Looking back, Dan Lawrence, IT Services Deputy Director, brought Customer Experience (CX) to the University when he joined in late 2015, making it one of our key strategic priorities. With help from Cathie Dingwall, Deputy Head of Service Management and Liz Simcox, Head of the ITS Project Office, an initial ITS CX programme of activity soon began to take shape. By the end of 2016, Kim Yeandle-Hignell, CX and Communications Manager, joined the team in order to build on all the great work already achieved.
Fast forward, we now have a dedicated ITS CX and Communications team in place and, with the support of many ITS staff, are starting to see some positive results. We’d now like to give you an update on all the progress to date.
Laying down foundations
2017 was all about laying down the foundations of CX. This involved, developing both a CX and communications strategy–helping us deliver improved and timely communications, whilst also enabling us to build a shared understanding of our customers. Our focus was, and still is, to build positive interactions with our customers by listening, empathising, and placing them at the centre of everything we do.
We are now on our way to becoming a customer-centric organisation, and are at the leading edge of CX among UK universities.
The ITS Customer Experience team have done a fantastic job of taking existing methodologies, and tailoring them to the University’s specific requirements. The team have also adopted and adapted our methodologies with a fusion of other, reliable techniques to create something truly unique, and based upon robust, proven techniques. The University are now at the leading edge of CX among UK universities. I was recently working with a business school in France and it made me realise just how far the University of Birmingham IT Services has come within the sector. — Dr Brownell O’Connor, CX Consultant
For a full list of what was achieved during 2017, please visit the CX Activity page on the CX SharePoint site.
What’s next? Journey mapping!
We’ve a lot of CX plans in place for 2018. Top of the list is to provide all teams across the Service with an overview of CX, and how we will use our personas to journey map the customer experience. Journey mapping will help us unite around our goals to empathise, understand, and meet customer needs in order to provide a distinctive IT experience.
To find out what we have planned for 2018, please visit the CX Activity page on the CX SharePoint site.
Become an ITS CX Champion
We still have a number of challenges ahead due to limited CX resources available however, with the help and support of ITS staff, we are confident that we will be able to achieve our goals over time.
Get involved! We need one dedicated ITS staff member from each area across the Service to champion CX for their team. This does not mean taking on extra work! It’s a great opportunity to enhance your current skill set, whilst also helping your team to deliver the systems and services our customers actually want, not just what we think they want. If you’re interested in becoming a CX Champion please let us know.
Questions?
For more information about IT Services Customer Experience, please email Customer Experience and Communications.