journey mapping

Another thing that helps you improve employee experience is employee journey mapping. This is the same as customer journey mapping, only for your colleagues. It might be a bit harder to decide which part of your employees’ journey you want to map, since there are so many touchpoints, but just pick a part that you feel needs improving. Your onboarding, perhaps? Or the process of logging a request at your service desk?

When you map your employees journey, the pain-points of using your services will become more visible. And the suggestions for improvement will come to you in no time.

Towards employee engagement

If you offer a consistently good employee experience, you’ll end up with the holy grail of the modern organization: engaged employees. As this infographic shows, companies with highly engaged employees perform better on various levels. They’re more profitable, get higher customer satisfaction scores, and generally outperform their competitors.

Take your employee experience to the next level

Want to know more about employee experience, a.k.a. workforce enablement? Check out this e-book for some background information and tips on how to get started.

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Useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether your customers are really happy. So, besides your current KPIs, consider using these 4 customer satisfaction KPIs:

KPI 1: Customer Effort Score

Are you keeping track of your Customer Effort Score (CES)? If not, well, you should be. And if you are, you know how important this metric is when it comes to safeguarding your customer-centric approach. The Customer Effort Score measures how much effort your customer had to put into contacting your service desk. The less effort, the better.

You measure how much effort your customer had to put into contacting your service desk. The less effort, the better. So why not turn CES into a KPI? Need to get some tips on receiving customer feedback?

KPI 2: First time right

What’s better than running into a problem, calling the service desk, and getting your problem solved straight away? It’s second only to not running into any problems at all.

Keep track of how often your department provides this kind of fantastic service with the first time right KPI. It monitors what percentage of calls you’re able to close during the first customer contact.

KPI 3: Self-service opportunities

Making your customers more independent is a big part of increasing customer satisfaction. So if you go through all the effort required to achieve this, you want to make sure your Service Catalogue and Knowledge Base are used.

Tracking incoming questions that customers can answer themselves can let you know whether you need to improve or promote your self-service facilities.

KPI 4: Customer satisfaction

And of course the most important KPI of all: customer satisfaction. Ask your customers what they think of your service. There are various ways to score customer satisfaction, from CSAT to NPS.

These measurements work best with regular surveys instead of annual measurements to give you more accurate and immediate insight into the results of your department’s efforts.

Download the free e-book and get customer-focused with BPSM

Using the right customer satisfaction KPIs is vital for a customer-focused service desk. Want to make customer satisfaction an essential part of your service processes? Download our Best Practice Service Management e-book and find out how you can improve your services with BPSM.

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Why should you start customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map helps you find opportunities for improvement where measurements and statistics can’t find them. Maybe you’ve got SLAs or other measurements in place to monitor the quality of your service delivery, but that doesn’t mean you always know where your opportunities for growth and improvement are. That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.

Step into your customer’s shoes and see what your customers experience when they request a service from your department. Is it easy to request a new laptop, for instance? Do customers feel informed when they talk to your service agents? And what about after they get their laptop: is everything set up and ready to go? And are your agents easy to reach for questions?

How to map your customer journeys in 10 steps

Now you know how customer journey mapping will benefit your organization, but where do you start? Before you start our interactive workshop or dive right into mapping your own customer journey, keep in mind these ten steps for an excellent customer journey map:

1. Start with one journey

Map a single customer journey at first. For instance, take a look at the steps your customers go through when they order a new laptop.

2. Engage all relevant parties

Your customer experience is a joint responsibility. Avoid creating a one-sided journey map by involving all teams that work on a specific service. Don’t map your ‘new laptop’ customer journey with just the service desk. Get the IT colleagues that prepare hardware and software to join too.

3. Determine your desired customer experience

Make sure you have an idea of what kind of experience you want and what’s realistic for your teams. Your approach to choosing improvements is different depending on whether you want to deliver a fully configured laptop that customers can use without asking more questions, or a laptop that has the basics set up but gives customers the freedom to pick more apps and settings for themselves.

4. Create a persona to start a customer journey with

Think of  the type of customer that would usually request the service you want to map. What’s their job title?  Would they prefer calling you on the phone would they rather send an email? What does your customer expect from your service? What software do they want on their laptop, and do they want to have everything pre-installed or do they want to it themselves?

Give your persona a name and make them as accurate as you can.

You may need multiple personas if your customers are very diverse, but start with just one for your first customer journey.

5. Get an idea of your current customer experience

Find customers who have recently requested the relevant service from you and interview them about their experience. Ask about their expectations and whether those expectations were met. Be sure to ask questions about different stages of the customer journey.

Find out how easy it is to request a new laptop, how well your agents answered questions after the laptop was delivered and everything in between.

A customer journey helps you find opportunities for improvement where measurements and statistics can’t find them.

6. Plot your customer journey

Give your journey a title and write down your customer’s goal and expectations. Make sure you plot the real journey based on your interviews, not the ideal situation you want to achieve.

7. Describe all touchpoints

Use the customer journey template we’ve provided to put your touchpoints on a timeline. Your touchpoints become clear from your customer interviews and include all communication during the service process, plus moments when customers feel communication is lacking.

Make sure you include the entire journey from start to finish. If you’re issuing a new laptop, your customer’s journey doesn’t end upon delivery. How do your customers feel about the aftercare you offer?

8. Link emotions to touchpoints

Use the customer journey template to put emotions under each touchpoints. Then plot a linear graph of your customers’ emotions, with positive emotions being high points, and negative emotions low.

9. Translate your insights into opportunities

The linear graph under your journey shows you which touchpoints make your customers feel satisfied or dissatisfied. This shows you where you can make improvements. Maybe your customers feel dissatisfied because of the waiting time when they request a laptop. You may not be able to speed up the process, but what if you build in a status update between request and delivery?

10. Keep improving

Now that you’ve got your customer journey ready, maintain it. Create built-in opportunities for customer feedback, so your customers can help you improve even further.

Next up: start customer journey mapping yourself

Now that you know how customer journey mapping works it’s time to get started. We’ve made customer journey mapping a piece of cake with our Customer journey map toolkit. In the toolkit you’ll find a digital workshop and all the tools and templates you’ll need to take the first step in improving your customer experience.

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1. Improve your Self Service Portal

Is the best service self-service? In many cases, yes! All the small tasks that your team deals with on a daily basis are usually things that can be “outsourced” to your customers (we call this Shift left). It saves both you and the caller valuable time and in the end improves the customer experience.

For example, it’s great practice to make sure your Self-Service Portal meets the demands of your user base. You can do this by simply user-testing your current portal and listening to the feedback. Good questions to start off with, are: is your portal intuitive enough for a first-time user? Do you use a language your customers understand? And does the structure of your portal make sense?

2. Map out your customer journeys

The best way to make sure your service desk customers have a great experience is to direct that experience yourselves. Map out your customer journeys for various types of calls and processes – one at a time – and make sure that every touchpoint meets a high standard of customer service. From reporting a call to the call evaluation once the call’s resolved.

Why not go beyond that and identify some points along the journey where you can really wow your customers? One or two really stand out points in the customer journey will lead to a way better overall experience, and do wonders for customer satisfaction.

3. Make your KPIs easier and customer-focused

Are you generating a huge list of reports to make sure your performance is on track? Stop that right away.

You need to keep track of metrics, of course, and you need KPIs. But we see far too often that there is a focus on reports over results. It’s much better to have 8 reports you use all the time than a lot of reports you will never use. It saves you time to focus on creating a better customer experience, instead of analyzing every aspect of the one you currently offer.

To keep your reporting as simple as possible, make sure it’s results-based, and maybe even project-based. If you’re looking at implementing self-service, for example, your go-to reports should be simple and to the point. How many people are using the portal? Which articles are read the most? If you need to deep dive to solve a specific problem, do so, but don’t take the plunge before you have to!

4. Focus on your customers more than your processes

ITIL and similar frameworks can be very useful. But they become a problem when following a procedure is more important than solving an issue. And that impacts your customer experience. At the very least, it’s great practice to realize that ITIL is a framework and not a set of rules.

And be wary of using ITIL as a means to improve your customer experience. ITIL was never intended to help IT-managers keep their customers happy. And keeping customers happy is now more important than ever. And harder, too. If your customers can update an app on their smartphone within 30 seconds, how can you explain to them that a software upgrade at work takes months to plan and implement?

You can read our e-book on Best Practice Service Management to get a better understanding of what we mean.

5. Step up your Knowledge Management

A sound system for Knowledge Management is getting increasingly important. If you want to successfully introduce self-service, you’ll need to organize your knowledge. Make sure all your how-to’s, FAQs and solutions to commonly occurring issues are organized and available to your service desk – and your customers.

Implementing a knowledge base may sound like a huge project, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s one of those projects that lends itself perfectly to a step-by-step ‘think big, start small’ process. The best thing to do is to inspire your team to continually update and improve your Knowledge Base.

6. Introduce Agile Service Management

And lastly, agile may be a trendy buzzword, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea for your service desk. We believe that agile could be a great fit for the modern service desk. Why? Agile means you can respond quicker to your customers’ needs, and do so with more flexibility, less frustration and more productivity.

Of course, not all parts of working at a service desk can be made fully agile. Some things require processes. But aiming to be more flexible, and using agile as a guideline can do wonders for your efficiency!

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