Date Published March 21, 2022 - Last Updated January 20, 2023
Millennials are dominating the workforce, with over 30% of the population falling into this category. With this major shift in the workforce, the way that people prefer to work is changing to reflect the way people interact with technology in their personal lives. For example, the curated social media and content experiences of the outside world have begun to seep into the way employees interact with internal services, like the IT department. Now, teams are pivoting to create a more customized experience for everything from knowledge access to self service and beyond.
What does that mean for you at the service desk? You’ll be expected to create a user-centric ITSM experience that will be memorable for your service desk agents and customers alike.
What is a Curated IT Experience?
As I mentioned earlier, customers expect the same type of tailored experiences at work as they get at home.
To help you meet that expectation, the focus shifts from managing one experience at a time to creating more connections between interactions so that every interaction is personalized.
This doesn’t mean creating a brand-new experience from scratch for each interaction; rather, it means compiling all of the things currently working well and creating better synergy to ensure the pieces work together.
This IT Service Management model includes the combination of services tailored to specific user personas through self-service, self-help, knowledge management, and the ITSM tool itself. For example, if someone contacts the service desk via self service and is given knowledge articles tailored to their specific equipment, software, and goals in addition to service that prioritizes their ticket based on business need, they have received a more custom experience instead of being shown the same solutions everyone gets every time.
Tips and Best Practices for Curated Service Management
When you’re looking to create a new IT service management model, there are a few basic best practices to keep your team moving forward throughout the full lifecycle of the customer journey:
Design Your IT Experience from the Outside In
Digital experience design is important. User experience is crucial. Whether your service management experience is being created from scratch or it has already been established, there is one thing to remember: if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got.
When thinking of any process, from incident management to self service, consider the user’s view. What are their needs, what are their drivers? Then, using that data, design each touch-point from the outside in to make sure they stay at the center of your focus.
Align Strategies with Clear Best Practices and ITIL Guidance
Memorable experiences don’t happen by accident. They are part of a carefully executed strategy with best practices acting as the guiding force. These best practices and ITSM frameworks can be based on ITIL guidance and will help streamline processes like change management and incident management, which fit into the greater picture of the end-to-end service strategy for which your team is aiming.
Aligning strategies doesn’t stop at the service desk. It means aligning the processes and strategies in place across all of the IT organization. This can help reduce friction if a ticket needs to be escalated beyond traditional IT support, and will help improve communication efforts between service desk agents, DevOps, and other IT team members.
Create Strategic Collaborative Initiatives
The thing people love about social media is the invitation to share their opinions. The same can be achieved at the service desk when you allow users, developers, customers, and stakeholders to provide their input and feedback.
Collaborative support and initiatives can be created in a variety of ways. It can mean creating a form for customers to submit feedback, encouraging knowledge sharing within the ITSM software. Or you could take a more agile approach to service management with integrated feedback loops. Once you have the necessary feedback, you can add it to the intelligent knowledge management database and incorporate it with elements of automation to better curate the customer ITSM experience.
Store Data from Prior Interactions
To create a memorable ITSM experience for customers, you need the ability to maintain information on past interactions with those customers. By storing the data for each user’s interactions, you can deploy machine learning technology to better predict that particular user’s needs. User data, incident patterns, and search habits all are continually being input and analyzed to help understand user intent, predict future issues, provide relevant search results, and even interact via intelligent automation like AI-powered chatbots.
This can be taken a step further with the addition of features like Natural Language Processing (NLP) which can help predict intent based on the natural language of the user, providing a better customer experience to people of different backgrounds and regions.
All these elements of data storage and machine learning combine to serve the customer unique solutions based on past interactions without adding much legwork for the service desk agent.
Create Knowledge Based on User Personas
All of these tips culminate into the most important factor for creating a user-specific experience: providing the user with the knowledge and information they need, when and where they need it, through an intelligent knowledge management system.
For an example of this in practice, think of an ITSM system that has a user’s past interactions stored, as well as the type of equipment they use and their user persona based on business need.
These elements work together to curate the right type of information, like a knowledge article on how to troubleshoot their phone, and serve it to them through the channel they prefer to reach out on, like a chatbot through Microsoft Teams. This tells the user that the service desk knows their needs and has the tools necessary to give them what they need. This goes far when it comes to creating a memorable employee experience because it shows that the service desk listens and cares.
Nancy Louisnord is the Chief Marketing Officer of EasyVista, responsible for the company’s global and regional marketing programs and product marketing strategy. With more than 15 years of global leadership experience in the ITSM software industry, she is a sought-after presenter at conferences and contributor to several leading industry publications. EasyVista is a global software provider of intelligent service automation solutions for service experience management. Leveraging the power of ITSM, Self-Help, Observability and Remote background management to create customer-focused service experiences, EasyVista has helped companies improve employee productivity, reduce operating costs, and increase customer satisfaction.