Are your service level reports all green, but your customer is still not happy? That's because traditional time-based IT support metrics suck. Discover a better way to measure IT service quality.

2. Contents
What does good IT support look like?
Why is good IT support important?
How is IT support quality typically measured?
What’s wrong with SLA metrics?
Focus on customer satisfaction instead
Introducing Net Promoter
The benefits of Net Promoter
Introducing CIOPulse
The value of using CIOPulse
How CIOPulse can help you succeed
Why ITSM surveys don’t cut it
Next steps
About the author
Copyright & legal
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6. Relying on time-based SLA metrics as an indicator of how satisfied customers should be,
can lead to The Watermelon Effect.
The Watermelon Effect is where the traffic lights on your SLA reports are all green (so you
expect your customers to be happy), but your customers are still unhappy (red faced and
frustrated!).
This mismatch of perceptions is pretty common and you’ve probably experienced it yourself.
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What’s wrong with
SLA metrics?

7. Research from Forrester shows how prevalent the misalignment is – there are about
twice as many IT teams that think they provide great IT support than there are
businesses who feel they are getting it.
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What’s wrong with
SLA metrics?

8. 65% of IT teams think they
provide good IT support
Only 35% of businesses
feel they get it
Forrester 2012

9. One of the causes of this problem is that the metrics used in Service Level Agreements
are a deeply flawed way of measuring service quality. They mislead IT support teams
into thinking they understand how the customer feels about the service they provide.
Our customers’ experience of IT support is shaped by many factors, not just how
quickly we responded or resolved their issue. Factors such as how they were treated,
whether they could understand what they were being told or asked to do and whether
they felt well informed about what was going on and what would happen next.
Even something like time is not absolute. From personal experience, we all know there
are many factors that can make the same absolute wait time feel longer or shorter.
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What’s wrong with
SLA metrics?

10. What’s wrong with SLA
metrics?
Ultimately, these experience factors are all about expectations and perceptions, not
absolutes. The perceptions of those at the receiving end of the service – our customers.
And the outcome of their judgement is their level of satisfaction.
David Maister, a researcher on the psychology of waiting times, described this rather
succinctly with the formula: S=P-E, where S stands for satisfaction, P for perception and E
for expectation.
As P and E are both psychological in nature, S can be attained when a customer’s
perceived experience of a service, P, exceeds their expectations, E.
Absolute measures of time take neither expectations nor perceptions into account!
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11. What’s wrong with SLA
metrics?
Finally, there is the problem of customer expectations increasing over time, as predicted by
the Kano Model. For example, electric windscreens and air conditioning used to delight car
buyers. Now these features are expected as a bare minimum. Over time, customers expect
more in order to be satisfied.
As a result, when you rely solely on purely objective measures, customers may perceive
that service levels are declining even when your measures tell you they are not.
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12. If you want to measure service quality, the best way to do that is to ask your
customers.
Valarie Zeithaml put this rather nicely in her book, Delivering Quality Service: “Only
customers judge quality. All other judgments are essentially irrelevant”.
We need to stop putting so much focus on traditional, time-based SLA metrics and
start focusing on customer satisfaction. The extent to which you can keep your
customers happy determines whether your customers trust you or bypass you,
forgive your mistakes or haul you over the coals, increase your budget or squeeze
it, keeps you as their service provider or outsources you.
And if you’re always asking your customers to not just rate your service, but to tell
you what you need to do to improve (a key practice of the highly successful Net
Promoter System®), you’ll find this feedback to be a very powerful way to drive
continual service improvement.
Focus on customer
satisfaction instead
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13. Zeithaml,

14. Introducing Net
Promoter
Net Promoter® is an open-source methodology used by 65% of the world’s top 200
companies to grow their businesses by increasing customer loyalty. At its heart is a metric
called the Net Promoter Score (NPS®) that measures the willingness of customers to
recommend a company’s products or services.
An NPS is calculated by asking customers a question along the lines of, “On a scale of 0 to
10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”. Based on their rating, a
customer is categorised as a Detractor (when they give a rating of 6 or below), a Passive (7
or 8) or a Promoter (9 or 10).
An NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage
of Promoters. This results in a score ranging from -100 (all your customers think you’re
terrible) to +100 (all your customers think you’re fantastic).
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15. Introducing
Net Promoter
The real power of Net Promoter comes from two very valuable follow-up questions that
ask the customer why they gave that rating, and what the number one thing is that
they’d like to see improved.
The answer to these questions are pure gold and, when analysed and themed, provide
an excellent basis for planning service improvements.
Net Promoter is often overlooked or rejected by IT teams because of the irrelevance of
the “likely to recommend” question for an internal service provider. But that concern is
easy to address by simply changing the wording of that question to something along the
lines of…
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied were you with the support you received?”
With the question reworded, you’re free to enjoy the benefits that Net Promoter has to
offer.
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16. The benefits of
Net Promoter
Here are five reasons why IT teams should use Net Promoter to measure and improve IT
customer satisfaction:
It is a globally proven service improvement methodology trusted by brands
such as Apple, Google, Rackspace and Zappos. There are a mountain of case
studies that show how effective it can be.
Unlike traditional surveys for gathering customer feedback, a Net Promoter
survey – with only three questions – is ridiculously quick and easy for
customers to complete.
The Net Promoter concept is simple to understand by staff at all levels.
Net Promoter includes some fantastic practices that help you turn customer
feedback into improved service quality. It is not just a customer satisfaction
score but a method for improving that score.
An NPS is standardised so you can benchmark your NPS against others.
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18. Introducing CIOPulse
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23. To create a customer-centric culture, customer facing support staff need plenty of
feedback to ensure their behaviours are aligned with the culture you want to create.
Support staff need to understand what good looks like and feedback from customers
provides clear examples of good and bad customer experiences. Customer feedback
is therefore critical to the performance management process.
This is never more important than for your less competent support staff. There is a
rather scary phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, relatively
unskilled staff mistakenly assess their ability to be much higher than it is. Your worst
support staff think they’re your best! Feedback can be used to ensure employees self-
perception of their own ability is more closely aligned with reality, and from there
they can grow.
Building a customer-centric culture requires that feedback is regular. Waiting for the
annual performance review won’t work. This is why organisations such as GE,
Microsoft, PWC and Accenture have declared that they’re moving away from annual
performance reviews to more regular feedback.
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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive
bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer
from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their
ability to be much higher than is accurate.
Wikipedia

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27. “Unhappy
customers are
your greatest
source of
learning”
Bill Gates

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Trademarks
Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related
emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and
Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
CIOPulse is a trademark of Silversix Pty Ltd.
Copyright
You have permission to share this, print this and distribute it for free to anyone you like, as
long as you make no changes to its original contents or digital format.
Disclaimer
This eBook is general in nature and not meant to replace any specific advice. Please be
sure to take specialist advice before taking on any of the ideas. Dave O’Reardon disclaims
all and any liability to any persons whatsoever in respect of anything done by any person in
reliance, whether in whole or in part, as a result of this eBook.