In 2021, HCLTech and HappySignals joined forces to help create more value for their customers and end-users through E-sense, HCLTech’s experience management offering, powered by the HappySignals Experience Management Platform (XMP).

During the past decade, the IT industry has evolved its view of experience management, and it is now recognized as a critical component of any successful IT service desk. It is also the cornerstone of HCLTech's continuous improvement journey with customers.

What’s Happening in The ITSM Market

The interest in experience management and the importance of good employee experiences have grown significantly in recent years. At the end of 2021, Forrester Research predicted that “2022 Will Go Down As The Year Executives Were Forced To Care About Employee Experience.”

The level of industry interest was also demonstrated in the AXELOS 2022 ITSM Benchmarking Report, which found that “two-thirds of survey respondents (67%) stated that their organizations understand the need to deliver a better employee experience, with another 18% expecting them to in 2022. Only 9% thought that their organizations would never see the need for improving employee experience.”

But for most of these interested organizations, their relationship with experience management is still likely precisely that, an interest. This interest can be turned into actions that improve employee experiences, employee productivity, and business outcomes in the year ahead. Something that our customers have been doing since 2015.

But There Wasn’t Always This IT Focus on Experience Management

When we started HappySignals in 2014, employee experience was not on the radar for most IT organizations. Initial research found that CIOs and IT service desk directors measured customer satisfaction (CSAT) but didn’t trust the results they were getting. Or they didn’t use the feedback.

The need for IT to measure performance from the end-user perspective was apparent, but little was available to help organizations to do this, either for enterprise organizations or their outsourced IT service providers.

The HappySignals experience management platform didn’t simply fill this need. We have worked with our customers since 2015 to refine the solution, the associated experience management processes and the key experience metrics at its core (end-user happiness and perceived lost time).

These experience metrics might be called different things based on your customer’s preferred terminology. For example, experience targets, experience-level targets, experience-level indicators or even XLAs.

In the same way that some people use the SLA acronym for service level agreement to relate to the service-level metrics, the XLA acronym for experience level agreement is also used to denote the experience metrics rather than an agreement.

What’s Needed for Experience Improvement

The mention of XLAs is a good place to pivot to how organizations start their experience improvement journeys. Here, it’s essential to understand that the captured experience data and the insights it offers are critical to people-centric improvements.

And while XLA documents have value, an organization seeking improvements shouldn’t be slowed down waiting for an agreement to be in place. Instead, we recommend that organizations start to measure experiences as soon as possible.

This approach not only identifies employee-impacting issues and their resolutions quicker, but the data and insights can also feed into XLA document creation (if needed). More importantly, the collection and sharing of experience data positively affect the working relationship between the service provider and receiver. It facilitates collaboration around a shared goal, provides transparency into performance and improvement opportunities, and helps to build trust. It also recognizes that the service provider owns the service experience.

Experience management ultimately changes the corporate culture, such that future IT investments are viewed through the perspective of experience and value, rather than just operational and financial efficiency.

Experience management doesn't just create happier customers; it also results in better business.

How HCLTech and HappySignals Help Customers

HCLTech and HappySignals help customer organizations all along the experience improvement lifecycle, from initial vision creation through data capture and analysis to improve prioritization and execution.

Then the iteration of this as experience data and improvements change end-user experiences and business outcomes over time.

Different customer organizations will discover different issues and use cases for experience data. For example, they might find if:

• The IT service desk ticket reassignment is adversely impacting end-user happiness and productivity. Here, the aggregate customer average is that each additional reassignment loses the end user 1 hour and 35 minutes and 8 happiness points.
• Data and insights are helping drive automation focus and success, ensuring that automation is applied in the areas that matter most to end users and that the expected experience improvements are realized.
• Incident management self-service capabilities, while gaining in popularity, are perceived to lose end-users almost twice the time of calling the IT service desk, plus with a lower happiness level.

Remember that these data points are for a spectrum of organizations investing in experience management and improvement, with the average organization likely having a greater opportunity to improve.

While experience management might be seen as the route to better experiences, it’s ultimately about better business.