So, if you listen, what do you learn?
In our previous blog & video about Listening we shared how IT end user engagement is no longer about gathering feedback on the amount of support tickets issued when something breaks in your business.
Rather, the best CIOs and their teams are using new and modern ways to listen to the different types of users across the business.
Their teams Listen by taking time to spend a day in the shoes of their end users. They capture IT sentiment using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, helping them really get a grip on what’s working and what’s not.
Once they’ve Listened they then Learn about what areas are the most important to focus on – what issues have the greatest influence on overall IT satisfaction.
Learning with Empathy
Learning with empathy is about asking, not telling.
It’s about seeking feedback proactively ever before a ticket is raised. In our SXSW Empathy in IT series CIO at Goodbody Stuart describes this as breaking it down and asking end users simply “What are the niggles, what is causing issues for you in your working day?”. Rather than focusing on “Here’s our new tools, here’s the new shiny thing”, the best IT teams are asking “What’s causing you pain, and what can we do to actually help?”.
Over time, by taking this approach organisations can make an enormous difference to making employees feel valued – providing the twin benefits of ensuring their voice is heard and giving them the tools they need to do their job well.
Learning about different users’ needs – the power of Personas
When providing technology to hundreds or thousands of employees, they are all going to have different needs. These differences could be regional, geographical, or vary depending on the specific product or service use, job or work style.
When gathering information about IT user experience, it’s helpful to break it down from the perspective of dynamic “IT user personas”. This involves asking people to say how they work (mobile or desk based, technical or not, highly collaborative or more independent), and then find groups of people who work in similar ways.
This could be how they work, where they work, the type of IT they use, what products or services they use to carry out their work, what friction points they have and what matters to each group.
Chris Murphy, Global Head of Workplace Services and User Experience at Boston Consulting Group noted
“it’s very hard to think about the 20,000 employees as a holistic group, so we break them into master personas…These personas are archetypes that help us deeply understand, I guess different archetypes within the organisation, we understand their roles, we understand how they work, we understand what IT products and services they use in their work, we understand their friction points with IT, we understand the moments that matter for them as they use technology.”
Learning with Voxxify
We have found that CIOs that use Voxxify to learn how the IT they provide is delivering value in the workplace both validate decisions they have made, as well as learning things they didn’t anticipate.
For example, Bridget Collins CIO at Cerence Inc. used Voxxify to measure the IT experience during a significant period of change (spin out from parent company Nuance). Bridget noted “What I found most valuable from that was I was really in the midst of what I thought was chaos. In some areas, it wasn’t chaos at all, we actually had things under control. And in other areas, it was a way for me to be able to manage some of the challenges that we were faced with.”
“Voxxify was a really simple, seamless way to get feedback from every type of user around the world. It helped me not only create an actionable plan to go help solve some of the problems, it really helped me prioritise. I can honestly say that without Voxxify’s data, based on the sentiments that I was hearing, I may have actually prioritised the wrong thing.
Bridget Collins, CIO Cerence Inc.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you get the most out of your IT spend, just contact our CXO Alan at alan@voxxify.com