Whether you’ve considered user experience a priority for your service desk in the past or not, you absolutely must consider it a priority in the post-Covid world we’re currently living in. Why? Because IT Support Experience has quickly transitioned to include Remote Work Experience.
HappySignals, a company focused on helping businesses to improve their internal services by focusing on employee experience, conducted a Q2 2020 Happiness Score Report. This report’s findings are based on 10,439 responses received between March 18th and March 30th, 2020. For trending purposes, it combines data from over 800,000 previous survey responses dating back to November 2019.
With their most recent findings coming during the Covid-19 pandemic, the emphasis on Remote Work User Experience brought back some extremely valuable data. Below are a couple of interesting takeaways.
The Pros and Cons of Remote Work
The biggest takeaways from the negative responses relate to conveniences of being in the office. The top concerns starting with employees missing their work equipment in the office and saying their work spaces at home were not as good as in the office. Another concern for newly remote workers was struggles with home internet connection.
Somewhat surprisingly, the least concerning of the negative responses included issues with technology while working remotely. Respondents scored difficulty accessing tools they need and concerns reaching their coworkers remotely as lower priority issues when working remotely.
Strong Omni-Channel Support Pays Off
The perception of support channels from an importance and employee happiness perspective are an interesting takeaway as well. For IT Incidents, the Self-Service Portal stayed the top support channel and increased in employee happiness sentiment.
Phone and Walk-In Support remain the most popular support channels, with the highest happiness ratings, all though there was an obvious decrease in Walk-In support priority due to Covid-19. Chat’s priority increased slightly during this time.
Support channel priority for IT Requests was similarly aligned to IT Incidents all though, as expected, the Self-Service Portal is truly the dominant channel here. User Experience happiness scores across all channels were higher than IT Incidents across the board with each channel increasing slightly in happiness score except for email and chat which stayed the same and decreased, respectively.
For more information on the value of a web-based portal while shifting to remote work, check out our recent article here.
Support for Remote Work User Experience
Including data from as far back as February, HappySignals was able to record the changes in IT Incident volume as companies were transitioning to mass remote work. Across surveyed respondents, IT Incidents increased by 12% between early February and mid-March. Elevated ticket volumes were steady through mid-April where they started to descend back to early February levels.
When it comes to perception of support while working remote, respondents leaned in the positive direction. Employees ranked support for remote work is excellent pretty high while poor and neutral responses to support for remote work were really low.
For more information on IT support best practices for newly remote companies, check out our recent blog here.
User Experience Matters More When Working Remote
The effect that Covid-19 has had on business and user experience feels obvious but the data is still being collected and the outcomes from that data will continue to impact us daily. One thing that is indisputable is the fact that work will never be the same.
Remote Work is here to stay which means IT Service Desks will continue to support a remote workforce, in full or in part, for the foreseeable future. As the HappySignals report points out, Remote Work Experience plays a key role in the happiness and productivity of your workforce.
User Experience in general is impacted by process, people and technology. A lot of organizations were caught off guard when they were forced to consider mass transition to remote work. If you’re using, or have the ability to use System Center Service Manager for IT Service Management, Cireson’s Self-Service and Analyst portal for SCSM is a must have for your organization.
Check out our free Community SCSM Portal products and don’t hesitate to reach out to our team for more information.
For a more in-depth breakdown of user experience, HappySignals collaborated with the team at ITSM.Tools for a deeper dive.
