Why IT Service should not be standardised

Last week we ran a Customer Journey Mapping workshop specifically for IT Managers. We introduced them into the world of Service Design.

Although alot of the participants were familiar with ITIL Service Design, they never heard of Service Design/Design Thinking.

After splitting the group into two, we worked out two real life cases. One about the interaction between users of a retail organisation and an IT Service Desk. Another about creating a new service for pilots to view there flight performance data.
Working through stakeholder mapping and personas we ended with finding improvements in the services delivered. Although it was sometimes hard to come up with almost tangible solutions, there were some great insights.

Insight #1 Personas
In the process of customer journey mapping one of the steps is to make a clear picture of customers. Especially in IT Service Management we see a tendency of standardization. This means we see all IT users as the same. But does an employee of the HR department have the same needs as a sales assistant in a retail organisation?
This is where personas help. It identifies the key characteristics, attitude, behaviour, needs and pain point of a customer.
in this workshop we advised to look especially at extreme customers. Our philosophy is: if an ‘extreme’ customer enjoys your service, then the ‘average’ user will enjoy it too.
As a comparison: person who suffer of arthritis cannot hold a simple potatoe peeler. By adjusting the handle with handle bar of a bike they were able to use it. And also the ‘average’ person was fine by using the adjested peeler.

Insight #2 Transparancy
In the first step we started with stakeholder mapping. One of the discussion let to the need of transparancy and sponsorship.
Most companys have SLAs in place. Service level managers agree the service levels with business managers. Service level managers put the service levels in place in their organisation, they communicate them for example to the service desk. Business managers do not take up the same role at business side. This means that service desk employees tend to be in an awkward position of having to explain the service levels. They miss the sponsorship or back up from business managers.

Insight #3 We need to do this for all our customers
Since the workshop was run only for one day we had to work on two specific cases. At the end of the day all participants agreed the workshop gave them great insights about their customers. Working in a multidisciplinary team helped them view the cases from different sides.
All participants agreed they needed to run this workshop more times. Either for different customers, or different employees in the IT department. This all to get a better understanding of the customer and improve services.

Interested in running your own Customer Journey Mapping workshop, please contact us.