“A Passion for Service excellence” How to recover your customers trust through service improvement. Mr Frazer Slack-Smith Charles Sturt University.

Service desk make up 9 service desk staff Role is first response, via phone/online form incidents and requests logged a year From June 2010 Students Central took on all student calls, DIT Tier 1 customers are staff only

I will talk on what we have been doing to improve customer service in the last 2 and a half years

customer service levels

Customer Service 2009 Caudit benchmarking survey showed quality of service was reasonable but inconsistent 26% of customers found that quick diagnosis of their problem over the phone was variable 31% of customers believed that skill level of staff was variable 41% of customers believed understanding impact of your technology problem was variable

Why is Variability Important

Customer Service Response was inconsistent and often slow Outstanding incidents took days to be either escalated to tier 2 (second response) or resolved Calls answered under 2 minutes typically around 75% First response resolution sits around 60%

Reasons for variability and slow response times

Reasons for Variability 1.Underdeveloped service desk knowledge base and support documentation 2.Lack of formal staff training and evaluation 3.Service desk wasn’t working as an effective team

No formal Training Training of staff was slow All training conducted as on the job learning without any real evaluation Heavy reliance on 4 staff who had most of the knowledge Customer service was heavily impacted when key staff resigned and new staff came on board which reduced quality for a time

Team suffered from low morale Response times for phone and online queries was always slow, causing a constant feeling of under achievement and lack of control Team members had varying capabilities differing understanding of what was expected of them, causing an underlying disharmony Team communication was minimal Did not cope with peak loads well

Unclear and confused direction and expectations Which resulted in.... Inability to conduct performance management effectively Inability to provide effective work environment Having the wrong people in the job

Addressing the issues

Building the knowledge base From 2008 support information was transferred from disparate sources into a single knowledge base for use by Service Desk Incident Feedback process developed to continuously improve Knowledge base effectiveness

Building staff performance Formalised training developed through 2009/10 New and current staff were evaluated Team developed a call script to provide consistency Service desk staff were provided with better equipment Introduced clear performance measures Raising capability of all staff to the same level

Building team performance Every team member treated equally by management Introduced clear guidelines on communication and behaviour Defining clear expected outcomes for the team (eg, 90% of calls answered under 2 minutes and outstanding queue to be under 15 by end of day) Selecting strong team members Clear line of command from management and direction comes through one channel

The Results So Far

Service Desk Response times are faster Outstanding Queue was always 50 or more now always under 15 Calls answer within 2 minutes was 75% now sustainably over 90% Training times are quicker New staff are trained to a level that enables them to do 80% to 90% of their work within 14 days Increased efficiency We can do more with less staff and every one is close to having similar abilities

Team performance All team members communicate well Team is able to adapt quickly to peak loads with minimal management input O’Week - Calls answered within 2 minutes % % Team morale good to excellent

Customer Service 2010 Caudit benchmarking survey shows not much change to variability levels First response resolution still remains at around 60%

Where to from here Increase engagement with 2 nd and 3 rd tiers to improve first response resolution rates towards 70% Continue to develop service desk staff performance Improvement of incident management process to better react to customer business needs