The concept of improving employee experience may make you think of HR or senior management. Both are responsible for culture and workforce engagement, after all. But it turns out that many departments affect employee experience—especially IT.
IT has always focused on end users in some fashion. Case in point: user experience, which plays a major role in service, product and system development. Then there’s the service desk, which is dedicated to technology upkeep and operations. Resolving technical issues and helping employees recover from a technical disruption is the focus.
But there’s still room to shift the service desk experience beyond traditional IT support practices and mindset to new ways of serving employees to help them be productive. For example, it might seem innocuous to redirect a ticket to different support group, but that action causes loss of productivity for the employee. Sometimes it can be significant.
The good news is that there are three easy ways to start improving employee experience.
1. Improve Ticket Routing to Prevent Bouncing
One way to avoid bounced tickets it to have multiple ways to route them. Categorizing is a good first step but consider using specialized groups and assigning tickets to specific analysts. More granular routing places tickets directly in front of the right analysts to resolve them.
It’s hard to avoid tickets addressed to you and/or are transparently viewable among a small team.
2. Think of the Service Desk in Terms of Empowering End Users, Not Supporting IT Infrastructure
It IS personal, the work of service desks. Whether or not appreciation is voiced, you are providing relief and a path to help end users perform and achieve for the organization—and perhaps their own personal growth. So, while IT was once domain-managed, it is now more accurate to view IT as a service, serving employees in particular.
What are additional ways your team can humanize the service desk experience? Perhaps making it more conversational and collaborative?
3. Understand What is Hindering End User Experience
It is common for prematurely closed tickets, lag in attending to tickets and bounced tickets that require repeat explanations to negatively affect end user experience. But your organization may have other areas of opportunity to improve experience and employee productivity. Are you in tune with what those things are? A quick way to get feedback are strategic use of surveys.
What functionality are employees asking for and how can you prioritize it?
A great option that was built with employee experience in mind is Tikit, a Microsoft 365 service desk. Tikit provides a native Microsoft Teams experience—conversational for end user employees and streamlined via artificial intelligence for analysts. Check out how Tikit works in this demo and try it for free!
