The IT Experience Podcast

Weston Morris is the Senior Director for Global Strategy for Digital Workplace Solutions at Unisys, and the podcast host of the Digital Workplace Deep Dive. The conversation dives into the quickly evolving world of Experience Level Agreements (XLA) are changing the way we look at IT services, focusing on actual business impact and employee productivity. Find out how Unisys research found out that the typical employee loses between 1-5 hours of productive work time per week and what that could mean in monetary terms in different business contexts. 

Key Takeaways 

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Our guest, Dr Selena Fisk, the author of "I'm not a numbers person", helps organizations make better sense of the data that they have access to. She believes that everyone today ought to be a numbers person, being able to understand data in order to make evidence-based decisions at work. In this episode, she shares her insights with us about what her research has shown to be important when organizations aspire to be more data-informed.

Key Takeaways 

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Matt Beran, Host of Ticket Volume podcast and InvGate Product Specialist joins us to speak about the state of IT Service Management in the US, what the Americans do well and where they struggle. In this conversation, we come across interesting differences and similarities between regional ways of doing ITSM and generally applicable principles that help IT teams provide better services and experiences to the end-users. 

Key Takeaways 

Why are some organisations insisting employees return to the office, asks Karen Ferris. Remote work was probably the reason organisations were able to be resilient during the pandemic. Despite the evident success of remote work, there is a push by organisations to bring people back to the office. According to Karen Ferris, this might not be a good idea.  According to a study by Flexjobs, 97% of respondents said that they want some level of remote work going forward. 57% said they would leave their job if they were not given options to work remotely. Find out what Karen thinks about the excuses companies are using, and what are the 5 reasons that actually make sense for employees to go back to the office. 

Key Takeaways 

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In This Episode Pasi is talking with Katie Bates, VP of Global Partnerships at HappySignals on How Customers and MSPs Benefit from IT Experience Management?

Learn about the topic, the whitepaper available at Happysignals.com, and the upcoming webinar with ISG on 3st January 2023.

In this episode, I'm joined by Roy Atkinson from Clifton Butterfield LLC to discuss his predictions for the CIO agenda in 2023. Listen to this episode to learn in 15 minutes the most important things for the world of IT in the year ahead. Plus, take a sneaky look back at Roy's 2022 predictions to determine whether he was right (or wrong) when we did this same episode a year ago. This episode was recorded in November at the HDI Service Management World event in Orlando, sorry for the audio quality as we did the recording outside and there are some background noises audible.

Key Takeaways

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In this episode, I’m joined by Neil Keating from Bright Horse to talk about Experience Management Office (XMO). So if you have or haven’t heard about them, listen to this episode to learn in 15 minutes the most important things about XMOs.

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How Data Quality in ServiceNow impacts Experience

Many times operational data in ServiceNow is missing or is bad quality and it's difficult to use all the tools available to make decisions when you cannot trust the data. If you don't know everything about your end-users it difficult to create amazing service experiences, automate services or allow agents to solve issues quickly. In this episode we go through these common challenges with Mikko Juola from Data Content Manager, an application for ServiceNow to automate and streamline your data quality and management.

Data Quality affects Experiences:

Mark Smalley is a well-known person in the ITSM industry, a contributor to the ITIL4 body of knowledge and by his own definition, his mission is “to help people understand Service.

His latest thinking is around “Experience Dominant Logic”.

The concept is linked to understanding how value is perceived in a provider/consumer context. He lays the foundation for his thinking by looking at the evolution from “Goods Dominant Logic”, depicting value creation in industrial production of goods/products - followed by the provision of services at scale that follows a “Service Dominant Logic”, leading into the Experience Dominant Logic thinking. It is the next step in understanding what IT Services are actually about, and how value in that context is co-created with the consumers of the services.

Key Takeaways

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Doug Rabold is HDI's Top 25 Thought Leader; International Speaker & Certified Trainer; Chairman of Board at HDI; CX, EX and Service Delivery Executive, and a familiar face in the ITSM events especially in the US.

In this episode, I met Doug at the Service Management World HDI event in Orland. We talk related to his article “Why XLAs Matter Now More Than Ever”, Doug opens up the article and other learnings he’s made since writing it. So if XLAs is your interest, you should listen to this episode and learn from Doug’s experience.

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The guest in this episode is Antonina Klentsova, IT expert in Digital and Sustainable transformation. She is one of the contributors to the ITIL4 framework and well known professional in the IT Service Management industry.

The episode goes deep below the surface to look at the impact of human sciences on ITIL4, the deeper significance of sustainability, diplomacy and what successful transformation looks like.

Key Takeaways

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Back with the "Happy in 15" -format, Sami and Pasi dive into the topic of how to answer to Cost Saving Pressure as an IT Team and how Experience Management and ITXM™ can help.

Key talking points:

1. Reduce IT costs and prioritize

2. Optimize IT outsourcing

3. Automate areas that matter

Make sure to check out the The Global IT Experience benchmark, to see the graphs we talk about.

At HappySignals we talk a lot about People vs. Process and Technology, our guest Lauren Kelly really explains how behaviour is a fundamental part of success in future businesses. She shines light on how behaviour thinking can help organisations become more successful and healthy.

Key Takeaways

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Sami and Pasi go through the typical mistakes organizations seem to make when they change their outsourced Managed Service Providers. Listen to the two most common mistakes Sami has recognized with global companies he has been talking with.

This episode is especially for those companies who are looking start their XLA journey with their MSPs.

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In this episode we speak about skills assessment in IT. Our guest in this episode is Matthew Burrows, takes us through the benefits and steps for organisations to map their IT employees’ skills to better match job roles to the people who would succeed in and enjoy those roles.

Key Takeaways

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In this episode Sami and Pasi go through a recent finding from The Global IT Experience benchmark, which states that 80% of the productivity business end-users lose comes from 13% of your tickets. Listen to learn more and make sure to check out the YouTube version with all the graphs.

Welcome to this new season of The IT Experience Podcast. This season we’ll introduce Sakari from HappySignals as another host, Sakari is curious about behaviours and data, and data about behaviours. Welcome Sakari, so happy to have in the podcasts as well, some might already know you from the The Global IT Experience Benchmark webinars, as you are the owner of that report.

"I have always been fascinated by why people do the things they do. What metrics drive the right kind behaviours and so forth. This is at the core of IT Service Management as well, where interactions between IT and end-users needs to be measured in some ways, and where metrics and KPIs are in place to encourage and enforce specific actions at work in the IT organisations." - Sakari Kyrö

Hope you enjoy this season and we’ll give the first episode very soon, so make sure you are subscribed and have the podcast app ready to go!

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Following on from our previous episode, we bring you another practical episode on how ITXM™ is a vital tool for your IT’s continual improvement success.

ITXM™ is the framework that brings the practice of experience management into IT operations.

In this episode of Happy in 15 we focus on:

- What are you setting out to improve?

- The outcomes of IT initiatives and why they hold high importance, especially from an end-user and team perspective

- How to measure and celebrate success from an ITXM™ perspective

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ITXM™ is the framework that brings the practice of experience management into IT operations.

In this first episode of Happy in 15, Season 2, we kick off after the winter season with a practical episode on how you can Identify Continual Improvement areas to focus on through using ITXM™

In this episode you will get a firm understanding of why: 

- Humans are the best sensors when it comes to delivering feedback about IT services

- The important order of People, Process and Tech

- Why conducting continuous measurement to receive continuous experience data trumps yearly surveys.

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ITXM™ or IT Experience Management brings experience management, a practice that has been used in external customer support and management for well over a decade, into IT operations.

ITXM™ enables IT teams to focus on outcomes of the deliverables they produce, as well as providing data-driven insights, fueling Continual Improvement initiatives, in order to achieve said outcomes.

Most importantly, ITXM™ is a framework that is needed and used by the whole IT organization, and not just the IT Service desk.

Now, we bring to you the recently released ITXM™ foundation course, bringing to life the practicalities of Experience Management for IT. Through online training videos and an online exam, you can get certified in ITXM™ and bring this framework into your organisation.

But the fun doesn’t stop there - Join our online community to share thoughts, ways of working and learning experiences with other like-minded professionals, thought leaders and pioneers of ITXM™.

We all wish that the war in Ukraine would end soon. While our ability to help is limited, we wanted to do two things.

Good technology enables people to do things that would otherwise be difficult or cumbersome. This is why we want to celebrate a number of Ukrainian startups that enable people in numerous different ways.

In this fully packed episode, Pasi and Sami start the conversation on how IT management teams should be using Experience Data. There are three key topics your management team should focus experience data on:

Drawing from interviews with various globally recognised companies, such as Refinitiv and Ahlstrom-Munksjö, Pasi and Sami also discuss Human Centric IT, Why humans are the best sensors and the IT Experience Management Framework.

In future episodes, Pasi and Sami will dig deeper into these topic areas.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Creating cooperation with your Service Providers creates greater alignment to IT goals and greater motivation to delivering and meeting service needs.

Traditionally, SLAs and the way they are formulated, are set up to control Service Providers and to imply sanctions when the target has not been met. 

Not only this, but SLAs create a watermelon effect within your organisation, with Service Providers rushing through tickets in order to meet the set SLAs, instead of delivering a high-quality service. This can be highly demotivating for Service Providers, as well as frustrating for your end-users.

In this episode, Pasi and Sami tell you how you can move from controlling your Service Providers to sound cooperation with them.

Align your IT team and Partners behind the same goal, with a little help from Experience Management. Start your Human Centric IT journey today, and boost your end-users productivity.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Human-Centric IT is a topic we frequently talk about in ITSM and IT Service Delivery. Human-Centric IT puts your end-users at the centre of Experience Management and all IT touchpoints. However, wouldn't it be great if there was an example of a companies journey to creating this kind of culture?

Oh wait, there is!

BioMérieux is a French multinational biotechnology company, which has existed for over 50 years. Their end-user base ranges from young tech-savvy new starters to employees who have been with the company since the beginning. BioMérieux wanted to improve how they deliver IT Services to their diverse end-user base and to implement Human-Centric IT.

Pasi speaks with Dominique Raphanel, Global IS, Support & User Experience Manager for bioMérieux on their journey.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Are you wondering where Employee Experience sits in the business, whether IT or HR owns it? Or maybe how starting from a "human perception" increases productivity?

In this episode, Pasi takes the different opinions and definitions of renowned ITSM thought leaders to expand the definition of what is Employee Experience for IT. From these definitions, Pasi goes further into where employee experience sits in business operations and HappySignals role in helping to deliver get experience outcomes for your end-users.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

Ticket bouncing, commonly known as ticket reassignment, is where an IT incident or request ticket is passed from one team to another, before its resolution. 

This has a dramatic effect on lost work time for the end-user, as well as happiness, productivity, resulting in greater costs and reduced business value. In fact, it has such an effect that we believe this could be one of the most important ITIL metrics to improve.

In this episode, Pasi divulges how HappySignals measures the impact of reassignment counts on happiness, productivity and cost, as well as customer testimonials from Refinitiv on how they approach this major conundrum many businesses face. 

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Typically, Service Desk agents are heavily demotivated due to receiving an influx of negative feedback, typically due to the SLA metrics that they are contractually bound to.

However, when taking Experience Management into use, we have discovered that 82% of feedback the Service Desk receives is Positive.

There are many challenges that Experience Management overcome, such as:

In this episode of Happy in 15, Pasi and Sami discuss why Experience Management is for the whole company, including your Service Desk and how taking this way of working into practice will motivate your Service Desk.

We also hear from Marte Thorbjønsen, the Director of IT Core Operations for Wilhelmsen group, on how they moved from inhouse Service Desk to an Outsourced Service Desk, and how they introduced both penalties and rewards into their agreements in order to get the most out of their new Service Partners.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

Do you have many people working in remote places where the IT walk-in experience is unavailable? Do some of you end-users feel like they are missing out on certain IT services that others are receiving? 

Sophos had this exact challenge. Specific end-users in remote locations, in countries where IT HQ was unavailable, were desperate to receive the walk-in experience for IT Incidents and Requests. After discovering this was a problem, Sophos worked on how to replicate this experience to all of their end-users - creating a Virtual Tech bar. 

Find out in this episode the challenges their end-users faced, the solution they implemented and how Sophos increased and maintained end-user Happiness.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

So you've invested in your (new) ServiceNow platform, how do you now show the value and the ROI from the NOW platform?

In order to prove the value of enabling ServiceNow, you need to start managing this asset and start creating and delivering great experiences to your end-users.

But how do you start creating great experiences for your end-users, that are worth celebrating?

In this episode of Happy in 15, Sami and Pasi discuss how you can begin to leverage the ServiceNow platform and begin delivering great experiences to your end-users. As well as this, the guys hear from Ex SVP of Customer Success, Jimmy Fitzgerald and his experience dealing with CIOs and executives needs when it comes to leveraging their ServiceNow platform.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

Human feelings and experiences of IT services will always be the most reliable indicator for experience. Human-centric IT puts your end-users are at the centre of every single service that is delivered, and essentially, is your target market for deliverables.  

In this episode of Happy in 15, Sami and Pasi dig deeper into Human-Centric IT and what it means to have Humans as sensors when looking for feedback and improvements, across all IT Touchpoints.

It is never too late to start your Experience Management journey, but it is better to start sooner than later. Your end-users are already having these experiences daily. The sooner you take this approach, the quicker you can start increasing their efficiency and productivity.

Are your end-users regularly complaining about IT Services? Do they feel that their voice isn't heard or listened to? Do you ever hear "Thanks to IT I was able to..."?

If this sounds familiar, then it is because you are taking the wrong approach to ITSM.

Human-Centric IT is about putting your end-users at the heart of your IT Touchpoints and listening to how they are experiencing IT services. From your end-user feedback, then improving your ITSM to benefit the user, making them happier and productive.

In your weekly Happy in 15, Sami and Pasi discuss Human Centric IT and what it means to implement it in an organisation. In this episode the guys:

Having one overall metric to measure everything within your IT services isn't sufficient in providing in-depth information on your end-users happiness and IT Service satisfaction. This is essentially the equivalent of going into a store and when leaving being prompted with the 4 smiley faces, asking you how was your experience in-store - it means nothing. You could have had an easy time finding your product, however, the customer service was shocking. How can you then accurately rate your experience with one metric?

Apply this same example to IT Services - You have many people, managing many different service departments (i.e. from Office environment to mobile devices to remote workers). How can you efficiently measure all these diverse services with one metric?

By creating Experience as the shared goal for your IT department, you then create Employee Experience as the outcome of your IT Services. 

In this episode of Happy in 15, Pasi and Sami begin the discussion on why Experience needs to be the shared goal for IT. Find out how Ahlstrom Munksjö uses Experience Data to increase happiness with support services, as well as different models and examples that can be beneficial for the whole IT team - from everyone from the CIO down to Service Desk Agents.

A question we hear a lot at HappySignals is "What would be a good score for our company?"

In this special edition of Happy in 15, HappySignals CEO, Sami Kallio, draws information from our recent Global IT Experience Benchmark report for H/1. This report contains anonymous data from all of our customers across different cultures, countries and industries. Sami discusses about how different industries and countries can have vastly different scores, hence making it quite difficult to create and "ideal score" or generic score to work towards.

Instead, Sami offers you advice on how to work out what would be a score that is smart and attainable for your specific company, as there is not one size that fits all.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

Unhappy end-users, losing productivity daily, a constant stack up of support tickets for IT incidents and requests? If this sounds familiar then something is wrong.  

Delivery great services need to start from the end-users themselves, and the areas they are shouting about which needs improvement. If you aren't listening to your end-users, then you face the dreaded watermelon effect and the continued bad reputation that IT departments so famously hold. 

Focus on People and understand what they want, then tailor the processes and tech around what your end-users want.  In this episode of Happy in 15, Pasi and Sami dig into why Service Delivery has been going wrong, from the theoretical formulation of delivery and improving services, to the new structure that will reform your IT Departments view on how Services need to be successfully delivered.

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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In this special episode of Happy in 15, HappySignals CEO, Sami Kallio, has his first opportunity to dive deeper into Service Management and the Global IT Experience report, previously known as Happiness Score™ Report.

Sami goes through the latest findings from the Global IT Experience Benchmark Report for the first half of 2021, specifically focusing on the overall IT happiness areas, divulging data from all of our customers on the happiest areas of IT services, as well as the unhappiest areas.

In just 15 minutes you can find out why end-users on a global scale are:

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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Keep in contact

Just like 2020, Yearly Surveys are a thing of the past and something to be forgotten. Yearly Surveys do not give you that valuable, qualitative data, that you can use at every step of your IT Service Experience. Let's throw you this statement; You wouldn't measure your customer experience once a year, so why do it with your employees?

In this episode of Happy in 15, Sami and Pasi divulge why Yearly Surveys are a thing of the past and the problems/challenges encountered by them, such as:

The rollercoaster year of 2020 proved a point that anything can happen, even overnight, which forces a change and adaption from companies and delivers new, diverse and unique experiences to your IT end-users. In this instance, yearly surveys are dead wood in the water and would never give you the real-time data to improve and react to your end-users experiences.

This use of "real-time" data is one cog in part of a big, well-oiled machine - Experience Management.

The ever-changing needs of end-users are a phenomenon that must be addressed to streamline IT services to keep your employees productive and, most importantly, happy.

Traditionally, in ITSM, we focus our measurement efforts on outputs, which is essentially the beginning of the end. By measuring IT services in this manner, we will never truly understand how end-users are experiencing IT services, creating the Watermelon effect.

On the other hand, creating a Human-centric IT solves more problems than just increasing the happiness of your end-users; even though that is a massive achievement.

In this first-ever episode of 'Happy in 15', we discuss the challenges IT is facing today, including:

- Bad Reputation of IT

- No central view of IT happiness

- No common focus for IT

- Lack of control with partners

- Unable to quantify end-user Happiness and Productivity

- Making decisions based on gut feelings instead of data-driven decisions

Find out how creating a Human-centric IT can help solve the challenges you are facing in your IT organization.

If you are loving this content, be sure to subscribe to Happy in 15 and never miss an episode. 

Looking for something even more bitesized? Check out our recently released Learning Center, where we cover everything from XLAs to optimizing your ServiceNow --> www.happysignals.com/learning-center

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About HappySignals

HappySignals is an Employee Experience Management platform for IT that makes experience data visible, understandable, and connected to operational data in IT, enabling enterprises to change their culture to be more open, outcome-focused, and data-driven.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of over 2 million employees in 130 countries. Our customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26% on average.

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It is time for something new, something fresh.

We have decided to stop making long 45-minute podcast episodes and bring to you bite-sized, specific topic-focused content. This content will be published weekly-

We aim to bring you IT Experience Happiness in 15 minutes, that's why we have called this concept 'Happy in 15'.

In this episode, Sami is joined by Katie Bates, VP of Global Partnerships and Alliances at HappySignals. Sami and Katie start the discussion on how creating partnerships with vendors and MSP will boost their success with their customers as well as their customer's employee's experience.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

Introduction to Katie Bates, VP of Global Partnerships and Alliances

How MSPs and vendors can differentiate from competitors

Why Partnerships are a force for customer success and high-quality customer experience.

Bright Horse's Neil Keating joins the HappyToday podcast to discuss how focusing on employee experience not only makes your end-user more productivity but can lead to further benefits for the organisation, such as loyal customers and shareholder value.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The benefits of employee experience

Employee Experience impacts the business, not just employees

In this episode, Pasi is joined by Reckitt's Head of Global Service Management, Prashant Arora, as well as Andrew Murphy the IS Manager of User Technology & Services EMEA. Pasi talks in-depth about Reckitt's journey from integrating Experience Management to their current success.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

How Reckitt started their journey with Experience Management

Inside behind the scenes view of Reckitt's ITSM and Employee Experience Framework

How Reckitt are pioneering forward to Experience greatness

Find out how Reckitt combines XLAs with SLAs

Sami and Pasi are joined by the Co-founder and President of XLA Collab, Alan Nance. In this episode, the guys dive into recent study findings and how there is now data starting to show what actually works when it comes to Experience Level Agreements.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

How XLAs can impact service positively

Why Incentives (positive and negative) should be used with your service desk

Including XLAS as part of Experience Management practice

Jimmy Fitzgerald, former Senior Vice President of Customer Outcomes at ServiceNow, joins Pasi in today's episode to discuss the three common questions he encountered from Senior Executives, about fully utilizing their ServiceNow platform. Not only this, but Jimmy also has some news on his next "Happy" venture.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The three common questions C-Level Executives ask on Optimising ServiceNow

Why Experience Management is the key to ServiceNow

In this episode, Sami is joined by Damien Fenwick, a Service Manager from Fujitsu. Over the last few years, Damien has been working on building the Experience Management practice for Fujitsu. Damien is a keen enthusiast for measuring experience and understanding how users feel about a service allows them to put their end-users at the heart and deliver a better service. 

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Topics Covered in this episode:

How Fujitsu approach Employee Experience

Putting end-users at the heart of their service delivery

Including XLAS as part of their Experience Management practice

In this episode, Pasi is joined by Refinitiv's Director of Service Improvement, Mark Bewick, and Head of Service Management, Neville Hughes, discussing how Refinitiv changed their approach to implement experience led IT operations.

Refinitiv embarked on the journey to investigate and redefine their IT service. The journey unearthed common pain points, the “3 main ingredients of employee happiness” and confirmation that traditional metrics need “help” to consider employee experience.

Refinitiv has started a journey of employee happiness (with IT support), they are witnessing great results and have huge ambition to make things better still.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

Pasi and Sami are joined with the change management rebel with a cause - Karen Ferris. Karen has been working as a change management consultant for the last 3 year and in the episode, she discusses the events over the last year and how CIOs need to become the driving force for organisational cultural change.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

What COVID 19 has taught us about rapid change

CIOs play a prime responsibility  in cultural change

Tech the driver for change

Pasi is joined by the Director of IT Service Delivery from George Washington University (GW), Chris Megill. In this episode, Pasi and Chris discuss why GW has integrated HappySignals into its IT stack, on their quest to continuous service improvement and employee experience.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

George Washington University has over 50,000 IT tickets per year, with their primary audience students and faculty staff

How GW overcame challenges of low response rates through basic surveys

Why Happiness and Productivity matches with GW's service priorities

The benefits of using IT Support Profiles for an educational institution

Why Experience Data allows GW to predict trends and justify spending

In this episode, Pasi and Sami explore what Experience Management means to different roles within the business, and how it can impact their work life and productivity.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The benefits of Experience Management for:

Pasi and Sami continue their conversation with ITSM legend Roy Atkinson, uncovering the different cornerstones of Employee Experience and what companies need to be doing in order to effectively manage their end-users experience; Experience Management.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The importance of feedback

Why you need to start measuring now

Experience Management process

Employee Experience relating to business outcomes

Goodhart's Law

In this episode, Sami and Pasi dig deeper into the topic of Experience Level Agreements, discussing how companies need to go further than creating agreements for measuring experience, which has previously restricted its predecessor - Service Level Agreements. The guys also bring to light Experience Management - an overall approach to focus on building and maintaining positive experiences.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

Why experience is more than just an agreement

Experience Management - the way of working that focuses on experience

Today the guys are joined by ITSM legend, Roy Atkinson. Roy is currently the CEO and Principal Analyst at Clifton Butterfield LLC, offering business advice in service management.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

What is Employee Experience

The difference between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement

Experience and end-user feelings

Employee Experience from different viewpoints

Shifting experience to deal with unprecedented events (Global Pandemic)

Following the recent release of the Practical Guide to XLAs, Sami and Pasi start discussing the chapter XLA vs SLA and the key differences between the two.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The key differences between XLAs and SLAs

What really SLAs are

How XLAs compare to SLAs

Everything you've ever wanted to know about Experience Level Agreements is finally here. We have received a lot of interest and questions regarding XLAs - What are they? What are the benefits? How to implement them? and many more.

Pasi is joined by the team behind 'Project Happy', who increased the happiness of their end-users at Ahlstrom-Munksjö by 112%, as well as decreasing the lost time by 69%. This was done in conjunction with their outsourced service partners Tech Mahindra and Tieto, as well as using ServiceNow as their ITSM tool.

Pasi is joined by TOPdesk Service Management Consultant, Hannah Price. In this episode, Hannah and Pasi discuss the importance of tailoring XLAs to an organization as well as bringing the customer into the conversation to truly impact the customer experience.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

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Hannah Price

Hannah has been working for TOPdesk for over seven years, helping clients implement ideas on-premises and SaaS solutions, as well as designing and optimizing their processes.

Today the guys are joined by the CEO of Giarte, Marco Gianotten, discussing today's topic; is happiness overrated? This episode dives deeper into the metric of happiness, the importance of keeping end-users happy throughout their IT experience, and achieving greater value through a continuous happy experience.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

The pursuit of happiness

Happiness as a metric

The Importance of experiencing happiness over-time

Input, Outcome, and Impact

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Marco Gianotten and Giarte

Marco Gianotten is the CEO of Giarte, a research and consultancy firm within IT services and IT (out)-sourcing, operating out of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Giarte has been recording experiential knowledge and perception of IT services in business environments for more than 15 years.

Independent ITSM Consultant, Barclay Rae, joins our hosts Sami and Pasi to discuss his latest article 'Watertight not Watermelon SLAs' as well as how he sees the industry changing. Barclay also discusses with the guys the motion of how an agreement for experience may be difficult to adhere to, however, IT departments need to be measuring value, experience, and outcomes instead of traditional SLA metrics.

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Topics Covered in this episode:

Pasi and Sami discuss the key benefits of Experience Level Agreements, as well as giving real-life examples on how XLAs are used or can be applied to everyday scenarios. Top 5 benefits of XLAs: XLAs measure the value of the Service Desk from the perspective of the business XLA measurement boosts cooperation A more motivated Service Desk team Drives business value Moving target - in a positive way ------ About this podcast This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services in large enterprises. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

"Most people understand XLAs as focusing on the outcomes and experience-based outcomes" 

Experience Level Agreements are an ever growing topic in ITSM. However, the term has never been given a single definition for the industry to follow. Pasi and Sami round up a variety of definitions, from many different organisations across the world, to bring to you the baseline of what an XLA is.

Remote work has been an emerging trend recently, with more and more organisations having to incorporate this way of working. HappySignals brings to you a 'Sneak Peek' into end-users experience of Remote Work, from over 5,500 employee responses.

Enfo's SVP of Service Center, Minna Nousiainen, shares the Enfo journey to becoming a modern IT Service Provider and the importance of service experience for the company.

"With this tool and these discussions, we are on the same side of the table with the customer. We are not a Service Provider and customer buying it, but we can see that there are impacts of both of our actions." Minna Nousiainen

Which factors are really impacting your employees positively and negatively in their IT service experience? 

In this episode, Sami and Pasi talk about the range of factors that drive employees to a better employee experience, as well as the negative factors that reduce happiness, productivity and increase lost time.  

Pasi gets hit with a watermelon! No seriously, an actual watermelon! In fact, the whole industry is getting hit with watermelons. 

In this episode Sami and Pasi discuss how Internal Service Desks make employees 22% happier and 47% more productive compared to Outsourced Service Desks. This is caused by something known as the 'Watermelon Effect', where companies are meeting objectives (the green of the watermelon) and everything seems fine, when actually employees are seeing red.

Companies heavily focus projects on SLAs (service level agreements) which is the main reason for the 'Watermelon Effect'. Instead, companies need to now focus on implement XLAs (experience level agreements) when measuring IT services.

Sami and Pasi discuss how our customers increase their employees productivity by 26% by making people happier. An increase in productivity by 26% means 1 hours per ticket is saved for end-users.

From our HappinessScore™ Report, which is built from 1 million customer responses, Pasi and Sami go through the successful and unsuccessful company cases, showing you what to do and what not to do.

Sami and Pasi discuss data from over 1 million customer responses - the Happiness Score™ Report. In this episode they analyse their customer's data who are using ServiceNow or other ITSM platforms. One topic they have measured in this report is the impact of reassignment counts - when a ticket is passed from one team to another. 

In this episode Pasi interviews Stephen Mann, who is the principal and content director at ITSM Tools. ITSM Tools is a website dedicated for ITSM topics from ITSM.tools. Pasi and Stephen discuss the latest trends in the ITSM industry - what is currently working and what to look for in future.

More information on Stephen or ITSM.tools can be found below: 

In this episode, Pasi and Sami discuss the HappySignals way to achieving Happiness in Employee Experience. Including how to get started, as well as the different approaches and methods to higher levels of Happiness for your end-users.

Hosted today by Marko Ruusinen, our guy in Palo Alto. He's interviewing Blake Morgan a leader in customer experience. She is a keynote speaker and customer experience futurist and author of two books on customer experience. Recorded outside.

In this episode Pasi interviews Mark Smalley about ITIL 4 and his upcoming book "ITIL 4 - High Velocity IT".

Links from the episode:

Pasi and Sami give some points on why continuous Employee Experience measurement and management can show the value of your ServiceNow investment. Call it a Live Business Value Assessment or continuous productivity measurement, it gives your focus to develop right things to achieve the outcomes you are looking for.

Pasi interviews Sami on his articles about changing the strategy in IT from Cost Reduction to Proving Business Value.

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Has the focus on IT support cost reduction really been the best option for CIOs and their senior management teams? 

There has been a long-held view that the IT service desk is a “cost of quality,” i.e. it’s an additional and unnecessary cost that’s caused by a lack of quality in certain parts of the IT value chain. With IT issues – or “incidents” to use ITIL terminology – something that can be managed away by better IT service design, transition, and delivery practices.

This cost-of-quality view has caused many organizations to consistently drive down the cost of their IT service desk and the available budgets. This might have involved fewer, lower-paid staff or it might have involved the outsourcing of the service desk function in pursuit of lower costs (through economies of scale), higher quality (through best practice capabilities), and increased innovation – it’s the common outsourcing promise, or at least the customer expectation of outsourcing.

Sad statistics say 70% of Digital Transformation projects fail and last year $900B was wasted last year. How do think about Digital Transformation and does Employee Experience tie into success of Digital Transformation Journey.

Speaker, Facilitator and Author Oscar Berg speaks about his book Digital WorkPlace, a step by step guide on Employee Experience.

Are you planning an Automation initiative or thinking about RPA? Listen to this episode to learn how employee experience data can help you find the right focus and prove the value it will bring to the business.

In this episode Pasi Nikkanen and Sami Kallio answer a question that came through twitter from @Joe_The_IT_Guy:

How do you create a business case for employee experience measurement?

We’ll talk about employee experience and some reports and research we found on the significance of it company’s business and profits. Also what affects it and then some practical things on how you can make your business case and make it part of your IT budgeting.

Links from the episode,

Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, joins me for a chat about employee experience equation and how does service management fit into it. We talk about the rise of employee experience, what does technology mean and why culture is very important when talking about enterprise service management. 

Pasi gives his take on a recent CIOReview.com article on Top Service Management Trends to Watch in 2019.
Let's give a hint, Employee Experience is related!

This episode is part of our Industry Insight series, where we pick interesting articles, facts and research that people working with employee experience should be aware of. Enjoy.

Pasi learns how Jesper Hansen's team in Denmark analyses and improves their end-users experience with HappySignals experience data. Region Midtjylland provides Service Desk for local hospitals using their ServiceNow.

In this episode Sami Kallio meets Alan Norris, ISV Consultant at ServiceNow. They discuss how employee experience and service experience is one of the key messages from ServiceNow and how Alan personally sees the importance. Recorded live at SITS 19 expo in London, so mind the sound quality in the noisy expo hall.

Enjoy!

In this episode Pasi goes and meets John Sullivan, CIO and Project Director at Virgin Trains. We talk about importance of employee and customer experience to the business, how traditional KPIs do not matter, how using ServiceNow enables them to innovate and how trust and transparency is the key to succeeding with service experience data.

In HappySignals measurement tool, we define employee into four different behavioural profiles. In this episode we explain those profiles and what drives different types of people in your organisation.

In this episode we discuss with Sami on why it's important to have transparency inside the enterprise with experience data. Having the data available to all stakeholders, partners and colleagues is crucial.

Happiness Score™ is a ITSM Benchmark we gather from our customers data. It's anonymized and updated daily and the numbers we who are from the past 6 months. In this episode we go through the numbers as they stand in April 2019, with some insight into what they tell us. As the first episode we do some introduction to the topic and in the future we'll bring more insight into the details.

Enjoy.

In this episode we talk about when is the right time to start measure, what are the fears related to measurement and why starting as soon as possible is the best thing you can do.

How to use employee experience measurement as motivation for Service Desk teams and agents. How seeing the positive will increase their job satisfaction and showing the negative will allow agents to learn from their work.

In this episode we talk about Employee Experience in ITSM and how HappySignals got started.