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Putting the “user” back into “end user computing”

Chris Bradford | End User Services Manager | Kingfisher IT

I'll kick this series of 'show and tell' articles off with the premise that the "Consumerisation of IT is here, and it's done" - there is no going back and even given the choice, I wouldn't want to go back. At Kingfisher our colleague-led digital workplace revolution is underway and it's as exciting as it is challenging.

I'll start with how our EUC journey started, with the transformation of our traditional Desktop Support model into something modern and colleague-centric, a service that our colleagues rave about in our annual IT survey, a service that we named “TechStop”.

TechStop is our take on a “modern” colleague support experience, a walk-up, first come first served “front of house”, where customer service and experience trumps everything.

The synergies here to our core retail business are apparent and how we run and measure its efficacy embodies this through its single, core performance indicator, the ephemeral and generally often challenging CSAT.

Let me take you back to early 2016, a time where there was no TechStop. The user desktop support “journey” varied (significantly) by store support office, consisting of walk-ups to the various teams across our IT function or phone calls/ desk visits and if you'd talked to our desktop support teams (both in-sourced and out-sourced) about CSAT, at the time, people would have thought you had some kind of complex disease worthy of its own acronym.

It's fair to say that the customer was not “front and centre” of everything that we were doing. Whilst our metrics (the ways in which we measured service performance) at the time were “green” our colleagues were not happy with the support experience across our sites. The as-is service was inconsistent, but the feedback wasn’t.

I really subscribe to the mantra that culture trumps strategy, culture > strategy or that culture eats strategy for breakfast (other variations are available). We had to change the way in which we were engaging and supporting our colleagues, and how we defined and measured our services in order to deliver the level change that was necessary. As the phrase goes, "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig" - we had to dare to do something fundamentally different, minor changes weren't going to cut it.

Going back to my earlier premise, that "Consumerisation of IT is here, and it's done" we looked at changes in consumer electronics sector and relating customer experience, the ‘walk-up, front of house' model looked to be the very epitome of what we were looking to deliver. We took the concept and looked at how we could apply it in an enterprise environment and thus 'TechStop' was born. Over what has been virtually 3 years we've opened six TechStop's across multiple countries. We've built a culture of continuous feedback and improvement around a service that I can honestly and proudly say that puts the customer first and at the very centre of everything it aspires to achieve. The colleague experience is now consistent across locations, and we invest time in making sure this consistency remains.

Did we land the cultural change? I think so. This was HARD. We provided retail training to some of our technical staff (and partners) to help build a customer mindset and continue to coach the team on a "being more Meerkat" when they are working on the TechStop. How we measure success has fundamentally changed. We rarely discuss SLA's, not because they're not there but because they are an implicit part of our core service metric, CSAT. The TechStop service has become the gold standard for CSAT within Kingfisher, a standard that our other services can aspire to and learn from.

Whilst the connection to our store colleagues here may not be explicit, it is implicit. By enabling a faster, consistent and feedback oriented service to all of our store support office colleagues they can get the help that they need, when they need it, meaning they can get on with their role in underpinning our retail business.

With this service in-place, and leveraging the feedback loop it provides we were in a fantastic position to kick-off our Modern Workplace initiatives to support our digital workplace revolution.