This presentation was given by Simon Skelton on 24th April 2013 at the Service Desk & IT Support Show.
"The John Lewis Partnership is renowned for its customer service excellence, but until recently its IT Service Management relied on ‘heroic’ staff rather than smart technology and processes. This presentation explains how John Lewis is modernising its IT service and support by following the lead of its businesses, and covers system selection and consolidation, and making social and peer-to-peer support work"
RSA Conference Exhibitor List 2024 - Exhibitors Data
ITSM the John Lewis Way, by Simon Skelton - Service Desk & IT Support Show
1. ITSM The John Lewis Way
“How John Lewis built ITSM which matches its peerless reputation for customer service”
SITS13: 24th
April 2013
Simon Skelton
IT Service Improvement Manager
2. 87% of our Internal Customers are Satisfied with the Service
4. JL & Waitrose have won many awards – what lessons can we learn?
5. You have to get all components right to give Good Customer Service
6. Service
Desk
50%
Incident
Mgmt
35%
Problem
Mgmt
36%
Configuration
Mgmt *
Capacity
Mgmt *
IT Financial
Mgmt *
Availability
Mgmt *
Release
Mgmt *
Service
Continuity
Mgmt *
Security
Mgmt *
Green ≥ 80% compliant
Yellow < 80% & ≥ 60%
compliant
Amber < 60% & ≥ 40%
compliant
Red < 40% compliant
Key
Based on OGC ITIL Assessment
Questionnaires and field work
Application
Mgmt *
* ITIL conformance scores have not yet been analysed for this topic
IT Financial
Mgmt
79%
Change
Mgmt
74%
Service
Level
Mgmt
20%
Our internal processes were obviously not optimised…!
Assessed by
Dec 2010
10. We consolidated Branch Call Centres – we need to apply internally
too!
VSD JLOSDIT Ops Bridge Wtr OSD Wtr WNSPPSSDPFSSD
Corporate Facilities
Support Desk
Security Support
Desk
Personnel Policy
Recruitment
Occupational
Health
SSTs (JL Br on-site
support
JL Br Personnel &
Recruitment on-site
support
PST (part of
PFSSD but for
Partnerlink)
Personnel
Administration
Payroll & Expenses
Financial
Processing
Car Scheme
Helpdesk
Brinklow Helpdesk
Ambient
Warehouse
Helpdesk
FRV Warehouse
Helpdesk
NW Chilled
Warehouse
Helpdesk
Transport Helpdesk
All Help Desks and Service Desks with Direct contact
telephone numbers/email addresses (as identified via the
JLPNet and/or the JLPNet Telephone Directory)
Application Support
(ASG) Hit
Business
Development
Systems (BDS) Hit
Clarity Admin Hit
ID CICS Hit
ID DB2 (DBA) Hit
ID DB2 (DBA LUW)
Hit
ID Domino
Infrastructure Hit
ID MVS Hit
ID Oracle DB Hit
ID Client Team Hit
ID Windows Server
Hit
ID SQL Server Hit
ID UNIX Hit
ID Web Server Hit
Information & IT
Security
Operations Support
(OSG) Hit
Network Technical
Team (NTT) Hit
Storage Hit
Victoria Technical
Services (VTS) Hit
JL Br Distribution
Application Team
Hit
JL DSMDWM Hit
JL EDI Hit
JL DS Selling (SSM
Application) Hit
JL Stock & Sales
Hit
JL Local Prices
JL Supplier
Ordering Support
JL DS Security
Admin
JL DS Standing
Data
JL DS Buying
Replenishment
JL DS Assortment
Maintenance
Product Hub
JL DS Information
Systems
JL DSPOS Hit
JL Ab Initio Ops
Group
JL Financial
Systems Hit
PLU & Ticketing
Support
Wtr Bracknell
Systems Admin
Wtr Supply Chain
Systems Ops
(DCS) Hit
Wtr Supply Chain
Systems Ops
Wtr Commercial
Systems Ops
Wtr eCommerce Hit
Wtr Integration EAI
Support Hit
Wtr POS Support
Wtr Selling Support
Waitrose Direct
JL BranchJL Head Office JL DistributionWtr Branch Wtr Head Office Wtr Distribution
Partnership
Services
Corporate
PS
Travel &
Accommodation
Registry
John Lewis
Corporate
ServiceNow
Application Support
Waitrose
Retired Partners
PS IT
11. We aim to reduce costs by resolving issues at the earliest opportunity
15. We’ve begun to make improvements with a simple Self Service Portal
16. We need to match our internal Customers expectations...
17. We need to offer the right ‘products’ to our customers
• BYOD – Company Email on iPhones & iPads
• Free Wi-Fi in Branches now coming to Head Offices!
• Upgrade from XP to Windows 7
– Upgrade from MS Office 2003
– Install Google Chrome
(as well as Internet Explorer 8)
• Increase mailbox sizes
– Replace Lotus Notes?
• Modernise Intranet
19. Summary
• We’re unlikely to ever get the same level of investment to support
internal Customers as we do for external Customers
– Why not follow the lead of the business?!
• Internal Customer expectations are based on their personal
experience as Customers – so they’ll never be happy unless we
appear to achieve the same level!
– Define Services and put in SLA’s to manage expectations –
You wouldn’t expect John Lewis or Waitrose to say you can
expect your delivery sometime in the next couple of weeks!
• The demographics of Internal Customers are changing too
– we need to adapt our Services to meet this challenge too
I’d love to say that we already do internally match the level of service that we provide to our ‘real’ external customers, but that’s a high bar to achieve and I don’t think we’re there yet… but we’re working on it!
Overall our internal IT support satisfaction surveys are pretty good at 87%, although I’m not convinced this gives the complete picture. However, the most important information shown here is the dissatisfied people, and therefore we make sure we follow up and speak to each individual to fully understand what their issue was. These are the ‘moments of truth’ where you can actually turn someone who is negative into an advocate!
We’ve all seen how tough the economy is, and some of our competitors have obviously struggled. John Lewis and Waitrose have ridden the storm well so far, but only by proactively adapting to a changing trading environment, and changing customer behaviours and expectations. We must also adapt our internal IT Support to survive!
John Lewis and Waitrose have won many awards for customer service, so what lessons can we take and apply to our internal IT service provision…?
Good customer service is not purely about your ‘front line’ staff. To consistently provide the best service, all the end-to-end aspects of the business must all be efficient and work in harmony.
To improve our internal IT support we first had to understand which processes were not fully optimised… we obviously had plenty of opportunities to improve!
Our 20+ year old Mainframe based IT support systems, plus numerous other Incident management systems that had sprung up over the years, no longer supported our processes very well. Reporting from these tools was also extremely limited, and therefore it was “difficult to manage what you don’t measure”. We therefore ran a vendor selection and chose ServiceNow to consolidate and replace all our legacy ‘ITSM systems’. Our primary reasons for choosing ServiceNow were: We wanted to be able to keep the system up-to-date with the latest version, with minimal effort (and cost!). We need to recognise that the business want to concentrate their investment and effort on systems that directly support trading, so we need to ensure the minimum effort is directed at keeping the ‘behind the scenes’ systems up-to-date. During reference site visits it appeared that most companies using competitors products were ‘stuck’ on back-levels, as typically an upgrade required an 18 month project! With ServiceNow we found most companies were able to keep up-to-date with minimal effort. Indeed we have found that the upgrade process has been a press of button and then a matter of minutes, but of course you still need to satisfy yourself that you have no issues by testing it! We needed a modern looking system that would be easier to ‘sell’ to our user base As well as some large traditional finance customers, ServiceNow is also used by Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, so we were reassured that these would keep ServiceNow’s focus on adapting to changing trends in user base. We needed an enterprise class system (we currently open around 16,000 new logs per month!) I wouldn’t say that ServiceNow is not without areas that could be improved, but overall I think it’s proven to be an excellent product, so the tool is no longer a limiting factor, but there’s far more features we have yet to exploit!
CTI was always seen as a ‘nice to have’, so we’ve only recently introduced it when a review highlighted we hadn’t implemented it. I wish we’d done this from the start, as in the end it took our Network/Telephony team only a couple of ‘lunch times’ to get it working (also with no extra cost)! We thought it would only save a few seconds for the Service Desk, however the key benefit has been to change to tone of the conversation, as those phoning the Service Desk are pleasantly surprised and reassured that we know who they are, and we know about previous/current issues that they’ve logged! It’s also important for us to have the VIP flag to ensure we ‘go the extra mile’ for key people. A lesson learnt is to also make sure all PAs/secretaries are VIP’s too – as they are often the one’s logging issues for their Directors!
It’s a difficult balance as to whether you need IT ‘geeks’ to ensure they have sufficient depth of IT knowledge to be able to resolved issues first time, vs ‘call centre agents’ who have better interpersonal skills, but often less depth of knowledge. Overall I think it’s harder to train interpersonal skills than it is to train technology skills! Initially when we began talking about introducing ITIL some people gave feedback that “you’re just going to turns us all into robots”! We don’t want ‘call centre robots’ working completely from a script, but introducing standard opening and closing phrases is important, as people don’t like to be greeted with “Yeah, what’s up”!
We still have an issue that far too many internal ‘1 st line’ support teams have popped up over the years! The John Lewis department stores used to have one ‘call centre’ in every branch, but have now consolidated to two locations, and this has been achieved without losing the ‘local knowledge’ and ‘customer intimacy’. We need to also do this with our internal support teams, but I’m sure the politics of this is not going to make it easy!
I don’t like ‘made up consult terms’ such as ‘Shift Left’, but it does make sense to aim to move as much away from the 3 rd line as possible, as it’s cheaper to deal with things via Self Service or 1 st line where possible.
Our businesses have adapted to new customer demographics who now expect interaction using social media, and we need to apply that internally too. So far we’ve just dipped our toes in the water and turned on the ‘Facebook style ‘Live Feed’ for our (1000+) ServiceNow users, so that they can ask ‘how do I?’ questions, provide support for each other, and share their knowledge. This feature was very easy just to turn on, and I just added ‘(Beta)’ to the option so that I set the expectation that we were not providing much support for this feature, however we haven’t had to do too much support! Although, I have turned on email notifications so I can keep an eye on what people are saying! We may consider turning on the ServiceNow ‘Help Desk Chat’ feature for our internal customers in the future, which allows a chat queue, and also records the chats in the Incident log.
Fully feature rich Websites are now ‘the norm’, and www.johnlewis.com has just reached £1 billion sales in the last 52 weeks! This has grown from just £64m in 2001!
Our internal customers are also used to feature rich Websites from their own personal experience, and therefore they have a right to expect the same from our internal systems. However until we implemented ServiceNow we only presented them with a static page saying what our phone number is and our opening times! Image if johnlewis.com or waitrose.com just had a page saying please phone this number to find out what we sell!?!
We implemented a simple self service portal to allow raising of generic incidents and requests, and allow people to see the current status of a log and add additional comments. We’ve also added in Facilities requests too, as the Facilities team were keen to capitalise on what they’d seen us deliver for IT. We also implemented the forms and workflows for New Starters, Movers, and Leavers – however this took 10x longer than expected due to a lack of anyone fully understanding what the actual processes were! We’re currently working on rationalising those processes and reducing the number of teams involved too, and we’re jut starting to use Lean/Six Sigma techniques to achieve this.
Later this year we hope get agreement to take the Self Service Portal to the next level, by making it look more like a real transactional Website, which we’ll continue to populate with all our ‘products’ and services. This example is also based on ServiceNow, but using their CMS (Content Management System), which obviously looks much more engaging.
We also must offer the right products and services to ensure we have happy internal customers. Here’s some of things that are happening this year to improve the ‘offering’.
The importance of the supply chain must not be forgotten. Our JL business has moved from small local ‘Service Buildings’, and revolutionised it by implementing large ‘Semi Automated National Distribution Centres’. This is critical to support new customer expectations such as next day ‘Click & Collect’ Internally we are also looking at improving our ‘supply chain’ by consolidating our hardware and software suppliers to get better buying power and efficiency gains. We are also running an Asset & Configuration Management project to improve the cost effectiveness and efficiency of how we manage our hardware and software.
Since we’ll never get the same level of investment internally, why not just follow the lead of our businesses and ‘adapt to survive’ in the same way that they are!
