Boost your service organisation Turn right, Shift-Left

Are your end-users bypassing or loathing your self-service portal? Is your service desk overloaded? Are your service desk agents bored answering the same questions over and over again? Are your technical experts occupied solving operational issues? Does nobody in your organisation seem to have the time or focus on the pro-active side of delivering service?

If so, your service organisation sounds pretty much the same as the average service organisation I’ve been working with the last 15 years. However, the last few years I’ve been working with several clients on the Shift-Left principle to overcome these typical service management issues.

What is the Shift-Left principle

The goal with the Shift-Left principle is to move the ticket resolution as close as possible to the customer. This can be achieved by mainly 3 things: an effective knowledge management system, by automating repetitive tasks and by an effective self-service portal.

The results that can be achieved by successful Shift-Left programs are:

• Higher user satisfaction since resolution times will dramatically improve
• Lower costs because of 3 reasons:
  • The amount of tickets will drop with an effective self-service portal
  • Less FTE’s are required due to automation
  • Higher resolution at the 1^st line
• Better continuity since technical experts are less required for solving operational issues

Most programs for implementing the Shift-Left principle are cost driven. This is a logical driver, since dramatic cost reduction is indeed a result of many successful Shift-Left programs. Moreover, service organisations are often under high pressure to lower operational costs. On the contrary, too much focus on costs can put the customer interest subordinated. I will elaborate more on this pitfall later in this blog.

Key elements for implementing the Shift-Left principle

Knowledge Management

In my experience, Knowledge Management seems to be a neglected aspect in almost every service organisation. Service engineers don’t seem to be able to find the time or motivation to document their knowledge. And frankly speaking, it is not the most fun part of my job either.

However, a lot of effort Is wasted by analyzing the same issues over and over again. Almost every client I’m working with is struggling to get this topic addressed. At the same time, everybody is recognizing the importance of it. I often see customers initiating ad-hoc initiatives for knowledge management. These initiatives are often very time consuming. The result is often outdated in no-time since maintaining the knowledge is not embedded in the daily operations.

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is a best practice developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation which I often advise clients struggling with this topic. KCS is a set of best practices for creating and maintaining knowledge in knowledge-intensive environments. Unlike the traditional add-on process of knowledge engineering, KCS is an integral part of day-to-day operation. KCS becomes the way people solve problems and creates knowledge as a by-product of problem solving.

Although supporting tooling is a key element, implementing KCS is mainly a mind shift. It should be embedded in the organisation and culture. A common example is that new employees are expected to contribute their knowledge on their first workday.

More information about KCS can be found on https://www.thekcsacademy.net/kcs/.

Automation

Automation is probably the most tangible way of cost reduction and performance improvement. You can often pinpoint the individuals who are performing manual tasks that can be automated. It’s relatively easy to define the business case.

Key element in automating (sub) processes is a proper refinement of the process. I often experienced a process full of rework which has been developed over many years. People involved in the process are often spending more work on the re-work than on the actual job that has to be performed. In Lean Management, this phenomenon is called a hidden factory. The term hidden factory is referring to the fact that it is often not noticeable if you are not specifically looking for waste in the process. A common example is people chasing information that was not provided or transferred incorrectly at the start of the process.

Once these tasks are refined and automated, you often see the following results:

• Fault percentage will drop: Since human errors are eliminated in the process.
• Dramatic increase of process time: A human being can simply not compete against modern processing power for repetitive tasks.
• Lower operational costs: Operational costs are often relatively low and consist of IT infra structure, license costs and maintenance costs.

Automation is a key success factor to improve service processes. However, there is a downside which is often overlooked. Automating a process is changing the risk profile. The process will be much more dependent on the IT infrastructure.

Let’s look at an example of a team of 5 people performing an on-boarding process. A single person being unavailable for a couple of days due to e.g. sick leave will most likely cause a backlog. The team can catch up on a more quiet day or may have to spend overtime to catch up. When this process is automated, a malfunction of the supporting IT can cause the whole process to stop. The same goes for an unexpected increase of workload. A team can set different priorities, spend overtime or can be (temporarily) extended. In an automated situation, the process can come to a complete stop when the workload exceeds the limits of the supporting IT. Expending IT capacity in case of an unexpected increase of workload is often taking too much time due to the technical complexity and due to the impact on the IT budget.

So assessing the risk and defining the counter measures are crucial steps when automating a certain task.

Self-service

Self-service portals were introduced many years ago. In my opinion, they were introduced with the incorrect motivation. Self-service portals were mainly designed and implemented to keep the customer away from the service desk. They were in no way designed to help the customer. This resulted in a cat-and-mouse game between the customer and the service organisation. I’ve seen many creative ways to bypass the self-service portal. And I´ve seen many brutal ways to force the customer to use the self/service portal. One of the most dramatic examples is a service organisation which completely went in isolation. They not only closed the contact center, they even introduced a pin code for the door lock to the IT department. This was not done for security reasons, but purely to ban the customers. They even had to change the pin code once in a while because the customers found ways to get their hands on the pin code.

Fortunately, this has been changed in the past few years. A key element for the Shift-Left principle is a self—service portal that actually adds value to the customer. With adding value, I mean more value than skipping the service desk’s phone queue.

Transferring customer contact from traditional contact methods like contact by phone to self-service is also called “Shift-Down”.

Personally, I’m very impressed what BMC showed with the recent releases of the MyIT portal. They redesigned the self-service portal based on personas. The result is a self-service portal that matches the expectations of the new generation of customers, who are used to modern user experiences like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

One of the key elements in BMC’s MyIT self-service portal is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows both IT staff and the customer to contribute to the service process. In my experience, the key success of solving an issue is finding the right person. I often stumbled upon a colleague who faced exactly the same issue before, after hours or even days of investigation. I personally believe that providing a platform to organisations to share these solutions and knowledge articles can really boost the performance of knowledge-intensive organisations. Crowdsourcing can help improving knowledge articles, detect outages, provide solutions etc. It can also create a community around a service where customers can actually support each other.