S2L: the way to a User Centric Strategy

Executive summary

For any organization offering services to users, the Shift to Left model is the roadmap to transform its way of designing, providing and supporting services. Starting at a foundational organization of four levels of Support the S2L model shows how important is for any organization to initiate that journey, set priorities and objectives. Either if your company is a startup, has escaled or is consolidated keep this model in mind to make your trip to a user centric strategy in a faster and more confident way. 

Introduction 

With this title I’ve recently participated speaking about our experience in the S2L approach at the Customer Service and Experiece summit organized by Incite Group in London in September 2019. 

Madrid Digital is a public company which provides ITC Services to Comunidad de Madrid Regional Government and Administration. 

Comunidad de Madrid is the central region of Spain, representing about 20% of the total Spanish GDP and having the highest GDP per capita of the country. It’s population of 6,6 millions has access to public services provided by a public administration governed by the regional Government, to name a few Health, Social Care, Education, Justice, Employment and so on. More information here. 

Those public employees are the users for Madrid Digital and in the last term all citizens benefit of our services. In this context, Madrid Digital is directly providing services to more than 165.000 users and also in some aspects to potentially the whole population mentioned above. 

We support more than 80.000 computers, 45.000 printing and scanning devices and 87.000 fixed and mobile telephone lines. We are supporting more than 1.200 information systems or applications that our users use daily thorough the more than 3.500 sites where the public services are provided. Finally we also support more than 9.000 network nodes including switches and wifi access points for local communications. 

S2L reference model

Most of organizations organize their operations of support in what I’d refer as a traditional way ranging from Level 1 to Level 3. 

At level 1 we deal with the reception of user cases or requests, their register, solution or escalations, depending on complexity of each one. 

At level 2 we deal with remote or on-site cases resolution that can’t be solved at level 1. It’s obvious that remote L2C is preferred over on-site L2P. 

Finally, for specific issues or most complex ones, we have level 3 that deals typically with IT infrastructures and applications cases. 

The S2L model bring us three additional levels of “support”:

- Level 0 deals with self-service or self-register capabilities for users, introducing web/mobile channels for support. Additionally we put at this level the enhancement of our IVR considering it a very real attention channel for our users. With this level we improve our user readiness to self service avoiding the need to be assisted by Level 1 staff. 

- Level -1 is related to monitoring and automation. Monitoring services from a user experience perspective in first term and extending it to most critical infrastructures. The use of auto healing mechanisms complements the readiness to be able to quickly restore services when critical events arise. 

- Level -2 includes SW and Services development and engineering and deals with software quality assurance and proactive patching of workplace devices for stability and security purposes. 

The objective is to set priorities and action plans to migrate resolution of issues from higher levels of support to lower layers of support, closer to the user.  Level -1 or -2 have been referred as “support” but really don’t solve issues but prevent them from occurring in case of level -2 and help them to be solved faster in case of level -1. At these levels we should identify which actions are we doing yet or need to be done to we aware of its contribution to make the best User Experience. 

Starting point

At the beginning it’s important to visualize what is your initial picture. In our case we were surprised to see a gap in these charts as we expected to see that we were solving tickets remotely. After analyzing the data we found out that we were using our ticket information system differently as we first thought. We also introduced slight changes in our technical groups of support procedures. 

At this point we did not have any evidence of Layers 0 to -2. 

One year later...

After one year of the launching of the web channel for user support we acehieved a pretty good rate of web channel usage of 9% in average. We did communication campaings to our users based con email messages and also adapted our IVR messages to inform them.

Despite of having about 400 service indicators we still discovered new valuable ones to measure how efficiently we were solving user cases. This process is very interesting because every week you become more aware of interesting findings. For example, we discovered that depending of user cases there are types that are more efficiently solved than others and you can readjust the procedures of less efficient to the most eficient ones. This indicator was named ATI (Added Time Index).

Layer -1 deployments

Regarding Monitoring and automation, we started it from a user experience perspective. Than means to focus on methods of monitoring that track the avaliability of most critical services. This has been demonstrated to have the highest benefit/cost ratio of monitoring just because when you have an issue at this level of monitoring it has the highest probablity to be affecting end users services.

Classical monitoring of infrastructures is much more difficult to be correlated with the impact of IT issues in services.

This can be clearly seen in our main monitoring screen that is our first level of monitoring.

When one of these spots is red it is because one critical service is down or affected and we have to start inmediatly the service recovery procedures. We also provided this view to our Level 1 team at the call center to be able to give information to users when they phoned because a critical event. This was highly important to remove users uncertainty when they reached our call center. This source of monitoring is also used to inform users in our IVR messages to inform them about major outages.

Then we focused in critical infrastructures monitoring as an important complement to quickly diagnose service incidents. When we confirm that a service is affected at our first level of monitoring, this second group of infrastructure metrics, help us to diagnose critical events much faster.

Other important set of actions at S2L level -1, were related to notification of events in real time. We had clear that to react inmediatly to critical events, they had to be notified inside our organization by any available means such phone, email, SMS, instant messaging notifications.

We finally completed this set of actions developing a mobile app to notify major or relevant incidents. While the above methods were based on service and infrastructures monitoring, this was based on our ticketing information systems monitoring, selecting very carefully the most critical cases to be displayed to get rid of the risk of spaming our support channels.

Regarding automation, to name only specific actions, we have implemented the automatic opening of tickets from diferent sources of monitoring, self restore of well known critical events and automatic phone calls to technical staff specially important on non bussiness hours to restore services when most users are away from the office, and have then available when they start their job. 

These automatic actions again have to be triggered by very carefully selected events to maintain a high efficiency in our service recovery procedures. 

Level 0 deployment

As we have mentioned above, by the end of 2017 we achieved an average 9% of web channel ussage. This was pretty different in education users. As it can be seen in the picture, we were able to slightly increase it (from 1% to 4%) through traditional communication campaings email based.

At the same time we launched new user centric services such Raices for education users we announced them that the preferred chanel for support would be the web. That´s how we achived an huge increase of use (from 4% to 27%) that was also caused by the launching of the new application but it was enough to give an average use of 7,6% by the end of 2017 for education users that remained in a pretty acceptable rate of 12% the following 2018 and 2019.

Time and cost implications of S2L strategy 

In the study for Madrid Digital regarding time we foung out that cases were solved between faster and much faster times when done at level 1, precisely between 20 and 80% faster for incidents and 15-80% for requests.

Regarding cost we found out similar results, giving cost that were multiplied by an average of 2 when we raised the levels of support. That can be clearly seen in the following picture.

Time and cost were important parameters for Madrid Digital while time was also an important one for our users. 

User feedback

After time and cost study there was something important missing. We could theoretically define our SLAs for support services that could be reached and still have user complains and on the opposite hand have defaulted SLAs and an acceptable user preception. So it was neccesary to ask our users about the service.

We implemented a user feedback channel inserting in each email notifying the solution of cases to our users, a link to a simple web form regarding the main aspects of the service.

Thats how we obtained an average score of 3.8, 3.56 and 3.29 (in a scale up to 5) for L1-L2, Infrastuctures and Applications support groups respectively.

So from a time, cost and most important user feedback perspective we can clearly conclude that S2L model is te way to a User Centric Strategy.

Takeaways

To conclude our study we can say that:

1. You can have very remarkable insights if you apply this still theoretical S2L model to your organization to set you User Centric strategy. Doing so you will have a powerful tool to guide your support and non support actions. 

2. It’s important to set your starting point and measure all time to track your progress in your roadmap. 

3. Start your monitoring from a user experience perspective complementing it afterwards. 

4. You can increase the adoption of new support channels when launching new user centric services. 

5. If you consider your organization user centric set a user feedback channel and motivate a permanent increase and analysis of it. 

6. Improve and evolve your model defining and measuring actions and indicators related to L-2    through L3. 

7. Set and track objectives and indicators at each stage of your strategy deployment.