Today’s digital business is putting tremendous pressure on IT service desks as the volume of requests go up and resources stay flat. Over half of enterprises have implemented self-service processes but are still not realizing the business benefits. IT organizations can learn from organizations, like Amazon, who have a proven approach to delivering customer service that both reduces costs and improves customer satisfaction. While their approach is primarily focused on external customers, there is a lot IT can learn about the prioritization process needed to support a shift-left strategy.
Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, once said “I would define Amazon by our big ideas, which are customer centricity, putting the customer at the center of everything we do, [and] invention” (CBS News, 2013). Since its founding, Amazon has been known for its dedication to customer service and customer service strategy.
In the book The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs, written by former Amazon managers Bill Price and David Jaffe, the co-authors emphasize on the idea that eliminating the need for service is in fact the best way to grow customer satisfaction.
According to Price, the value-irritant matrix presented in the book delineates a way for managers to analyze and categorize incoming conversations with customers in order to understand which interactions are most important. The matrix, which is shown below, helps classify customer conversations into one of the following actions: simplify, leverage, eliminate, or automate.
Source: The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs, 2018, p 59
Amazon’s value-irritant matrix approach includes:
The purpose of this categorization is to understand which customer interactions can be improved or leveraged — which usually need human contact — as opposed to those that need to be eliminated or automated through self-service, such as AI, chatbots or other self-help technologies. In other words, managers need to understand the requests and incidents that come into the service desk in order to reduce low-value, repeatable issues and focus on high-value interactions!
Gartner’s report on 3 Simple Ways IT Service Desks Should Handle Incidents and Requests, explains that, with a few adjustments, the value-irritable matrix approach can also be applied to ITSM service management. While Price’s matrix uses four categories, Gartner recommends three: eliminate, automate and leverage.
The process starts with IT interacting with the business and understanding their service desk data. Similar to how Amazon focuses on prioritizing high-value interactions with customers, IT services desk takes a similar approach to categorizing incidents and request to take advantage of the “shift-left” approach to eliminate and /or automate recurring low-value incidents. Once IT understands the categories and the types of requests they get, they can begin developing a strategy for reducing incidents and requests that reach the service desk.
This allows more time for the service desk to focus on high-value employee service interactions that can have bigger impact on the business. Taking this into account, IT service desks need to start:
Want to learn how you can get started? Download the Gartner report: 3 Simple Ways IT Service Desks Should Handle Incidents and Requests.