At Experience Design, we often meet Service Delivery organizations that are challenged to improve the services they deliver. One of the common observations we see is that many service delivery organizations forget to see the experience from the customer's perspective. Customer in this context refers to both external customers or the employees in your organization (internal customers). The service portal may look good, but the end-to-end customer experience suffers from not being customer friendly. Small things can have a big impact. 

Let me give an example. A customer has an issue and raises a case. We often see that customers choose the wrong service or wrong category when they create a case either via self-service or via a service desk. They get a case-ID back as a reference to their case.

When the case is assigned to an agent, a common design error we see is that the case is closed because it was with the wrong category, and the agent opens a new case with the correct category. Sometimes the agent even asks the customer to open a new case. The customer will find that the first case was closed without the problem being resolved. This is very annoying from a customer perspective. Additionally, the customer gets a new Case-ID, which is confusing.

Another variation of this kind of design is specific to IT services, where most large organizations differentiate between Requests, Incidents, Problems and Changes. If the customer case is set to the wrong type, e.g. as a Incident, but should have been a Change, the customer will experience the same pain as in the first example. They will receive an Incident ID as their receipt. When an agent sees that it is of the wrong type, they close the Incident and create a Change with a new ID. This approach is very confusing for the customer.

Conclusion: When a case is created, NEVER change the case-ID! If you need to update an attribute such as category, service name, record type (Request, Incident, Problem or Change), you must do that within the original case so that the customer is not bothered with multiple case-ID’s.

Lasse Koch

Partner