Reading time 25 minutes, written by Helena Lindberg
This guide uncovers how to utilize behavioral user profiles when running Service Desk in IT Service Management, so how to use profiles in Service Desk. It gives you insight on what creates value or frustrates your employees and helps you design and develop your services accordingly. There is a bit of reading (approx. 25 min) so if you prefer you can also download the guide as PDF from here.
Download PDFProfiles or Personas are both a way to describe and group customers based on their behavior and motives. Personas are a semi-fictional representation of customers, often containing assumptions. Personas are usually based on market research and survey data with little interaction with the customer, whereas profiles rely on real customer conversations and interactions. When research is done in interaction with the customer, the assumptions (or hypothesis) about customer behavior and motives can be validated or invalidated into customer profiles.
The more you understand your customer the better decisions you can make when developing services for them. To get this customer understanding, companies often benchmark to other companies in the same industry. But we have discovered that the behavioural model with IT problems is actually quite similar regardless of the industry. The biggest differentiators in user behaviour and value creation come from culture and the behavioural IT profiles.
IT profiles gives the Service Desk a good understanding on how specific groups of customers should be addressed, what are their main pain points and what creates the most value for them. This knowledge can be utilized in direct customer service interactions, but also in making investment decisions between different service channels, processes and products etc.
In HappyToday podcast, Sami and Pasi talk about the usage of IT Support Profiles in Service Management.
HappySignals behavioural IT-profiles are based on dozens of one to one interviews and 20 group interviews with end-users in different roles and different organisations. All in all more than 500 people were interviewed and two main factors impacting the user experience and behavior the most were recognized and documented by our psychologist.
1. The Competence, which indicates how capable the user is in fixing the IT problem himself or all in all talking about the IT related issues.
“Calling to the Service Desk can be very stressful for someone with very little IT knowledge; some callers feel intimidated because they fear they may have done something wrong or because they feel people would judge them due to their lack of experience with IT tools. Other callers may find it difficult to understand instructions, especially if given in other than their native language. At the other end of the spectrum are the users who are highly competent; users that have probably already done everything they can to fix the problem or simply avoided fixing it for as long as possible. These users may even be able to fix it themselves but don’t have the rights for it.”
2. The Attitude, which indicates users willingness to solve the problem on their own.
“Attitude describes whether a user wants to fix the issue themselves or simply have someone else take care of it. There are several things that influence a users attitude. Some users are interested to learn, others don’t have much time at hand or the criticality of the problem forces their hand.”
When these two behavioural drivers crossed paths we got four behavioural user types, the HappySignals IT Profiles: Doer, Trier, Prioritiser and Supported.
HappySignals IT Behavioural Profiles are divided into four: Doers, Prioritisers, Triers and Supported.
Doers are eager and also capable to solve IT related problems themselves. They Google solutions before contacting IT support. People often ask Doers for help. Doers are happy to help but might end up using up too much of their work time for this. Sometimes Doers try to teach others to solve problems themselves, but often it is quicker to just fix the issue.
Triers are willing to try to solve IT issues themselves but are usually not capable. They want to learn, but might not want to admit that they don’t know how to fix something. They often rely on only one or two colleagues they know and trust and are not eager to contact new people. Triers might also think they do know how solve the problem even if they can’t. In this case Triers won´t contact support but just start to try everything, ask someone close by, go to Youtube and often invest a bit too much time on the issue before contacting support.
Supported are not competent in solving IT issues and also not willing to try it on their own. Supported might avoid contacting official IT support because they are embarrassed to admit they are not familiar with IT. They just hope someone could help them out so they could get back to work. When finding help they favor familiar people and onsite service if available. Supported rarely use self help channels since they have difficulties understanding the instructions and are not really interested in learning about the solution.
Updated October 2019
As you have just learned from our profile descriptions, there is much potential to use IT Support Profiles in everyday Service Desk work. Here are some of the use cases our customers have been successful with.
Find out how to use IT Profiles in HappySignals Analytics, in the video above.
How you speak, chat or communicate with your colleagues, employees or end-users is the first thing that profiles allow you to personalise. With Doers and Prioritisers you can use IT lingo and speak very directly on what they have already done and what should be done next, it’s more a co-operation with the person in the other end than Service Desk Agent trying to solve the problem blindly. On the other hand Supported and Triers really appreciate you taking your time and speaking calmly and in plain language.
Let’s take a simple example, an employee calls with a laptop issue.
Script for Doers and Prioritisers:
“Hi, so I’m sure you already restarted your computer and have checked the updates etc. Let’s see what the log tells us, so can you please go to…”
Script for Triers and Supported:
“Hi, don’t worry, we’ll get this sorted. First we’ll try the old fashioned way of shutting down everything and unplugging all cables. So can you click the Start menu and select shutdown…”
Best practices would be to make a quick cheat sheet for Agents, 3 things to do and 3 things to avoid with each profile. This way you are not making the topic too difficult for your Service Desk, but rather remind them on how to talk to the person on the other end.
Learn from the data
Promote channels for profiles
Fine tune the language you use in each channel
HappySignals Channel Analytics helps you understand how different channels work. We can also drill-down into this data using profiles.
As shown in the use case: Personalize communication, using this same approach with your Virtual Agent allows you to automate personalization. Creating different workflows by using the Profile.
Example: Virtual Agent in ServiceNow provides links to Knowledge Bases for Doers and suggests ways to start a discussion with a Live Agent for Supported.
Understanding what your end-users prefer, how they behave and motivates them is priceless for any IT development project. Even more important is using these as high level drives for your whole IT Strategy and Digital Transformation initiatives.
When you understand who your end-users are, you can make better decisions on trendy things like consumerization of IT. Why would you drive Bring-Your-Own-Device policy if most of your end-users are in profile, Supported and don’t care or need fancy devices, but rather simple things that just work. On the otherhand if your company is full of millennials and Doer profile employees, then BYOD could be crucial for their employee experience and productivity.
Having the profile data continuously up to date, you can use it with the kick-off of all your IT projects and offset the research cost from individual projects. This allows you also to tie the success of your IT project into employee experience and productivity.
Goal of your IT project could look like:
Let’s make Doers more productive in our ERP
Let’s make it easier for Supported to have consumer level simplicity
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