What Impacts Employee Experience in ServiceNow?
Which factors are really impacting your employees positively and negatively in their IT service experience? In this episode, Sami and Pasi talk about the range of factors that drive employees to a better employee experience, as well as the negative factors that reduce happiness, productivity and increase lost time.
Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to Happy Today podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or on the enterprise Service Management system then this is for you.
Pasi Nikkanen: Hi again, welcome to Happy Today podcast. Today we are going to talk about what makes employees happy or unhappy to their services. And this is what we call factors. An example that I use is usually the one where if you go to the airport, you call at the toilet and you come out and then there's the smiley faces. So you hit the red smiley face or the unhappy face, the airport doesn't really know was it because the flight was delayed or the toilet paper was out. And we try to tackle this something that we called the factors. So can you, Sami, explain how do we gather this information?
Sami Kallio: Yeah, so every time you answer our survey, we are dividing those scores from zero to 10 to three different areas. So positive are the nine and 10, so when you click nine and 10, we are asking what made you happy. And there is a set of factors that you select. "Okay, these were the ones that in fact made me feel good."
And then if you click neutral, seven, eight, we are asking what we could do better. Under seven, we are asking what we must do differently.
Pasi Nikkanen: Okay.
Sami Kallio: So today in this episode we first go through the positive ones and then the most negative ones so that you kind of understand what are the main areas of causing people be happy or unhappy to IT incidents. So this is now today only about IT incidents.
Pasi Nikkanen: And this data is part of our happiness score report. So you can get the whole report online. You go to HappySignals.com and you can download it from there.
Sami Kallio: Yep.
Pasi Nikkanen: All right, so let's start. What makes employees happy?
Sami Kallio: I was thinking to go to only the biggest three and the biggest one here is speed of service. So you can go to our report and see exactly the percentage there. But the speed of service is the biggest. But now we have to think about it in a bit different way because this is not the speed of the first answer to the end-user. This is the perception of the whole time needed from the moment they realize they have that IT incident to the time they know that it's resolved. So sometimes people are losing time, even before they contact service desk.
Pasi Nikkanen: Exactly. They don't know where the portal is. What is the number. They asked their colleagues, their managers and so on.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. But the speed of service, their perception of it, is the biggest one. Okay. But quite interesting, the next two are eight and soft skills. So much of only, but first is the attitude. So what was the attitude of agent really influences that you really get that nine or 10. So you wouldn't get those if you don't have right people.
Pasi Nikkanen: So even the employees are human and they appreciate good human service. So just like us as consumers when we've gone somewhere and somebody is smiling and having a good attitude, positive attitude, it makes a difference.
Sami Kallio: And interested about your case. That's the thing. The other, the third one is agent skills. And this has been quite interesting follow up because that been going up, the whole history of our company. So it's getting to be more and more interesting and important for end-users. I think the reason for that is that the end-users are starting to be more skillful on their own all the time. So that is causing that these factor is going up.
Pasi Nikkanen: And probably it might be this consumerization because the agents and the employers all are using more IT outside their work life and their work, the enterprise IT is coming closer to the consumer IT, so that could be one of the reasons.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. And the other things we asked there is about the process. Did I get informed and was the service provided proactively or did I learn something? All of these have an influence on it, but not as users, these first three.
Pasi Nikkanen: Perfect. Then what about the negative ones? What seems to be the thing that make people unhappy and frustrated.
Sami Kallio: Frustrated might be the right word. Sometimes I use, first, hate, but that this may be too strong. But the first interesting thing here is that the agents are not the ones causing unhappiness. So one of the what the most important factor is the attitude of agents. So of course if that is wrong, that is really wrong, but it's not very big issue in the industry. Skills, a bit bigger. But the speed of service, of course, it is the biggest one here. And that is quite obvious because if you don't get things solved when you need them, of course that would make you frustrated. But the second biggest is the one that is, let's say, making people think what is causing this? And still, we don't have an exact answer. And the problem there is that my ticket was not even solved.
Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, that's strange because even in the ticket, when we were asking, it said, "Hey, if you think that this wasn't... You want to re-open this. You can always click another button." But still they are accepting the resolution that it was not solved.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. So they approve it but they still said, "You didn't help me." And that, "You didn't help me" is maybe key there.
Pasi Nikkanen: True.
Sami Kallio: So they might, in some cases we know from the freedom feedback that there was other employee that helped them or they got the resolution on their own from Google or something. The other thing there is that even though they accept it, they are still thinking that this was not the real fix. This has happened several times already and they know that this will happen again. So they're kind of saying, "Yeah, but not." and I think those are the main two reasons.
Sami Kallio: And then there are cases when the end-users really... If you read the freedom feedback, they don't want to be part of it anymore. So they just start and they make the decision, "I will leave with this problem... We have been trying to solve it for three weeks and you're not going to help me but I'm not going to spend my time. I'm just going to boot my computer every morning," or something like that.
Pasi Nikkanen: And probably it might be tied to that factor that is, "I had to explain my case several times," so at some point they just get frustrated and don't want to continue.
Sami Kallio: And in fact that is the third most important of the factors. So the tennis ball thing, "I had to expand that several times." We just had an episode earlier on reassignment counts. So that is very, very linked to this one.
Pasi Nikkanen: All right. But still about that, "My ticket was not solved." I think one good thing in our product is that you can select that factor so then you can see what are the cases causing this? Are they related to some services or related to some teams of yours, or locations. Wherever you are having more of those problems and then you start to understand, okay, what is really behind that really use, and that is 30% of all cases where people are rating the surveys on 30 percentage. People are saying that you didn't even help me.
Sami Kallio: And because of course sometimes it's like some team is not responsible of handling some service, but now if you see that from the data, that we get such a huge volume of people complaining that it wasn't solved because it ends up to a wrong team, then could you make a process of actually getting it the right team or saying how that other teams should actually handle it so that it does get solved. But yeah, you can really dig down into the data and see what you could do.
Pasi Nikkanen: And then the other small factors are like I didn't know where to start, or the instruction's very hard to understand. They are not huge in an overall situation. But of course there are customers that they are having issues in those. With our product, you can also not... Okay these factors you can use and and get it from our benchmark and everybody can use them however you wish. Because that is coming from all our customers, that is a thing that you can trust it even though you don't have your own data there. But our customers can compare their own situation to a benchmark in the tool so they can really start to understand, "Okay, do we have an attitude issue even though 30% of people are saying that the attitude is good but it's 15% less than the benchmark." So that helps you understand, okay there is something we can do better in that area.
Sami Kallio: True.
Pasi Nikkanen: And also our customers, they can actually make it actionable. So for example, the service now customers, they can use the workflow designer. So when the feedback is coming in, it has a lower score. It has a certain factor they could make. So let's say that it's an agent skill thing, it could go to the service desk team manager and say that, "Hey, it seems to be again a skill issue." If it's an attitude issue, we should definitely go there and then maybe start highlighting that hey it seems like we aren't solving this issue. So it's really, really powerful that you can do then with the experience data, when you bring it back to your ideas and platform.
Sami Kallio: And again you can also use the data to make some of the agents heroes who really need to be the hero. So the people who have the best attitude and the skills, not the ones who are resolving most of the tickets. But are getting most of the mentions by attitude.
Pasi Nikkanen:
I did want that kind of report to one customer just with the service not reporting. So just get, "Hey, pick all the positive feedbacks and who agent has the most mentions of good attitude or good skill." So it's really more like a happiness leaderboard than a penalty board as it sometimes is used. Cool All right. Thanks Sami. And as mentioned earlier, you can get the report, go into details, and we'll update the report quarterly. So the next one is coming beginning of 2020. So until that time I say, stay happy.
Pasi Nikkanen: Hi again, welcome to Happy Today podcast. Today we are going to talk about what makes employees happy or unhappy to their services. And this is what we call factors. An example that I use is usually the one where if you go to the airport, you call at the toilet and you come out and then there's the smiley faces. So you hit the red smiley face or the unhappy face, the airport doesn't really know was it because the flight was delayed or the toilet paper was out. And we try to tackle this something that we called the factors. So can you, Sami, explain how do we gather this information?
Sami Kallio: Yeah, so every time you answer our survey, we are dividing those scores from zero to 10 to three different areas. So positive are the nine and 10, so when you click nine and 10, we are asking what made you happy. And there is a set of factors that you select. "Okay, these were the ones that in fact made me feel good."
And then if you click neutral, seven, eight, we are asking what we could do better. Under seven, we are asking what we must do differently.
Pasi Nikkanen: Okay.
Sami Kallio: So today in this episode we first go through the positive ones and then the most negative ones so that you kind of understand what are the main areas of causing people be happy or unhappy to IT incidents. So this is now today only about IT incidents.
Pasi Nikkanen: And this data is part of our happiness score report. So you can get the whole report online. You go to HappySignals.com and you can download it from there.
Sami Kallio: Yep.
Pasi Nikkanen: All right, so let's start. What makes employees happy?
Sami Kallio: I was thinking to go to only the biggest three and the biggest one here is speed of service. So you can go to our report and see exactly the percentage there. But the speed of service is the biggest. But now we have to think about it in a bit different way because this is not the speed of the first answer to the end-user. This is the perception of the whole time needed from the moment they realize they have that IT incident to the time they know that it's resolved. So sometimes people are losing time, even before they contact service desk.
Pasi Nikkanen: Exactly. They don't know where the portal is. What is the number. They asked their colleagues, their managers and so on.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. But the speed of service, their perception of it, is the biggest one. Okay. But quite interesting, the next two are eight and soft skills. So much of only, but first is the attitude. So what was the attitude of agent really influences that you really get that nine or 10. So you wouldn't get those if you don't have right people.
Pasi Nikkanen: So even the employees are human and they appreciate good human service. So just like us as consumers when we've gone somewhere and somebody is smiling and having a good attitude, positive attitude, it makes a difference.
Sami Kallio: And interested about your case. That's the thing. The other, the third one is agent skills. And this has been quite interesting follow up because that been going up, the whole history of our company. So it's getting to be more and more interesting and important for end-users. I think the reason for that is that the end-users are starting to be more skillful on their own all the time. So that is causing that these factor is going up.
Pasi Nikkanen: And probably it might be this consumerization because the agents and the employers all are using more IT outside their work life and their work, the enterprise IT is coming closer to the consumer IT, so that could be one of the reasons.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. And the other things we asked there is about the process. Did I get informed and was the service provided proactively or did I learn something? All of these have an influence on it, but not as users, these first three.
Pasi Nikkanen: Perfect. Then what about the negative ones? What seems to be the thing that make people unhappy and frustrated.
Sami Kallio: Frustrated might be the right word. Sometimes I use, first, hate, but that this may be too strong. But the first interesting thing here is that the agents are not the ones causing unhappiness. So one of the what the most important factor is the attitude of agents. So of course if that is wrong, that is really wrong, but it's not very big issue in the industry. Skills, a bit bigger. But the speed of service, of course, it is the biggest one here. And that is quite obvious because if you don't get things solved when you need them, of course that would make you frustrated. But the second biggest is the one that is, let's say, making people think what is causing this? And still, we don't have an exact answer. And the problem there is that my ticket was not even solved.
Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, that's strange because even in the ticket, when we were asking, it said, "Hey, if you think that this wasn't... You want to re-open this. You can always click another button." But still they are accepting the resolution that it was not solved.
Sami Kallio: Yeah. So they approve it but they still said, "You didn't help me." And that, "You didn't help me" is maybe key there.
Pasi Nikkanen: True.
Sami Kallio: So they might, in some cases we know from the freedom feedback that there was other employee that helped them or they got the resolution on their own from Google or something. The other thing there is that even though they accept it, they are still thinking that this was not the real fix. This has happened several times already and they know that this will happen again. So they're kind of saying, "Yeah, but not." and I think those are the main two reasons.
Sami Kallio: And then there are cases when the end-users really... If you read the freedom feedback, they don't want to be part of it anymore. So they just start and they make the decision, "I will leave with this problem... We have been trying to solve it for three weeks and you're not going to help me but I'm not going to spend my time. I'm just going to boot my computer every morning," or something like that.
Pasi Nikkanen: And probably it might be tied to that factor that is, "I had to explain my case several times," so at some point they just get frustrated and don't want to continue.
Sami Kallio: And in fact that is the third most important of the factors. So the tennis ball thing, "I had to expand that several times." We just had an episode earlier on reassignment counts. So that is very, very linked to this one.
Pasi Nikkanen: All right. But still about that, "My ticket was not solved." I think one good thing in our product is that you can select that factor so then you can see what are the cases causing this? Are they related to some services or related to some teams of yours, or locations. Wherever you are having more of those problems and then you start to understand, okay, what is really behind that really use, and that is 30% of all cases where people are rating the surveys on 30 percentage. People are saying that you didn't even help me.
Sami Kallio: And because of course sometimes it's like some team is not responsible of handling some service, but now if you see that from the data, that we get such a huge volume of people complaining that it wasn't solved because it ends up to a wrong team, then could you make a process of actually getting it the right team or saying how that other teams should actually handle it so that it does get solved. But yeah, you can really dig down into the data and see what you could do.
Pasi Nikkanen: And then the other small factors are like I didn't know where to start, or the instruction's very hard to understand. They are not huge in an overall situation. But of course there are customers that they are having issues in those. With our product, you can also not... Okay these factors you can use and and get it from our benchmark and everybody can use them however you wish. Because that is coming from all our customers, that is a thing that you can trust it even though you don't have your own data there. But our customers can compare their own situation to a benchmark in the tool so they can really start to understand, "Okay, do we have an attitude issue even though 30% of people are saying that the attitude is good but it's 15% less than the benchmark." So that helps you understand, okay there is something we can do better in that area.
Sami Kallio: True.
Pasi Nikkanen: And also our customers, they can actually make it actionable. So for example, the service now customers, they can use the workflow designer. So when the feedback is coming in, it has a lower score. It has a certain factor they could make. So let's say that it's an agent skill thing, it could go to the service desk team manager and say that, "Hey, it seems to be again a skill issue." If it's an attitude issue, we should definitely go there and then maybe start highlighting that hey it seems like we aren't solving this issue. So it's really, really powerful that you can do then with the experience data, when you bring it back to your ideas and platform.
Sami Kallio: And again you can also use the data to make some of the agents heroes who really need to be the hero. So the people who have the best attitude and the skills, not the ones who are resolving most of the tickets. But are getting most of the mentions by attitude.
Pasi Nikkanen:
I did want that kind of report to one customer just with the service not reporting. So just get, "Hey, pick all the positive feedbacks and who agent has the most mentions of good attitude or good skill." So it's really more like a happiness leaderboard than a penalty board as it sometimes is used. Cool All right. Thanks Sami. And as mentioned earlier, you can get the report, go into details, and we'll update the report quarterly. So the next one is coming beginning of 2020. So until that time I say, stay happy.
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