Meet Our Expert in Continual Service Improvement: Elena Henderson

A Little Bit About Me 

I took on my first role at Netitude as the Ticket Dispatcher for the Service Desk back in February 2018. From there, I started cultivating a keen interest in customer service, and a few years later, I ended up taking over the management of the Service Desk team. I've learned absolutely loads whilst working here, from all kinds of technical support to people management and development. On my lunch break, you'll normally find me curled up with a good book in our comfy break area.

Role Overview

This role is all about creating a feedback loop for our business processes. My day-to-day involves implementing small changes to work towards a more significant process change, then checking back in with other parts of the business to look for process bottlenecks or things that just aren't working quite right.

Motivation Behind the Role 

I've spent all of my time at Netitude working on our Service Desk team, so I was up for a new challenge within the business. On the Service Desk, I interacted with so many different businesses and people about the issues they were facing, so I feel like I've got a pretty good insight into some of the points in our process where things could be improved.

Implemented and Planned Strategies

We've already made some strides towards continuous service improvement by making some enhancements to our IT Support application, including single sign-on with your email account to the web portal and adding your full 365 user lists and licenses. Internally, we've created new ways to measure how quickly we plan, quote, and deliver big projects to our customers. 

In the coming months, we will focus on improving our escalation process to increase the visibility of a high-priority ticket when flagged on our service desk. We'll also tweak our ticket alerting process by adopting a more proactive approach. This approach involves getting more useful automated information from our clients' systems to identify problems before they happen. 

Identifying Areas for Improvement

We use the EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) method to ensure we're all working towards the same vision as a business. It's a fantastic and straightforward set of tools and processes that allows us to determine the most important issue we're facing, the impact not resolving the issue will have, and exactly what success looks like when it's resolved. 

All members of the business are encouraged to submit their suggestions or bottleneck areas to a central location based on issues they're facing or have been reported to them by our customers. These are then voted on and prioritised so we face the highest impact issues, not the easy ones. Whatever comes out on top goes through our IDS (Identify, Discuss, and Solve) process: identify the real issue (not just the symptoms!), discuss the issue and how we might resolve it, and work out what solving the problem looks like and whose job it is to do it!  

Metrics for Success

The EOS method means regular check-ins are scheduled in each employee's calendar. Within these 1-2-1 meetings, both manager and employee sit down to check in on how they are getting on with their BAU (Business as Usual) activities and actions. Having the EOS process in place means all employees can see how their individual tasks contribute to the bigger-picture goal of the business being met. 

From a personal standpoint, having weekly 1-2-1s ensures that I'm held accountable for the tasks that need to be done and that any issues that I'm facing are discussed and resolved quickly before they ever become problems. 

Encountered Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge for me is picking just one thing to work on! As I mentioned, I've worked on the Service Desk and at Netitude for quite a while, so I have built up a catalogue of the things I'd love to work on! The EOS process makes sure we're I'm focussing on what is having the biggest impact on the business and helps me break down the big things into smaller, achievable tasks. It can look a bit insurmountable at first when you're faced with a big issue, but breaking it down into weekly jobs helps massively with knowing I'm progressing towards the primary goal.

Role Objectives 

Continual Service Improvement! But seriously, it's about creating a culture of that within the business and for our customers as well. It can be very easy to sit and stew when things aren't going quite as you'd expect. The aim of my job and this new process is to bring those things into the open and work out a plan to address them instead of just 'living with it'.

Enhancing Netitude’s Service Experience 

We're tightening and improving our internal processes, which will directly impact the speed and quality of our services to our customers. I love that we're mature enough now as a business to know we need this role to ensure we don't gloss over when things don't go to plan but, instead, take a step back, learn from them and improve.

The best way to find out how to improve our services is to hear directly from the people using them. In the coming weeks, we're launching our one-click customer survey to let us know how we're doing; within the survey, customers will be granted the opportunity to leave us some specific comments we can address.

I truly believe that to achieve continuous service improvement, every single piece of feedback raised by a customer needs to be considered and reviewed. Only then can we elevate our service offering and serve our clients in the best way possible.