Improving Service Desk User Experiences

Every interaction with your company, from your clients to your employees, affects how your company is perceived. Per the User Experience Professionals Association, User experience (UX) involves a person's emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership.” In this world of the digital business, user experience is the one thing that no department can avoid, yet few departments are able to measure.

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Different Users – Different Experience

Poor user experience is encountered every day, whether it is a door opening the wrong way, your computer crashing, or a web site taking more than 7 seconds to load your coffee order. In business, user experience fails are often centered around End User Support services, or slow access to internal systems - essentially, your IT support team becomes the brunt of a thousand bad user experience jokes.

There is a solution. Through combining the insights of User Experience professionals with the expertise of Solutions Architects specializing in End User Support Services, you can develop a Service Desk solution that meets the needs of a broad user audience. There are three simple questions that I use to start the process:

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Who are my users?

In your business you have users defined by many different traits. You can't look at them from a single point of view. They may be female or male, a technophile or a technophobe, but there are a few types of technology users you can expect to see, and they often cross categories.

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What challenges do they face?

With the users categorized, you can start identifying their specific challenges. While some of your users depend on their mobile phones or tablets, others depend on their laptops. But all of them need connectivity to your services - and the list of devices keep growing. Whether its email, cloud storage, phone calls, text messages, or device security, they count on your systems to keep them connected and secure whenever they are working at a task.

The key issues that all corporate end users face include:

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How do I measure ROI?

Measuring the ROI of your service desk is often difficult. It isn't all about how many calls are answered within an hour. Its about client satisfaction, and about how many calls they have to make in the first place. By breaking down your ROI calculations into key pieces, you can better make decisions that will affect the widest percentage of your user base (Millennials will be 75% of the workforce by 2025!). These decisions in turn affect user satisfaction, and the overall user experience with your company.

Some areas where you can break down your ROI include:

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Great Experiences Matter

It isn't enough to just provide support - the user experience of that support must be great. As the Millennial generation takes over the workforce with their focus more on self than company, it is imperative that we provide this group of socially focused and connected, individuals with positive experiences so that we can leverage their commitments to the brands and services that they enjoy. And everyone else will appreciate the better user experience as well.