With the impact of “the great resignation” still looming, organizations are focusing on all aspects of the employee experience to boost retention. There are several important aspects to managing the employee experience:
- Ensuring new hires can start work with everything they need.
- Providing a great experience when employees need support by making it easy to engage IT and get issues resolved promptly.
- Offering support channels and response times that meet your employees’ needs.
Two simple KPIs provide everything leaders need to know at a glance.
Zoom in on two KPIs
Onboarding Satisfaction
Since the onboarding experience sets the tone for a new hire’s ability to dive into their new role and become productive, this is a great place to start measuring. If people understand and are satisfied with IT performance during the onboarding process, they will have what they need to succeed later.
Onboarding Satisfaction should be measured via surveys at 7, 30, and 90 days, showing the progression as they become more familiar with the organization. Careful attention should be paid to the location and employment type to ensure success. This is particularly important during onboarding in organizations with remote or hybrid work arrangements.
Here are some satisfaction indicators to look for through onboarding surveys:
First 7 days
- Expected equipment, software, and access are ready and available when they arrive. They are provided with an orientation or instructions on logging in and accessing resources for the first time. (Videos are a great way to scale this, as long as they can be accessed via an onboarding application on their phone.)
- They should know where to find information and how to engage IT support.
- Any issues they experience on their first day should be handled and resolved promptly to avoid escalation.
First 30 days
- They should know how to get new items they learn about as they settle into the new role.
- Access that requires training should be provisioned promptly upon completing training.
- They should understand any SLAs or timeframes to expect when they need support.
- They should no longer need to escalate issues.
At 90 days
- All of their needs should be handled, with the only contacts being issue-related.
- They should feel that IT meets and that they have the tools they need to do their job.
Tracking helpdesk ticket volumes and the percentage of tickets escalated by new hires can help ensure acceptable satisfaction survey results. These two measures should be reported across the defined demographics for all three intervals. Use the volume and topic trends to improve onboarding materials and the flow for better future experiences of new hires.
To ensure the employee experience continues to be acceptable after 90 days, IT should continue to survey employees routinely, using the same demographic breakdowns.
Customer Effort Score
The move to hybrid and remote work environments and increased system complexity has made it more challenging to support end users at a time when the employee experience is a vital area of focus. That’s why we suggest borrowing a page from the customer support playbook and applying it to your internal employees.
Several factors affect the ability to provide a great user experience:going beyond service level agreements (SLA) to experience level agreements (XLA), designing adequate omnichannel support, ensuring agents have the tools they need to support end users remotely, and proactively managing computing environments, so users experience fewer service interruptions. This is particularly critical as the employees move farther away from support teams.
With all that goes into creating this experience, a single metric is needed to demonstrate results as improvements are implemented. This is the role of the Customer Effort Score (CES). CES measures how easy it is to engage support and obtain the needed help.
Several factors will affect the CES for IT support:
- Ease of contacting IT
- Ability to find information quickly and easily
- The agent’s ability to perform troubleshooting and repairs on-site or remotely
- Satisfaction with the way troubleshooting and support are provided
- Satisfaction with the overarching user journey for support
CES has been a critical metric for years when supporting consumers. It is why we’re now asked to rate or service anytime we buy something, from rides to airline flights to furniture. IT should do the same at ticket closure, looking at both engagement and how support has been delivered.
Look locally to see holistically
To ensure effectiveness, measurements should be done across different workplace demographics: by business unit, location, location type (remote, hybrid, on-site), and employment type (full-time vs. temporary) to ensure each group is effectively supported. For example, if targets aren’t met for hybrid workers, there may be something specific to supporting this group that needs to be addressed. Viewing the results across different demographics is essential and can point to areas where support lags.
Adding these two measures to executive dashboards is a great way to demonstrate success in managing the employee experience and gain leadership confidence in IT’s operational abilities.
Start by making support easier
As you track these KPIs, consider how your IT tools support your goals. Check out GoTo Resolve, the all-in-one IT support platform that gives agents an easy way to respond, act, and resolve issues – all in one place.
