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How To Drive and Measure User Experience - Part 1

Ron van Haasteren
TOPdesk

Service desks teams use internally focused performance-based metrics more than many might think. These metrics are essential and remain relevant, but they do not provide any insight into the user experience. To gain actual insight into user satisfaction, you need to change your metrics. The question becomes: How do I efficiently change my metrics? Then, how do you best go about it?

Living in the Age of Customer Experience

The customer experience is vital to the outcomes of your service team. The word "experience" is critical. The quality of the user experiences is paramount.

When we look at our internal customers — our employees — their expectations are continually changing. For them, they want to stay in the flow, remain productive, and make meaningful progress in their work.

Customer experience is the sum of the employees' perceptions of working in an organization, "perception" being most important. To understand the experience, service desk members must ask their users to define their experiences. Part of this journey is managing the emotional parts of the customer journey. However, even if you meet expectations, but somehow, the emotional experience goes south. Then, while the issue may have gotten resolved, this doesn't mean the user is happy. Perceptions are not the same as results. So, even if the service desk meets all pre-defined success metrics, this doesn't mean user satisfaction is excellent.

Taking the pulse of the user is vital to organizational success.

What is the User's Experience?

The service desk delivers support to users, but they must measure the services provided and which are the most important to them. When measuring the user experience, you may find that your services need improvement.

For example, one organization I recently worked with let their customers ask them questions whenever they needed assistance. Thus, users found that the service desk remained open for users, who soon understood that their concerns were always valid; this only occurred because the service desk asked users how to support them best.

There are likely dozens of things that your department can address, but the team can't handle everything at once. Start with what's most important to the user so they can experience the best benefit for your effort. You can achieve this in several ways. For example, consider focus groups. These are what you think they are: teams sitting down with a group of users to ask them about the services provided. You are asking about specific goals and measuring outcomes.

Even though these groups can be a good starting point if you have nothing in place and can be easy to implement, they can require a fair amount of trust otherwise these groups can turn them into ranting sessions. Get through the negativity to regain confidence before diving into what you want out of these focus groups.

Periodic Measurements and Continuous Measurements

Periodic measurement is examining your services regularly, through a survey, for example. Alternatively, continuous measurement is the use of a brief survey to ask for feedback from customers about the services they just received after every interaction. Periodic measurement only provides a general overview of aspects that apply to multiple services, such as how friendly the department is and how well the communication is. These assessments are a great place to start because they help provide a picture in terms of user experience.

Because periodic measurements can be pretty general, how you phrase your survey questions to users matters. "How do you rate our services?" will not suffice. You must dive into various aspects or themes of the service so that you can gauge authentic user experience.

There are usually five main themes that the customer thinks of when experiencing a service ...

Read How To Drive and Measure User Experience - Part 2, covering the five main themes and more.

Ron van Haasteren is the Global Culture Strategist at TOPdesk

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How To Drive and Measure User Experience - Part 1

Ron van Haasteren
TOPdesk

Service desks teams use internally focused performance-based metrics more than many might think. These metrics are essential and remain relevant, but they do not provide any insight into the user experience. To gain actual insight into user satisfaction, you need to change your metrics. The question becomes: How do I efficiently change my metrics? Then, how do you best go about it?

Living in the Age of Customer Experience

The customer experience is vital to the outcomes of your service team. The word "experience" is critical. The quality of the user experiences is paramount.

When we look at our internal customers — our employees — their expectations are continually changing. For them, they want to stay in the flow, remain productive, and make meaningful progress in their work.

Customer experience is the sum of the employees' perceptions of working in an organization, "perception" being most important. To understand the experience, service desk members must ask their users to define their experiences. Part of this journey is managing the emotional parts of the customer journey. However, even if you meet expectations, but somehow, the emotional experience goes south. Then, while the issue may have gotten resolved, this doesn't mean the user is happy. Perceptions are not the same as results. So, even if the service desk meets all pre-defined success metrics, this doesn't mean user satisfaction is excellent.

Taking the pulse of the user is vital to organizational success.

What is the User's Experience?

The service desk delivers support to users, but they must measure the services provided and which are the most important to them. When measuring the user experience, you may find that your services need improvement.

For example, one organization I recently worked with let their customers ask them questions whenever they needed assistance. Thus, users found that the service desk remained open for users, who soon understood that their concerns were always valid; this only occurred because the service desk asked users how to support them best.

There are likely dozens of things that your department can address, but the team can't handle everything at once. Start with what's most important to the user so they can experience the best benefit for your effort. You can achieve this in several ways. For example, consider focus groups. These are what you think they are: teams sitting down with a group of users to ask them about the services provided. You are asking about specific goals and measuring outcomes.

Even though these groups can be a good starting point if you have nothing in place and can be easy to implement, they can require a fair amount of trust otherwise these groups can turn them into ranting sessions. Get through the negativity to regain confidence before diving into what you want out of these focus groups.

Periodic Measurements and Continuous Measurements

Periodic measurement is examining your services regularly, through a survey, for example. Alternatively, continuous measurement is the use of a brief survey to ask for feedback from customers about the services they just received after every interaction. Periodic measurement only provides a general overview of aspects that apply to multiple services, such as how friendly the department is and how well the communication is. These assessments are a great place to start because they help provide a picture in terms of user experience.

Because periodic measurements can be pretty general, how you phrase your survey questions to users matters. "How do you rate our services?" will not suffice. You must dive into various aspects or themes of the service so that you can gauge authentic user experience.

There are usually five main themes that the customer thinks of when experiencing a service ...

Read How To Drive and Measure User Experience - Part 2, covering the five main themes and more.

Ron van Haasteren is the Global Culture Strategist at TOPdesk

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...