Tips to improve user experience on ITSM

IT service management (ITSM) should be intuitive and easy for users to navigate, as well as simple and cost effective to configure enhance and upgrade, according to Applaud IT managed services practice manager Mark Richards.

If users aren’t happy, “your platform will not succeed,” Richards said at a BMC Remedy ITSM software event in Sydney. End users care about two things, he said: “How quickly you pick up the phone and how quickly you resolve [the] issue.”

Here are five tips Richards offered on how to optimise user experience:

1. Logging customer problems should be quick.
   “If your service desk needs to take two minutes or longer to log a call, it’s too long,” says Richards. Simplifying the logging process by limiting the number of fields to be entered can reduce logging time to 20 seconds, he said.

2. Follow the three-click rule.
   “If you need to click more than three times to get to where you need to go, it’s too much,” says Richards. Similarly, make sure users don’t have to answer questions for which you should already know the answers, he says. Don’t force customers to spend time filling out multiple forms to get support. “The user will remember” their experience, he said.

3. Make it easy for support staff
   “Make it easy for the service desk to log information, says Richards. “They will be the biggest evangelists of your platform.”

4. Get the taxonomy right.
   Without a common language, “everyone is going to be talking about the same thing in 15 different ways and your data is just going to skew as a result,” he said. The chosen taxonomy “may not be perfect, but whatever it is, stick with it.”

5. Integrate social media
   Applaud IT plans to start “looking at Facebook to get good and bad feedback from our end users,” Richards said. “The lines are blurring” between the personal and the professional “and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

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