November 2007 - Issue 4
Turning Bad Users Into Good Customers

We've all heard the mantra 'it's the user's fault' whenever there's a problem. Unfortunately, that classical IT moan doesn't bear scrutiny because if their IT supplier is on the ball, users can't be at fault when they make a mess of things - because they won't.

Equally, we've all witnessed the 'customer from hell' and felt sympathy for the person trying to offer service in an impossible situation. Both these issues are part of the service delivery challenge as customer behaviour significantly influences quality, since service is a co-operative rather than a one-way transaction and involves both parties in creating an outcome that is valued.

So how can IT make customers out of users and raise service standards to world class levels? There are many techniques available and this viewpoint deals with one of them - upskilling. Other methods of dealing effectively with customers can be found in earlier articles as well as the White Papers available on the Partners in IT website.

It never fails to take people by surprise that new technology or applications involve users needing to be trained to use it properly.

This is sometimes done by projects that carry training costs as part of their budget - but rarely beyond that stage. Even a well funded project will miss the most obvious part of the training need since budget ceases on implementation and yet the simple aspects of staff turnover, business growth or relocation will dilute the ability of people to use the technology properly. So the system goes live and the initial objectives are met - but does this mean the service will always be as good as it could be? This is doubtful because it takes time for staff to be able to use a new service properly, like it does to be able to drive a car properly. Passing a driving test is not the same as becoming a competent driver since it takes experience and extra training to be able to cope with non-standard situations.

Training is also an issue when it is funded by projects with defined end dates and are then wound up, whereas service continues for years thereafter - despite relocation and turnover. A call centre environment may experience 25% turnover each year, which means that after 4 years all the trained staff will have left - raising the question as to how new staff get the same level of capability awareness their predecessors had.

The answer is that such turnover was anticipated and built into the ongoing IT training budget. If it is not, the inevitable consequence is that new staff will operate at a lower level of capability and thus negate much of the original business case benefits. This progressive degradation in value often leads to a reinvestment in applications development because it is - erroneously - believed that the problem needs solving by building a new solution, whereas the opposite is true. In the same way that advanced driving courses and refresher training exists to help car drivers get the most from their vehicles, IT systems operation and management is no different.

Competency Training

User competency improvement can be achieved by ensuring that every member of staff is brought up to the standard required to work on advanced systems. An effective way of achieving this aim is by use of the European Computer Driving Licence, ECDL, which is rapidly gaining acceptance as the most widely used method of achieving competency improvement in the UK and 107 other countries with over 1,000,000 users. If your per-user costs are £23.40 per hour and improving user proficiency saves 30 minutes a week, the case for investing in ECDL can be seen.

Competency improvement

Realising the claimed benefit from the level of investment represented by strategic developments such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or sophisticated Customer Information Systems (CIS) means that staff must know how to use them properly. Despite this seeming an obvious statement, it is rarely the case that 100% of the users of such systems have 100% of the knowledge to do their jobs properly 100% of the time and this acts as a limitation on organisational capability. This skills shortfall is something that IT can play a major role in addressing and upskilling IT enabled workers to function in the most efficient manner possible is a core component of the world class service delivery proposition. This can be done either as part of an implementation programme or separately because the processes involved do not depend on the technology being installed but on the differences between required and actual skills.

This difference has been assessed through call closure analyses of help desk traffic as a loss of 7.2% of the effective working week and the next figure shows the business impact of suboptimal skills.

Business departments using upskilling methodologies have experienced up to 45% productivity gain from their people, who become far more confident and able to handle the complex workflows presented by modern systems and is clearly a non-incremental benefit.

The emphasis is not just about training people in shrink-wrapped office productivity applications but through an integrated business process designed to ensure everyone always has the skills needed to do their job.

Productivity gains can be either reinvested for business benefit, either in terms of handling more work with the same number of staff or by reducing staff to match current work levels and the ultimate aim of the IT department should be to align the skills of the people that use your services to the capabilities of the technology.

This is the fundamental essence of service management and a department acceding to world class status needs to develop a training strategy. Part of that strategy is to understand that service is not just an operational task but involves managing customer opinions and influencing their values - or in other words, making them better customers than they were before.

Back to the Articles page >