A few months ago in my blog about Drake and Service Management, I hinted twice that I would talk later about how to measure success and how to change from a culture of speed.  In the report “This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Service Desk”, we have taken the research from our team that supports Customer Experience Professionals and applied it to the IT Service Desk.  Forrester recommends that all IT service desks determine the Customer Experience Index (CXi) by taking a survey of business customers to test how effective (met the needs), easy, and enjoyable their interactions have been with the IT Service Desk over the past three months.  By measuring the customer experience and coupling it with the metrics of speed traditionally collected, a true picture emerges of the success of an IT Service Desk.  However, we found that only 1/3 of business customers are surveyed about their experience with the Service Desk whether it’s random surveys or surveys after each ticket.  We can do better!! 

If you haven’t started measuring the customer experience at your IT Service Desk, make a New Year’s resolution to start now (and I don’t mean one of those New Year’s resolutions that peter out about 2 weeks into the New Year!!!).  Starting with a baseline will help you understand how you are progressing at customer experience and give you an understanding of what needs to be fixed in order to make the customer experience at the IT Service Desk even better. 

Using the Forrester CXi methodology, we took a survey of 3,914 information workers and found that the overall CXi score for IT Service Desks was a 75 or the very bottom of the “Good” rating (scale contains Poor, OK, Good and Excellent ratings).  Once again, we can do better!!  Make a New Year’s resolution to create a process of continual improvement with the data from the customer experience surveys or use the report to better your surveys and in turn the information you can use to feed your continual process improvements. 

Regardless of where you are in the spectrum of measurement and improvement of customer experience, make those resolutions because it’s time for the IT Service Desk to get customer obsessed!!!