The Importance of Experience Management to CIOs

Experience management might seem like another one of those consultant-created buzz phrases designed to squeeze more out of your IT budget. However, experience management should be a key part of your CIO toolbox – a key indicator of how well your IT department supports business needs and outcomes.

Think about it. How often do you encounter C-level peers with IT service and support horror stories (either personally or from their staff) despite your current metric portfolio repeatedly showing that agreed-on service level targets are being met? This issue is usually because these traditional IT metrics – service level targets – measure how well things are being done operationally rather than assessing the suitability of the outcomes and the experiences of the people involved.

This is precisely why organizations, and CIOs, are turning to experience management – to better understand how well business and employee needs are being met by the services and support provided by the internal or external IT service provider. Then to drive the positive change that will close the expectation gap between demand and supply.

Why experience management should be in your CIO toolbox

You might think that you, plus your top team, already have more than enough performance metrics. You’re probably right. However, a key point about experience management is that it’s not about measuring even more performance-based data points. Instead, it’s about measuring the right things and aligning your improvement activities to what matters most to your business and its employees. This latter point is important because merely measuring performance to show that agreed-on service targets have been met misunderstands a fundamental purpose of metrics – the need to improve operations and outcomes.

So, are you confident that your IT department is measuring the right things?

For example, is the outsourced IT service desk that saves money, employs industry best practices, and removes the need for internal support resourcing fulfilling the needs of your company’s employees?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) might show that all is good – or at least acceptable. But how well are your organization’s employees being enabled? And when things aren’t as they should be, what’s the negative impact on their productivity and the business outcomes they contribute to?

Put another way, how does your IT service desk – internal or external – contribute value to your company? Or does it do things (including not doing things) that diminish it? Perhaps this isn’t easy to know right now. It’s why experience data is important, and employee experience measurement plays a key role.

The crucial role of employee experience

Experience management focuses on the experience of, and outcomes for, the people positively or negatively impacted by IT’s services and support. You might argue that customer satisfaction (CSAT) measurement is enough. However, as with the other KPIs showing all is well, CSAT isn’t a great indicator of what employees feel about the service and support they receive. Think about the companies that have moved from CSAT questionnaires to measuring net promoter score (NPS) – it’s a similar concept. That CSAT measurement is more likely to reflect the “mechanics” of IT support rather than how employees feel about how they and their IT issues are handled.

Instead, experience-based metrics allow you and your team to better understand what’s happening –good, neutral, and bad – at key employee touchpoints. Such that any future improvement to operations, services, and outcomes can be made in the right places, addressing the underlying root causes rather than the more apparent symptoms.

The benefit of employee experience to CIOs

Like every other part of your organization, you need your IT operations and the outcomes they deliver to be “better, faster, cheaper.” Of course, there are traditional IT strategies to help here—for example, cost-cutting or adding extra automation.

But do you know how well these strategies work at a business, rather than an IT, level? There might have been the required drop in the unit price for incident ticket handling, but how has this impacted the employees supported by these “now improved” capabilities?

This issue is where the need for experience management comes in – with the ability to understand the business-level impact of current and changed operations and, importantly, to take the actions that improve the status quo as needed. For example, your investment in IT self-service capabilities might not currently be offering the speed, cost, and service experience benefits it promised – as shown by the aggregated HappySignals customer data below:

Source: The 9th Global IT Experience Benchmark: H2/2022

This data shows that using self-service is, on average, losing employees an extra 113 minutes of productivity per ticket versus the telephone channel. And this is for organizations that are already investing in employee experience improvement.

Accessing valuable performance insights and the root causes allows CIOs to deliver better IT service delivery and support capabilities to their organization and its employees. Importantly, organizations are likely blind to these issues with their use of traditional, operations-based performance metrics.

Hopefully, the above has been enough to make you at least curious about employee experience management will help your IT department improve its operations and business outcomes. You can read more detail in our CIO’s Guide to Employee Experience Management. Alternatively, please get in touch with us to find out how we can help.