While significant effort and investment are being spent on designing digital solutions that meet customer needs, one area that has not received the same level of focus is internal systems and internal IT. For example, while airlines are leveraging new age digital technologies to improve the passenger experience, less attention is being paid to the experiences of employees when they require IT assistance in order to serve passengers better.

NIIT Technologies (NIIT Tech) is looking to address this gap with a focus on what it calls empathetic experiences. The core of empathetic service is tailoring both services and application environments to align more closely with specific client needs. There are two core components to this service:

• Focus on service culture and measuring experiences
• Customization of services.

Service culture & measuring experiences

To align its services with the evolving expectations of its clients, NIIT Tech has implemented a broad based program to mature the culture of its delivery resources and shift the team’s focus from just meeting SLAs to building quality client experiences in addition. Entitled the Hi-5 Program, it has five components:

• Think customer
• Challenge status quo
• Unleash ideas
• Improve continuously
• Take ownership.

To measure its ability to meet client needs, NIIT Tech has revamped its approach to gathering feedback from clients receiving support from its help desk and application management delivery teams. Rather than standard CSAT processes that gather feedback using a regular, pre-defined schedule, NIIT Tech uses its Voice of the Customer offering to instantly rate service when it is freshest in the user’s mind.

When a ticket is closed within the ITSM tool, an automated process kicks off, resulting in an email being sent to the client who has just received service. A link to an online survey tool is provided, but rather than a long survey, the user is offered just one question about their experience with three possible answers: negative, neutral, or positive. For negative responses, further follow-up is done to understand what specific aspects of the service failed to meet expectations.

At a media regulator, where NIIT Tech has implemented this process, it is now receiving feedback on 12% of tickets, and has seen an 87%-90% monthly approval rate. The response rate is right in the middle of the target of 10-15%, and is up from an initial 5% response rate.

Customization of services

In addition to evolving its culture and how it measures satisfaction, NIIT Tech is also looking to ensure that its services target the higher priorities of its client base. It has tailored IT infrastructure services and solutions to address the key drivers of internal user-centricity across each of its five core industry verticals, including:

• Travel: focused on digital and mobile experience, NIIT Tech offers Wi-Fi enablement, application performance management, and mobile device management
• Insurance: focused on customer acquisition, retention and services, NIIT Tech focuses on PEGA landscape management, data management, and analytics
• Banking: focused on employee/customer engagement and time to market, NIIT Tech offers release automation, tailored ServiceNow ITSM offering, and development/test environment management
• Manufacturing: focused on operational efficiency, NIIT Tech offers vehicle and asset tracking as well as SAP landscape management
• Media: focused on content management, NIIT Tech offers data archiving as well as identity and access management.

NIIT Tech is also employing a process through which it mutually agrees with the client to service levels for each in-scope application based on that application’s criticality. These service levels include:

• Platinum support for applications that can impact the client’s brand
• Gold for applications that are revenue impacting
• Silver for customer facing applications
• Bronze for applications impacting the efficiency of business delivery.

This designation defines how services are delivered, including support hours, location mix of support, and service levels to ensure that both parties are aligned on the expectations for each application and they are customized to the client’s needs and priorities. NIIT Tech can also institute variability in an application designation depending on cyclical requirements, such as financial close periods.

In addition to tailored application support, NIIT Tech also customizes its application support to the user requesting it based on role, level and other custom factors that enable it to initiate tighter SLAs for critical users.

Beyond tailored reactive support, NIIT Tech is looking to proactively reduce ticket volumes and client requests with customized business process monitoring and management. This service embeds monitoring into NIIT Tech’s services, leveraging automated monitoring tools, that allow it to proactively identify disruptions to key back-office functions (such as finance or HR) or end customer facing business functions.

As an example of this business process monitoring, for a travel company, NIIT Tech developed a series of dashboards for monitoring processes within the ticket booking function. Monitoring included booking and payment processing within the website, subscription management across various channels, and end-to-end processes within the mobile app. Proactive monitoring enables NIIT Tech to identify and resolve incidents without waiting for an end user to raise a ticket, aligning support to business priorities, increasing process availability, and improving end customer experiences.

While NIIT Tech is focused on delivering empathetic experiences to clients’ customers across the application lifecycle and its IT infrastructure offerings, it is also looking to embed user centricity from the internal IT application user perspective into its services.