Tokio Marine's DEX Expert: Behind The Scenes of an End User Experience Team
In a previous episode of The DEX Show Podcast, we invited Darren Edwards, End User Support Manager at Tokio Marine HCC.
Darren has helped build the EUC Experience strategy at TMHCC. Below is a select summary of excerpts from his previous recording:
How does an End User Experience team fit into a larger Digital Transformation Strategy?
The emphasis on digital transformation was the reason why my role and actually end user experience and the end user experience team at TMHCC was created.
TMHCC went through a period of unprecedented growth throughout COVID, was quite successful and the company really grew – and that kicked off the IT transformation. So when I started, I came into this brand new end user experience team of which there was a new role, head of end user experience, my role, one of my direct peers, and then all the other teams that kind of flow out of that, I guess.
The transformation itself is really about aligning technology more closely with the business. So if you think implementing a product model, essentially, but then also with some support in shared services. So products and services and platforms is the way we split them down and end user experience cuts across everything.
We've pretty much come to the end of that digital transformation now. I think it was 18 months to two years, the transformation from beginning to end. It's moving into a more a “business-as-usual” state now. And we need to obviously then try to find a way of maintaining the successes that we've gone through throughout the transformation.
What is your team overseeing and owning?
From an end user experience perspective, our remit is fairly broad. It’s split logically into sort of two arms.
1) End user support that I look after is your traditional IT service desk, first point of contact for our end users in the TMHCC international business. A lot of the standard stuff, request management, instant management, that kind of thing is still part of our remit. We also get more involved and think more about the service we're providing as an IT organization to the business. So we look after a lot of the metrics and the reporting across IT. Surveys, sentiment survey being one, but obviously our service management tool set as well. So we send out surveys at the end of every ticket, we collect those metrics and we quite fastidiously go through the comments that were provided on those surveys.
2) And then the other half is our end user technology team, which is a bit more focused on the technology itself. So we refer to them as our second line team, but it's desktop support, desktop implementation, builds, patching, fundability management, that kind of thing.
And actually now I think we've maybe looked at Nexthink initially as a tool to use, an IT or technology tool to use. And I think now we look at it quite differently now that we're more into digital experience management, we use it more as a sentiment capture tool and ask more existential questions really.
How can end user teams improve their communications in IT?
We really get involved in active listening. Meaning: we ask the end users what they need from IT? What they are getting? What they're not getting? How can we can make things better? Plus, we compare that with a lot of surveys we take, engaging with our userbase and capturing the top three things that we've done in that reporting period.
Typically it's been sort of six months, but we might try and accelerate that, make that a bit more often depending on what happens over the course of the next 12 months. And especially with the data that we get out of our most recent user sentiment campaign. So that's kind of our biggest thing really. For us, we had a good conversation a little while ago, actually about banging the drum within IT and making sure that we celebrate our successes.
The real achievement is in seeing that rise in employee satisfaction. And obviously we measure that through our DEX score. So really what we want to focus on is finding those continual service improvement initiatives that we can pick up on and drive forward and then see that translate into an improvement in our DEX score and ultimately that happiness and efficiency and effectiveness of our user base rather than just, you know, continually, commemorating our own achievements and putting that out there across the business.
How does your team calculate a digital experience and job well done?
We’re probably at the beginning of our journey in a lot of ways in terms of measuring our end user experience. We pulled together a broader customer satisfaction survey that we're planning to put out as well in the coming months. And then obviously we've got our kind of standard service management ticket login survey as well that we're using, so that's probably the biggest benchmark we've got about how well we’re doing.
We’ve realized in the last 12 months, that that's on its own, that's not really good enough. We need an amalgamation of all of these things to measure what we're doing and how successful we've been. But in saying that we have got our DEX score, we've got our other experience scores as well. We've created a few other different dashboards over the last 12 months, probably our most successful one of which was our device compliance dashboard. We threw that together quite a while back now, maybe 12 months ago, maybe slightly longer, and managed through that dashboard, actually, and the insights that gave us to increase our compliance score from 7 to 9.91. And that was just through not really knowing where we were in terms of how compliant we were, device to device.
And then I guess another key one has been our ticket reduction. And this feels quite old school actually talking about this sort of stuff on this show. But the number of tickets that we have had open historically has been at 7.1 – which is massive in relation to the number of users that we've got. And over time, we've managed to reduce that ticket backlog right down to a far more manageable level which has now enabled our first and second line teams to move away from focusing on ticket volume and instead focus on individual tickets themselves and give them their full attention and really add that value that we expect.
Also, we've really just started properly measuring our service level agreements in a meaningful way. We were kind of measuring them before, but maybe not as much as, or not as fastidiously as we could have been.
