How to measure customer experience in IT services

Customer experience has a branding problem. Say "CX" in a budget meeting and people hear "feelings." Loyalty. Delight. Emotional connection. Lovely words. Try getting them funded.

The trouble isn't that CX is fuzzy. It's that most organizations never measure it, so it stays a slogan.

The watermelon dashboard

Picture a service desk whose dashboard is solid green. Calls are answered in 20 seconds. Tickets close inside the agreed time. The monthly report is a thing of beauty.

Meanwhile, half the staff have stopped calling. It never fixes anything, so they ask the coworker who "knows computers" instead.

Service management people call this the watermelon effect: green on the outside, red on the inside. It happens when you measure what's easy for IT to count and ignore what the customer went through.

Measure the experience, not the activity

Four measures get you most of the way there:

1. First contact resolution. Was the problem solved the first time, or did the customer have to come back?
2. Satisfaction, asked immediately. One or two questions right after the interaction, while the memory is fresh.
3. Effort. How hard did the customer have to work? Count the transfers, the repeat explanations, and the follow-ups.
4. Repeat contacts. The same person returning about the same issue is the clearest signal you have.

Then comes the step most organizations skip: tie those numbers to your operational data. Which request types score worst? Which times of day? Which handoffs? Now the data is telling you what to fix, and experience has become something you can manage.

What it looks like when it works

On a federal service desk I led, supporting 8,000 users, we held customer satisfaction above 97 percent and first call resolution at 92 percent. Those two numbers told me more about the health of the service than any speed metric on the board.

The same discipline applies well beyond the IT help desk. Take a city's 311 line. Closing the pothole ticket is activity. Whether the resident felt heard, and would bother to report the next one, is the experience. Only one of those shows up on most dashboards.

Tools help. They don't do it for you.

Experience management platforms such as Qualtrics can pull surveys, sentiment, and operational data into one place, and they're worth having.

But a platform pointed at the wrong questions gives you a very expensive watermelon. Decide first what you'd do differently based on the answers. Then buy the tool.

The bottom line

Treat experience data with the same rigor as operational data, and the metrics follow. CX stops being the warm and fuzzy line in the strategy deck and becomes a case you can make with numbers.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.