DSM’s business case for ITsat explained
“He who manages processes around user satisfaction saves considerably”
Ruud Neeskens is worldwide manager for Global ICT Services at DSM and is closely involved with ITsat.
Since the summer of 2006, DSM has been using ITsat to measure and improve user satisfaction with IT at the company’s sites around the world. After three years not only has ITsat become ‘the voice of the customer’, it is also a tool to link the internal world of SLAs to the outside world. Ruud Neeskens is worldwide manager for Global ICT Services at DSM and is closely involved with ITsat. He explains the specific benefits ITsat has delivered for DSM and how companies can improve satisfaction.
Should we treat users as though they were customers?
“Yes, because customers should always be the benchmark for a service company. You need to know what effect your actions have. In IT the tendency is to look from the inside outwards. Achieving KPIs does not automatically mean you are doing a good job. The question is, who are you doing it for. We need to increasingly adopt an approach of looking from the outside in. SLAs are still important, but you need to manage processes around outcomes, too. You need to be constantly thinking about why satisfaction has gone up or down. Management is a very complex process. You should be aware that something is wrong even before problems start being identified in management reports. ITsat helps you to do that. The best indications come from measuring satisfaction at ‘moments of truth’, such as after the implementation of a change. It acts as a type of early warning system. Users want to be able to get on with their work and managers want their business to run well and to keep the number of lost production hours to a minimum. When users are dissatisfied with a SAP change that has been implemented, it is usually because something has gone wrong and the change has resulted in an incident that affects the continuity of the business. This is why user satisfaction is so important to managing your service chain. It’s not just a matter of ‘ticking boxes’.”
How soon can you identify that there is a problem?
“Very quickly. For example, we noticed that satisfaction in Latin America suddenly took a nose dive. This had not yet become apparent in the reports and SLAs. KPIs such as average time to answer were being met, but there was a marked drop in satisfaction. Before our service provider’s account team was even aware of it, we could advise them that there was a problem on the central service desk in Mexico City. Various key figures were missing and knowledge was not being transferred correctly. As a result, incidents were not being successfully resolved. This adversely affected the incident-to-resolution process chain. Users had to be called back because the diagnosis was not correct and too many things were going wrong. This all became apparent in reports on user satisfaction in individual regions. It shows that ITsat allows you to identify problems often at an earlier stage than SLA reports.”
Why do you keep hammering on about user satisfaction?
“It’s Chefsache, the responsibility of the chiefs. I cannot make the service desk ultimately responsible for improving the entire service chain. As part of management, you have ultimate responsibility for designing and improving the service chain from the top right down to the bottom, with all internal and external links in the chain. You need to be constantly looking at ways to improve satisfaction. As a service organisation there never comes a point where no more improvements can be made. You need to be open and remember that the problem could lie within the organisation, and look at how things can be done better at all levels – from operational to strategic. ITsat helps keep us on our toes.”
About DSM
Royal DSM creates innovative products and services in Life Sciences and Materials Sciences that contribute to quality of life. DSM has annual net sales of EUR 9.3 billion and employs some 23,500 people worldwide. DSM is headquartered in the Netherlands with locations on five continents.
What is the value of surveying for the business?
“Everyone understands a satisfaction score. Over recent years we have worked incredibly hard to go from a meagre 6 to an 8 in the final score for IT. We are now seeking to reach ‘wow’ level, where users and managers are proud of their own IT organisation. You can’t slacken the pace for a moment. If we would do nothing for a couple of months, not only would the satisfaction score drop, we would also lose the trust we have built so far. It’s not enough just to survey once a year. Nor is there any point in surveying with the primary purpose of setting IT managers’ bonuses. Rather than starting with the rewarding system, the first thing to do is define what performance is. That also chimes with the customer’s perception. If you don’t know how to get from a 6 to a 7 and from a 7 to an 8, you are travelling blind and whether or not you get your bonus is simply a matter of chance.”
Do you use ITsat as a punitive measure?
“No, that is too defensive, too black and white. It’s not a stick, rather a tool for bringing about improvements. You need to avoid a situation where suppliers are put off and do not get actively involved in improving their processes. The user is not interested in who delivers the service or resolves the problem. In their eyes, if something goes wrong then we – Corporate IT – are responsible. It is even more pointed with top management. Their attitude is: ‘You organised the outsourcing yourself, so you deal with it’. We must take on this responsibility. The last thing we should be doing is ‘delegating’ this responsibility to others and trying to say it is down to the service providers.”
Has the business taken the rising scores on board?
“Yes, but it’s not always that obvious. Many people start from the assumption that you can only expect bad things from IT. Some business managers go round with that image in their heads and are surprised when IT doesn’t make such a bad job of things after all. Tens of thousands of transactions take place between Corporate IT and the business, so it’s inevitable that something’s going to go wrong at some point. When the escalation then appears on the demand manager’s schedule, it is bound to colour that person’s opinion. ‘We may well be getting a score of 7 from the grassroots, but I’ve got people in my office who actually hate the IT team’, is sometimes the first reaction you get. We need to take this into account, but the fact that we are surveying user satisfaction means you have got some facts to back up your response in an emotive situation like this and so manage expectations. ITsat makes what we are doing well and what we are not doing well measurable and demonstrable.”
About DSM ICT
• More than 500 staff support 19,000 workstations.
• Over 180 sites in 48 countries covering three regions.
• Many mobile end users.
• High degree of standardisation.
• 10,000 SAP users and around 1600 business applications.
• Service provision is both outsourced and insourced
How would you rate ITsat compared to other systems used by IT organisations?
“ITsat is in a class of its own. ISO, ITIL and other methods tell you ‘what’ and sometimes ‘how’ to organise your processes. They do not look at whether the customer values your service. You might have a perfect ISO-certified process for manufacturing lifejackets filled with concrete, but unfortunately they won’t be any use to a drowning person. You have to start by looking at outcomes. You can then use these customer satisfaction outcomes and measurements to work on your processes, your organisation and your people. You can’t assert that you offer a good service simply because you do everything according to a process methodology or quality framework. These things help, but they are not enough on their own.”
How do you communicate outcomes?
“Communicating successfully is important. I don’t mean saying to people ‘Look at how well we’re doing’, more along the lines of ‘We are making good progress’. The thing is to make improvements faster than your customers expect and, above all, to be open. Traditionally, communication is not a strong point for IT. Too often we don’t take the time to explain why we can’t do something or what we are flat out working on. If customers are dissatisfied about an aspect of your service, but they know you are doing something about it and you keep communicating with them, the battle’s already half won.”
Does high user satisfaction reduce costs?
“Yes, you have to ask yourself when is a user a satisfied customer. Users want to get help quickly to find an effective solution to their problem. If we resolve the problem quickly, it ends up being cheaper. If service processes take too long this often becomes expensive due to miscommunication and working at cross purposes. Costs start to fall when you deal with an area of dissatisfaction by improving your processes. Friction, errors and frustration all represent costs associated with lost production hours. Suppliers also need to grasp that principle and understand that managing processes around user satisfaction will make money for them. Service providers have got an interest in having more satisfied users, because it will deliver them earnings. There are a whole raft of hidden costs within service processes. The best, fastest and most error-free process is often the cheapest as well.”
Wat is de bottom-line?
“Through ITsat I have been able to cut various sourcing governance costs within my management organisation by 40 percent. A great deal of time and effort went into trying to detect problems. Sometimes it was like searching for a needle in a haystack and often a great deal of work went into working out a solution that turned out to be a dead-end. ITsat makes diagnostics better and faster avoiding a lot of guesswork and time spent on discussion. When there is a problem everyone is on edge and, instead of pointing the finger, we set to work with the service providers to find a solution. Savings are also to be made by reducing costs you would prefer not to incur. An incident that you prevent is the cheapest as it doesn’t cost anything. And an incident that you resolve first time round will not recur. Our score for getting it right first time has risen from 70 percent to over 95 percent . As a result, the number of tickets per user per year has reduced from 9.6 to 7: a total savings of around 50,000 tickets per year. That’s a lot of money that you’re saving simply by being smart. You can also identify a higher FTR when you review the rising satisfaction scores. Overall, the TCO has gone down by at least 10 percent with ITsat. But to achieve this you must manage processes around user satisfaction. User satisfaction will not rise of its own accord.”
“Through ITsat I have been able to cut various sourcing governance costs within my management organisation by 40 percent, instead of pointing the finger, we set to work with the service providers to find a solution.”
Has ITsat had an effect on your third generation outsourcing?
“Yes, if we halve the work for the service desk, then we only pay half as much. It works the other way round too. The risk from changes, migrations and incidents lies at our door. If our own actions result in instability and therefore increased workload for the service desk, we have got no grounds for expecting to continue to pay a fixed amount per seat or user. In some contracts you pay for input, such as per call or per change. With this type of contract, the service provider has no interest in reducing the amount of work. Other contracts have a fixed price for the service irrespective of the quantity, such as a price per seat. Then you end up either paying too much or too little. If you are paying too much you don’t hear a thing, but if you are paying too little the service providers are on the phone straightaway, for example if the number of incidents turns out to be well over the figure agreed in the contract. We now have a model where we are responsible as DSM for the amount of work we generate, but we also benefit from the savings if we get satisfied customers while doing less work. ITsat is a catalyst for this.”
About DSM and ITsat®
Within DSM, ITsat is used to survey a small number of end users every week over the internet about general aspects of IT service provision. In addition, a proportion of all resolved incidents, standard service requests (SSRs) and changes (RFCs) are evaluated every week. Communication with end users takes place in twelve different languages. Overview reports are generated every month that provide a picture of satisfaction and show where people want improvements. DSM also uses weekly detailed reports to approach individual users about tickets not resolved to their satisfaction.