You might have seen a presentation or read up on IT experience management (ITXM) (or perhaps have been convinced by a peer) and already know it will make a big difference to your organization. But how do you get started? A key need in doing this is to create an ITXM strategy. This blog explains what you need to do.
First, though, you might have landed on this blog looking for employee experience management, so you might need a quick “elevator pitch” for what we call “ITXM.”
What is ITXM
ITXM is a strategic approach to IT service delivery and support. It prioritizes the end-user experience to help ensure that your organization’s IT services better align with the needs and expectations of employees.
With an ITXM strategy, your IT organization can move beyond traditional IT service management (ITSM) to create a proactive, end-user-centric IT environment that measures, analyzes, and improves end-user experiences to deliver better IT operations and business outcomes.
How to create an ITXM strategy
Your organization might have its own corporate approach to strategy creation. If so, please use the steps detailed below to guide that.
These are merely the common steps our customers use to adopt ITXM within their organization successfully:
- Defining your organization’s ITXM objectives
- Measuring the current IT experience
- Analyzing the experience data to identify employee pain points
- Prioritizing experience improvements
- Implementing changes and monitoring impact.
Defining your organization’s ITXM objectives
Before your organization starts with ITXM, it must establish clear objectives regarding what it wants to achieve with its ITXM strategy. Your organization might have various objectives for ITXM, such as:
- Better aligning IT services and operations with business needs and expectations
- Enhancing the IT service desk experience
- Reducing the time end-users lose with IT issues
- Improving employee satisfaction with IT services
- Making better, data-informed decisions
- Demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of IT improvements and investments to business leaders.
These initial objectives will help guide your organization’s ITXM journey. However, objective key results (OKRs) will be needed later as more insight is obtained. For example, for the “Enhancing the IT service desk experience” objective, the key results might be:
- Achieving a 10% increase in end-user experience scores over the next quarter
- Reducing incident average resolution time by 25%.
Measuring the current IT experience
To improve the IT experience for end-users, your organization needs to understand where it currently is. This involves collecting experience data that details how end-users perceive the IT services they consume (including IT support).
We believe experience is dynamic rather than static, which should fuel how your experience data is captured. This helps alleviate many of the issues organizations currently have with their customer satisfaction questionnaire (CSQ) approaches.
So, when measuring experiences:
- Capture end-user feedback across various IT touchpoints
- Collect experience data daily, not just via periodic surveys
- Gather end-user feedback immediately after interactions to capture accurate sentiments
- Align end-user feedback with specific services or incidents for meaningful analysis.
At HappySignals, we have settled on two key experience metrics:
- Happiness Score – how satisfied end-users are with IT services using a net promoter score (NPS) approach
- Lost time – the perceived level of productivity end-users lose due to IT issues.
Analyzing the experience data to identify employee pain points
Once your organization has experience data, it can be analyzed to identify end-user pain points with IT services (including IT support).
Patterns in the end-user feedback will highlight where improvements are needed. For example, the HappySignals Global IT Experience Benchmark: Full Year 2023 shows the common issues experienced across our customer base (even after investing in experience improvement to varying degrees):
- Enterprise applications have the lowest Happiness Score across IT touchpoints. End-users lose an average of 5 hours and 24 minutes a month because of issues with their corporate applications.
- Geographical differences impact experiences. With incidents, Western European end-users are the most critical of IT (with a +75 Happiness Score) despite losing less time (2 hours 38 minutes) than end-users in all other regions. Meanwhile, North American end-users score incident handling 6 points higher (+81) than Western Europe despite losing almost 1 hour more work time per incident.
- 80% of end-user lost time with IT incidents comes from only 13% of tickets. While most issues are resolved quickly, a small percentage (13%) take longer to fix. These few, more time-consuming cases account for most of the end-user lost time (80%).
To foster trust and collaboration, share the experience data and discovered insights with all relevant stakeholders.
Prioritizing experience improvements
This is very much about improving “what matters most” to employees. So, focus on the issues that have the greatest impact on end-user Happiness and productivity (and business value). Of course, not all improvements will be fully addressable with the available improvement resources. As with any improvement initiative, quick wins that address “low-hanging fruit” are good for demonstrating success and building momentum for ITXM.
When designing improvement initiatives based on the experience data, not only is it important to focus on “what matters most” (within the limitations of budget availability), but it’s also important to assign clear ownership and accountability for implementing and managing your ITXM initiatives.
Implementing changes and monitoring impact
Experience data is a powerful tool for informed decision-making. However, its real value is realized by implementing the prioritized initiatives. End-user feedback will allow your IT organization to:
- Focus on improvement initiatives that will have the most significant positive impact on end-users.
- Direct resources to areas with the highest need for improvement.
- Assess the effectiveness of initiatives based on changes in end-user experience metrics.
For example, IT can investigate and implement solutions to enhance usability if feedback indicates dissatisfaction with a particular software tool. You’d be surprised at how often the “unliked” corporate application isn’t what IT thinks it is.
To learn more about creating an ITXM strategy, check out our ITXM Framework. You may also like to:
