itSMF Bulletin November 2017 Bulletin - November 2017 | Page 16

Not only does coaching lead to engagement, and
engagement lead to happy customers, but having an
engaged team has other compelling benefits: Decreased absen-
teeism, less turnover and higher productivity.
#5 CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CSI
According to Gartner, although 95% of companies have
collected feedback from their customers for years, only
about 10% use these suggestions to change their processes
and improve customer experience.
From straw-poll votes we’ve done at IT conferences, this is
pretty close to what happens in IT teams. Most survey their
customers. Few do anything with the feedback.
We’ve already talked about the benefits of using customer
feedback for coaching support staff. The other use for
customer feedback is to use it to drive continual service
improvement. If you want to improve service, listen to your
customers. They’re giving you free consulting!
Customer-driven CSI requires you to periodically analyse
verbatim customer feedback and identify themes in that
feedback. Where are customers commonly telling you
you’re strong? What areas are causing them to be
frustrated?
Practical Tips
Tip 1- Coaching should not just be about correcting mistakes.
Some of the most effective coaching focuses on reinforcing the
most desirable behaviours.
Tip 2- Don’t use vague feedback for coaching – “Sam was great”
or “Service was poor” is useless without knowing what was great,
and what made the experience a poor one.
To do this, you need to do what is called ‘verbatim coding’.
Coding is the act of converting open-ended responses into
more structured data that can be analysed quantitively.
Think of it like tagging.
Tip 3 - Discuss positive customer experiences in team meetings
and recognise individuals publicly. If you want to reinforce
desired behaviours, small, regular, immediate rewards are far
more effective than annual bonuses. Each act of public
recognition reinforces the behaviour not just of one member of
the IT team, but for everyone that hears it. For example, consider this verbatim: “My problem took
ages to resolve. And the ticket was closed before it had
been fixed”. You might tag this as “slow resolution” and “no
verification”. Every time you see feedback about not being
happy with how long a ticket took to resolve, you’d code it
as “slow resolution”. And every time a customer tells you
they were frustrated with a ticket being closed without
checking with them first, you’d code it as “no verification”.
Tip 4- CIOs often have more influence than they realise.
CIOs should take the time to recognise individuals and
teams for their customer-focused behaviours. This positive
reinforcement can have a huge impact on employees and create
real momentum for a movement towards customer-centricity. Once a set of verbatim feedback has been coded, you can
simply count the occurrences of each code (tag). The codes
with the highest counts represent your strengths (positive
feedback from Promoters) and weaknesses (negative
feedback from Passives and Detractors).
There’s a lot of statistics software out there for doing
coding. But none that we’ve found that makes coding easier
than doing it in Excel. When we analyse verbatim feedback,
here’s how we do it:
Put all your feedback in Excel – one piece of feedback per
row.
Read the verbatim. It helps to do a quick scan first, to get a
feel for the themes, and then code it row-by-row.
The relationship employee engagement
satisfaction leads to a virtuous cycle.
16 itSMF Bulletin—November 2017
and
customer
Add columns that represent each theme you start to
discover (e.g. “slow resolution”). Each column will
represent a strength or a weakness.