Region Midtjylland, Providing Experience for Hospitals

Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to HappyToday podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

Pasi Nikkanen: On this episode of HappyToday, I'm with Jesper Hansen, so maybe tell a little bit where you're from and what is your role and maybe a little bit about your background.

Jesper Hansen: Sure. I'm from Denmark. I'm in national healthcare. Denmark has five regions and I'm the head of a service desk in one of the regions. I have 29 employees and we handle healthcare for five big hospitals, and we have about 16,000 tickets a month we're handling.

I've been doing that for the last 10 years, the last four years as a manager. We've been through a transformation during those years and we're now in a different role than we were 10 years ago. Service desk is actually participating more in the operations and recommended actions for both operations and products.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. What does employee experience mean to you and how do you actually use satisfaction data and the productivity data?

Jesper Hansen: Well, we've been training a lot on the telephones, making agents learn how to talk to customers. We are using the it support profiles to differentiate our customers. So some of the customer satisfaction data we get now is actually based on different profiles.

So that's an opportunity for the agents to make the service directly for that type of customer. They are training that, and all the data we get now from the surveys, I can use that to see what agent is really doing good. And then we can analyse what is he or her doing?

Are there certain phrases they use, compared to those that are not doing as well?

And then we can train each other. I offer coaching for the ones that I need. So it's not like you are doing something wrong.

Pasi Nikkanen: You still make it as a positive thing. For you to learn and develop as an agent.

Jesper Hansen: You can learn this, you can learn from him. He's doing this and that's working for him. And that will actually make your day better because it's nice to talk to people that are happy.

Pasi Nikkanen: True, true, yeah.

Jesper Hansen: So, that's one way we use the data.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. Okay. And you also mentioned something that you analyse a little bit of the productivity side of it?

Jesper Hansen: Yeah, every time we make a ticket in our service desk, we register what kind of application or service it is concerned.

And we have actually two places to register this. We had the company experience, and then we have the cause, what actually caused it. So you can have a customer saying my healthcare system doesn't work. And we find out it's because they don't turn on the computer for example.

But it's still the customer, the healthcare system that doesn't work. Then we put the other one as the user fault. That gives a lot of data, and every agent has a system of business service they are responsible for.

So they set up meetings with second line, discussing how much are we doing? How many tickets are we solving in first line? And how much in second line? We want to do about 80% in first line. We can use data to show that if we do that, customer satisfaction is raising.

And the amount of time they spent on talking to IT about the problem, drops. So the lost time decreases and the happiness increases.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. That's really powerful because we can see from a lot of our customers' data, and they have this reassignment counts, every time it goes to the second level or third level, it really starts affecting the happiness and the productivity of the employees. Some people start using, tried to use technology, but I see your approach is more like down to it then you actually work with people. How can we, solve these things in the first level? Yeah, sounds really powerful.

Jesper Hansen: Makes you able to create reports. You can say go to operations and say, last month we had these things. You should focus on this because that's the largest impact on the company.

So, that's quite a turnaround under service desk. Because before we were asked to please pick up the phone quickly. Now we can actually say we can prevent all the calls if you focus on this area.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. So were there any, like, obstacles or objections when you said that this is what we start to do, we start to measure things and we start to see how the employees are satisfied or rating the services?

Jesper Hansen: We had some issues about the measuring on the personal level. People were concerned how is this data going to be used. So if I get three bad smileys will I get fired?

Not really, but there was that concern. We had to take it slow and show people that no, that's not the intention. We actually want to make it better for everybody.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. So what is now the feeling in service desk, how they feel about it now?

Jesper Hansen: In the service desk, they are happy about this. I have one-on-ones with my employees every month. And a couple of times I missed out, and they actually want to know how are we doing?

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay, yeah.

Jesper Hansen: So, they are very happy about it now.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right, all right. Any happy or unhappy surprises that have come along? Any stories, some employees saying something or something happening at the service desk that you learn from the data?

Jesper Hansen: Yeah, a very practical example in the healthcare, if something goes wrong and it's critical they have to register that at the hospital, and say this is very big problem. People might die if this happens again.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, true, true.

Jesper Hansen: And so they make a ticket from that in their own system and they confront IT and says, how are you going to prevent this from happening? So, one of these employees in the healthcare gave us a very bad rating for one of the applications. And I have a filter, so I contact everybody that give us bad ratings and ask what could we do better?

And so they told us we had to learn what the system was and that was a critical system. We documented this in the knowledge base, and we made the known arrow description so that next time they would call, we would know right away what to do with this issue.

And then a week later I was called in for a meeting about how to avoid this, and I can tell them this story and we have this customer feedback and we'd done this and we now have a knowledge template, so it shouldn't occur again. That was based on the customer feedback.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right. Hey, thank you so much for your time. Glad that you got into this interview. So I hope you make great things and make your employees happy again.

Jesper Hansen: I'm sure we will, thank you.

Pasi Nikkanen: Thank you. Bye.

Jesper Hansen: Bye