Ever wondered how IT can truly enhance business productivity and employee satisfaction? Get ready to uncover the secrets behind successful IT experience management with Sami Kallio and Sakari Kouti from Happy Signals. Sami, the CEO and co-founder, shares the mission of placing human experiences at the heart of IT decision-making, while Sakari offers insights from the Global IT Benchmark report, backed by data from millions of end users. Learn why measuring IT’s impact on end-user experience is the key to creating happier, more efficient organizations.
Join us as we dissect the complexities of cultural differences in IT experiences and how understanding regional feedback can revolutionize your IT strategy. From a Norwegian company's surprising customer happiness boost through a communication shift, to a U.S. company's budget decisions driven by experience data, discover actionable strategies for transforming IT from a reactive to a proactive service provider. Sami and Sakari explain how focusing on genuine customer assistance not only enhances IT service delivery but also motivates IT workers, leading to a more meaningful and satisfying work environment. This episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone seeking to leverage experience data to lead IT teams and elevate organizational performance.
Ever wondered how IT can truly enhance business productivity and employee satisfaction? Get ready to uncover the secrets behind successful IT experience management with Sami Kallio and Sakari Kouti from Happy Signals. Sami, the CEO and co-founder, shares the mission of placing human experiences at the heart of IT decision-making, while Sakari offers insights from the Global IT Benchmark report, backed by data from millions of end users. Learn why measuring IT’s impact on end-user experience is the key to creating happier, more efficient organizations.
Join us as we dissect the complexities of cultural differences in IT experiences and how understanding regional feedback can revolutionize your IT strategy. From a Norwegian company's surprising customer happiness boost through a communication shift, to a U.S. company's budget decisions driven by experience data, discover actionable strategies for transforming IT from a reactive to a proactive service provider. Sami and Sakari explain how focusing on genuine customer assistance not only enhances IT service delivery but also motivates IT workers, leading to a more meaningful and satisfying work environment. This episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone seeking to leverage experience data to lead IT teams and elevate organizational performance.
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Speaker 1:
Hey everybody, really intriguing tech chat today around human-centric IT experience management, a category that Happy Signals knows a lot about. Sami and Sikari how are you?
Speaker 2:
Very good, very good, and thank you, Evan, for having us.
Speaker 1:
Well, thanks for being here, Really intrigued by the great work you're doing. And, sami, maybe you could start off by introducing yourself as CEO co-founder at Happy Signals and the big idea behind your startup and vision.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, thank you, and, as you said, founder of Happy Singles, one of the co-founders and really driven by helping IT to really understand what experience end users are having with IT and really helping organizations to use that data in the decision making of IT Hopefully something that in this video recording we can really kind of give you insights to what we have learned during those 10 years and maybe giving some ideas of why experience management or why that people data experience data is so important for IT. But maybe, Eman, if I can say, kind of the problem we really are solving there. It's like, traditionally IT has been very, very good in understanding how we work in IT. We know the operational data and even more we know the technology data. But then there is the question do we understand how the people that are using the technology are feeling about it and are we making them efficient? And the I very often have with with c-level people when I have a discussion with them about the.
Speaker 2:
It is that what is the real, the one purpose that it is having. The purpose is to help the rest of the organization be happy and efficient. There is very few businesses where the it itself is the business, but we are there for making the others efficient and happy, but still the old metrics escalate and so we have been measuring how we work and thinking that is enough, when the reality is that we have to be measuring. Are we creating value for the end users? And that is where we are helping IT leaders to really change giving them that people data so they can do better decisions. Leaders to really change the giving them that people data so they can do better decisions. That is very, very shortly the the mission of happy signals that we want to help organizations to really understand that experience and use that in the decision making.
Speaker 1:
But what a great mission, yeah I'd love the car to chime in on. You know his role and background a little bit, and also again why experience data is so crucial for IT decision-making Sure.
Speaker 3:
So my name is Sakari Kure and I've been working with Happy Signals now for about four years and one of the roles and probably the most relevant one for this conversation is that I write the benchmark reports with Sami. So looking into the data, digging into the data much deeper and the role of decision-making and experience data for decision-making is, as Sami was explaining, the enabling part of IT. It is meant to enable the business itself and sometimes we ask, when people ask about why we exist. One phrase that I like to ask is when was the last time that you heard thanks to IT? I was able to, and when you speak to large organizations, a lot of times the people who are on the other side say well, I can definitely tell you when was the last time I wasn't able to do something because of IT. And when you do experience management right, it really highlights and brings out the reasons and the focus for the IT teams to do the things that will make people more effective and productive at work.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic, so I'm intrigued. Tell us about the Global IT Benchmark report how the data is collected, what it covered, what were the goals there.
Speaker 3:
Sure. So should I take this, or do you want to take it Sami?
Speaker 2:
Goals, I got to go.
Speaker 3:
Okay. So the global IT experience benchmark is collected from HappySignals customers, and the way that we're able to do that is that the data that we collect is standardized across all of our customers in all 130 plus countries, over 2 million plus end users that are responding to these surveys. So the data is collected in different IT touchpoints. The most common one at the moment is ticket-based IT support services so incidents, requests and so forth but we also collect data from other areas, such as laptops and computers, enterprise applications, remote work, etc. So the data is all standardized, we collect it into the platform and therefore we're able to see both differences in terms of regional differences in the world, but also much more on a micro level when it comes to different aspects of IT. So it's standardized. It's all coming from HappySignal's customers, and all of those customers are people that then have chosen to focus on experience as a key driver for IT management in their organization and maybe it's a good idea.
Speaker 2:
The core is that these are the normal employees of those organizations, so it's not IT people or buyers that are telling how they feel about IT. It is the real, normal end users of all our customers. So that is maybe good to remember. And now, when we go through the results a bit, I would say that remember that these are organizations that are already focused on experience management. So even though it is a global benchmark, it is from organizations that have already focused on making the experiences better. So most likely, on average, the results would be lower than or for sure they would be lower than in our customer base.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, really interesting. Sami, and tell me what are some of the biggest learnings from the Global IT Benchmark survey. Could you boil it down for IT leaders?
Speaker 2:
Maybe, if I start from there and then, sakari, you add more. I think one thing that is very often forgotten is that now, when we are asking people's experiences, their own background influences how they are answering surveys and how they are telling their opinions and how open they are, and that's why one big part of the global benchmark is about the cultural differences, and this is very important for our global customers. That might have 100 countries where the employees are coming from. And, if I use an example here, if you have a score of 75 and that would be from German employees, that is very, very great results from German employees. That is very, very great results. The same number coming from US would be terrible result because the average score in Germany is 60 and average score in US is 81. So you really have to understand how people are kind of thought and how they are thinking. Are they more likely to give positive feedback or negative feedback?
Speaker 2:
But in overall, even though we now go to benchmark numbers a bit, it's not about competing against the benchmark. Experience management is always understanding what we could do better to improve the reputation of IT in your own organization. It's never competition against others, but the learnings that we try to share in this set is to give you understanding that what we have already learned and others have learned, what is realistic, what is normal, to find those areas for improvement for yourself. I think the good thing is to understand that experience is not something that is equal in every country. Sakari, maybe you add on that one.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, one interesting aspect is that, as Sami mentioned the US and Germany. One interesting aspect is that, as Sami mentioned the US and Germany, we have also had customers that have been thinking about how can they create a completely standardized offering of IT services to every single part of the world. And then, when they start comparing traditional CSAT or NPS scores, for example, they say why can't we make those German or Dutch people happier? Like we need to put more manpower there, more resources, more support. And it's almost like hitting your head against the wall, because it's the cultural rating patterns that actually change so much of what is good and what is excellent.
Speaker 3:
So if you get a seven or an eight in Germany, that's really good score. So don't put more money trying to get those eight or nines or tens, because you might never get them. On the other hand, if you're getting, for example, nines or tens, let's say in some of the Asian countries that's the norm. So you shouldn't be happy with a seven or eight, because then you're doing something that isn't up to par with the cultural rating patterns in those locations. So just understanding that can already help allocate resources in a better way. You take away from the areas where you know you're already doing basically as good as you can, and you can allocate the money to locations where you know, based on the benchmark, that despite good scores, we're actually not at the level where we should be. So it's about prioritization and knowing where to put the money, where it matters most.
Speaker 2:
And Sakari, would you agree that, even though the global kind of aspect is very, very important, I think the biggest finding in the whole 11 IT experience reports that we have done is really the understanding that it is not only about the happiness of end users or their experience. We are measuring always also lost time regarding to all the different IT services and as an example, like in IT incidents, we have asked this now in the last six months from 1 million people. The average is that they say that they lost three hours, 12 minutes a ticket and that can be turned into money. So if you really think about, if you have outsourcing partner as an IT organization, you have outsourced your IT on tickets, you're paying quite much less than 160 euros or $60 per ticket which might be the cost of those employees' lost time for your organization. So we kind of help organizations to not only understand the experience but where end users are losing time because not IT able to support them on the best possible level, and that makes the business case of experience management and understanding employees' experiences. But there is also cultural differences in there. So Western Europe two hours 40 minutes on average and in the US three hours 22 minutes, if I remember exactly right.
Speaker 2:
So people are losing and estimating times also differently, but that is always the perception of lost time, so they tell IT how much time they lost. My estimate is never fact, it's just my estimate. But when you start to kind of like in tickets, you have different ticket categories and then you realize that if the ticket is about that category, the average lost time is six hours. If it's about that ticket, it's less than one hour. So which is the one that we should be optimizing and prioritizing in IT service management is quite clear when you start to understand that, and also everybody listening to this podcast is that only 13% of all tickets are causing more than 80% of lost time.
Speaker 2:
The question is do you know which are those 13% of tickets in your organization? And that is only the people can tell you that, and that is like then IT really have understood the business priorities and then we can go back to the business stakeholders and, hey, these are the areas we have to now focus on, because those are the areas where we are not enough good to create great experiences every time, because in some cases it doesn't really matter if it's open for three days, they are still losing 15 minutes, but in some other areas they lose time much, much faster because it's more critical for them. But that is maybe the big learning from the whole. Benchmark thing is that, whereas they lose time much, much faster because it's more critical for them but that is maybe the big big learning from the whole benchmark thing is that it's not only about happiness, it's about efficiency, as well, that's so important.
Speaker 1:
What are some of the implications for IT leaders when they read the survey and the results? What did they tell you needs to change, has to change. What do they want to change? What are their aspirations? I'd love to hear about some of the feedback, the signals, from some of your customers and partners. That's pretty shocking findings.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, of course, I think very typically we are discussing about how to discuss about these things with the business and also how to lead the whole IT teams with the experience data. So it's not so much about the whole benchmark report, it's more about how I really start to lead the organization in a new way. If you really think about the whole situation in the IT leader's mind SLAs and the old metrics tech metrics they are more like a management tool. You are telling to the organization how they must work. This is how the process must go, this is the time that it can take. When you move to experience, you are telling them what is important. So for me, that is a leadership tool and that mindset is the thing that changes a lot for IT leaders that they don't anymore have to be telling exactly how the organization and partners have to work, but they can talk about the value that, hey, these are things.
Speaker 2:
The efficiency of end users. The experience of end users is the one that we are partner I want you to prioritize. I don't care so much about the SLAs, I care about the experience and efficiency, and if those are increasing, SLAs can be forgotten and that change is quite a big one, because we have been in IT working for SLA way for four years, 20 years or something, and that is the thing that we typically have, that discussions with the C-level IT people, that how to take those steps. And for us it's very clear Start to measure, start to learn, do first decisions. You cannot jump to experience management culture in a month. You cannot even do that in a year. If you want to be there in two years, then we say, now it's time to start to measure and learn how to do it, and that's why kind of the whole experience management is a way of working rather than just the metrics itself.
Speaker 1:
I love that and maybe shift the discussion a bit from the report and the approach to some real-world use cases of how IT is using HappySignals data, particularly maybe around things like self-service functionality is a very hot topic. Maybe a story or two might inform us as to how you're helping customers, either Sami or Sakari.
Speaker 3:
I can take one, and I love the fact that you said do you have the singles? And like you said singles, I'm thinking one-hit wonder, because sometimes it feels like people are looking for a one-hit wonder when they're starting to do experience management, looking for a magic wand that they implement once and then everything is rosy and green forever after right. But actually one of the things with experience management that is important is to understand how important it is to do this on a continuous basis, because it's a little bit more like looking outside and looking at the weather, and if you do an annual survey to understand what the experience is, it's like looking outside. Today it's sunny here in southern France. Do I expect that to be the case for the rest of the year? You need to have that measurement ongoing on a continuous basis and in an easy format to digest it.
Speaker 3:
And one really good example of this was one Norwegian company that was working with an offshore service provider and in the script the way that they would greet customers or the end users contacting IT support they would speak to them with polite phrases, with small talk and everything else, and happiness was quite low.
Speaker 3:
They were wondering what's going on here and then they realized that these Norwegian end users, they just wanted to get down to business, they wanted to continue with their work. So they changed the script from hello how are you doing today? Is the weather nice in Norway today? And they just started it with how can I help? That small change in the script actually changed the happiness, because then the people who were receiving the support felt that, hey, they really care about the time that I'm spending in this support interaction. So that's one small example, but I think that really highlights how traditional metrics could so easily miss out on a small detail like that, where people feel that they both are not as happy as they could be and also are losing precious time in doing small talk with somebody that they just want to fix their problem.
Speaker 2:
If I then take a kind of an example of the other end, meaning how to use the IT budget, because there is no IT organization that would have unlimited IT budget. You always have to make a decision to use the money to the areas that will create the most of the value. And there was one of our customers in the US that they had a stakeholder that was shouting very heavily to IT that one of the customers in the US that they had a stakeholder that was shouting very heavily to IT that one of the applications was really, really bad. It has to be replaced. It did believe that and they started to plan replacement for that software. But simultaneously they took our product in use and started to measure 20 of the key applications of the organization. It happened to be that this application that they already were planning to replace was rated one of the highest by the normal employees. But there were some other applications that were rated very low and were causing issues for the efficiency of the organization. So IT was able to go back to that one stakeholder and say, hey, sorry, but based on this you are wrong and we are spending the money for this and this application rather than the one that you said and when he saw the result, like, okay, it might be than me and only a couple of people have been talking they were able to use the money for more efficient use or more important use.
Speaker 2:
And that is the strength of the whole understanding how people feel.
Speaker 2:
Because then id don't have to go only to ask business what is important for you, but we can go to meet the business, say, dear stakeholder sales director, this is what your thousand people told me, those things we are good in IT and these are the areas we have to improve.
Speaker 2:
Do you agree? So we can be more proactive service provider internally for the stakeholders of our business, proactive service provider internally for the stakeholders or business? And that really is the kind of the what I call culture, like human centric cultures. Really, when you start to do budget decisions based on the experience, data and Sakari gave you a very practical example of the, of the very like how we work and how we communicate level, but all the stakeholders in ID who are owning any services or any platforms or solutions should know how the people feel about those services so that we can really understand are we creating value or not? I think that is the mindset, the culture of change that has to be happening now in IT, that it is not that bad thing that let's stay away from those end users. It is the good thing that we understand how they feel so that we can really help them, and that really is motivating as well.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely. And let's talk about the psychology of work and that you mentioned motivated IT workers. That's something we don't have a lot of these days. People are sadly doing more with less. They're overwhelmed and a lot of workers are disconnected. We've seen that through all the surveys. It's a real problem of checking out overload, burnout, et cetera. What is the role of HappySignal? Is that IT service and experience management in general in making happier workers and happier support staff?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think the example that I have been using most is coming from a very practical operational level of IT. If you take the serviceless agent and think about what is their work like when they are using and measured by SLAs Very typical SLA is that how many tickets you solve per hour. Mindset is that then you are measuring how fast I'm getting rid of my customers. And when you start to measure experience of end users and giving that feedback directly to agents, you're measuring how they help people. As a mindset, I would rather go to a place where I'm helping people than when I go to work. My mindset is that I'm killing tickets and that is a kind of huge change in their mindset. When we did a survey to our customer base, we asked what are the biggest benefits they have gotten from experience management and 64% told us more motivated IT people, and that is such that we and the younger generation even more they want to do meaningful job.
Speaker 2:
Having service up and running kind of is meaningful, but if the application on that server is creating value and making end users efficient, then most of us IT people will feel that, hey, now I'm creating some value. Value is not delivering something on time and budget If the application delivered doesn't create any value, and that is kind of the big mindset that the experience management is really focused on time and budget if the application delivered doesn't create any value, and that is kind of the big mindset that the experience management is really focused on changing that. What is enough? When we deliver IT services, applications, devices, whatever it is not enough that we deliver those. Those devices have to work for the benefit of end users and I think that is challenging because we are so used to the traditional way of working. But I think there are a lot of people now very excited about experience management and what that changes and how that changes IT.
Speaker 1:
Including myself. It's a fascinating topic. As we wrap up here, what can we look forward to short term, long term? On new features, updates, roadmap what do you guys have on the radar? I'm guessing there's something to do with AI and machine learning on your roadmap as well. What can you share at this point?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think that was quite obvious choice from you and for sure, that is the thing. So we have huge customers, some of them having 300,000 end users, so you can imagine how much feedback they do get on daily basis, and AI is helping them to really recognize the patterns and really understanding that feedback coming across the countries and so on. So we are using AI to summarize feedback and give people the kind of understanding on the data so that not everybody has to read all the feedback coming in, even though every feedback is valuable. But AI is helping them to understand what is meaningful, things to fix, and that is the kind of the direction we are going. Also, we are moving to do more and more enterprise service management kind of services. So when companies have been doing service management in IT, most of them are now doing that also in HR, procurement, finance and so on. So that is another area where we are widening our offering. But AI is very, very heavily part of the whole product development. It's not a separate thing.
Speaker 3:
It's part of everything in our product in the future, and I think if I would add one thing there is that of course, we scratch our own itch or we eat our own dog food whatever term we would like to use and one of the things that I really like about working at HappySignals as well is that everything is done in co-design with the customers.
Speaker 3:
So we don't do AI for the sake of doing AI, but we really consider where are machines good, where are people good and how can we support the decision-making of the people working in IT, and not so that the machine would do the decisions for them. Because there's so much context understanding, there's so much context understanding, there's so much priorities that will never be in the data. But if you provide them this visibility of experience data and how it impacts end users, they will be able to make better decisions with the data than they would be making without the data. And if AI can help with that, great, let's go all in for it. But it's not just for the sake of doing things, but really thinking about how can we?
Speaker 1:
make those same IT workers think the same way, that our slogan is that more smiles, less time wasted, that time is spent well and it's allocated where it matters most. Fantastic Well, so insightful. So much amazing work. Congratulations on all the success. Speaking of happiness, summer in Finland is a very happy time, so I'm guessing you're going to have a lot of lakes and islands and rivers in your near-term future. Is that what we can expect?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that is the case. And, of course, evan, maybe you don't know, but Finland has been now seven times selected to be the happiest country of the world, so that's why we are from Finland, so it's a good place. I have questions about that.
Speaker 1:
I have deep questions, but we'll save that for another episode. I've been in Finland in December, january. People don't look so happy, but I'll come back to that topic on another show. All kidding aside, thanks so much for joining. It's really enlightening work you're doing and so informative. Take care, guys. Have a great summer, thank you. Thank you, you too. Take care.
