Note: This article was originally written in English by Stephen Mann on July 7, 2023 and translated into German by Blueponte.

Understanding the Importance of Experience Management for ITSM

If you have not “been living under a rock” over the past few years, you will have noticed the increasing focus within IT Service Management, and especially within the IT service desk, on employee experience. At the beginning of 2022, Axelos found that two thirds of respondents, 67 percent, said their organizations recognized the need to create a better employee experience, with a further 18 percent expecting to do so during 2022. Axelos also found that only 9 percent believed their organizations would never see the need to improve employee experience. Forrester Research stated that “2022 will go down in history as the year executives were forced to care about employee experience.” In addition, 12 of the 17 service management practices within ITIL 4, published in 2020, reference the need for experience management, whether related to employees or end users, to some degree.

What is experience management?

This is a situation often seen when something is relatively new. If you ask ten people what employee experience is, you might get eleven different answers, with many definitions resembling those commonly used for customer experience. These definitions are often framed at an organizational or HR level. However, one of the most relevant definitions with an IT focus was published by Forrester Research in a 2019 blog:

“The psychological research shows that the most important element of employee experience is making progress every day on the work that matters most to them.”

This definition highlights the importance of productivity when considering how IT experiences affect employees and the work they perform.

Why experience management is necessary

There is often an experience gap, or what could also be described as a performance gap, between what IT service providers believe they do well and how the people they serve actually perceive them. Traditional IT metrics may convince leadership that IT performance is good, or even excellent, while end users remain dissatisfied.

Much of this disconnect stems from reliance on traditional IT performance metrics. These metrics focus on IT outputs rather than business outcomes. They also emphasize the operational mechanics of IT service delivery and support, measuring how much and how quickly something is done. Critically, they measure success at the point of IT delivery rather than at the point of IT service usage. Because IT is not measuring the right things at the right points, it can be effectively blind to whether business needs and expectations are truly being met.

Experience management addresses this by focusing on end user experiences and their perception of outcomes to determine how positively or negatively IT impacts people. The experience data and insights collected allow IT service providers to better understand how key employee touchpoints are performing and whether employee and organizational needs are being met. Importantly, experience data helps identify issues that traditional IT metrics fail to uncover and clarifies what really matters, so that improvements to processes, services, and outcomes are made in the right places.

How experience management improves employee productivity

The key to successful experience management lies in agreeing on the right performance indicators. While these may differ between organizations, two experience measures are commonly used in IT support interactions:

1. One is an employee experience rating, often expressed through Net Promoter Score values.
2. The other is a productivity based measure, such as employees’ perception of lost productivity.

Collecting experience data is only the first step. The data must then be shared and acted upon, with improvements prioritized based on what matters most and delivers business value. It is equally important to continue measuring improvements so that progress can be communicated and sustained.

Examples of where experience data and insights drive positive change

A useful way to illustrate potential improvements, or end user issues not visible through traditional metrics, is by looking at publicly available experience data and insights. An example is the Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, which provides valuable lessons from organizations already investing in experience management and improvement.

Examples of experience and productivity problems that are unlikely to be visible in traditional IT metrics include the following.

• Hardware and enterprise applications create the greatest friction for employees, as reflected both in experience ratings and in perceived productivity loss.
• IT support services have the greatest influence on overall IT experience, whether positive, negative, or neutral.
• There are significant differences in experience ratings across regions, with Western European end users reporting the lowest satisfaction despite losing less productivity than users in other regions.
• 80% of perceived productivity loss is caused by just 13 percent of incident tickets, meaning the average time lost does not represent the typical experience.
• The most common reason for negative disruption experiences is not slow service, but problems not being resolved.
  The self service portal remains the channel with the worst employee experience and the highest perceived productivity loss, with the latter being almost two hours longer than when contacting the IT service desk by phone.
• The self service portal remains the channel with the worst employee experience and the highest perceived productivity loss, with the latter being almost two hours longer than when contacting the IT service desk by phone.

One final consideration when reviewing these insights is that the data comes from organizations at varying stages of their experience management journey. As a result, the average organization is likely facing even more challenges than those described above.

Discover the power of experience management with HaloITSM, move beyond traditional metrics, and close the gap between IT performance and end user satisfaction. Book a demo today and take ownership of the IT experience in your organization.