User personas to improve employee’s IT services satisfaction : case: Cargotec

Abstract

Companies internal IT support strategies often miss unique technology requirements of the different sets of business users. User personas can be an effective tool leading to greater employee satisfaction and higher productivity as the employees today expect personalized experiences with minimal manual interventions. The aim of the present Master’s thesis is to study how Cargotec IT services could improve employee satisfaction with the help of user personas. Cargotec IT ServiceDesk is the single point of contact for all end users for any IT related requests, but they do not have tools to understand employee’s needs, challenges and viewpoints to be able to provide more personalized services based on real needs.

The study follows the Design Council’s Double Diamond process model. Literature review discusses the ITSM and ITIL frameworks and how they can be used for managing the IT services. Employee experience at the workplaces and the ways to measure it were studied to gain understanding about the factors that influence employee satisfaction. Different methods were used to discover relevant user persona groups for Cargotec IT services and to understand how the ServiceDesk team can use the user persona information and provide personalized services in a more efficient way. A survey was sent to employees who often collaborate with the ServiceDesk team. The goal of the survey was to spot employee’s feelings of the ServiceDesk services and understand the development needs from the employees’ point-of-view. The survey showed that the service attitude and response times are at a good level but communication practices and competence of the first tier need improvements. Benchmarking was selected as a method of getting insights on how other companies are using user personas in their IT services. The hardest part was to find relevant companies for the benchmarking as it was found out that there are not many companies that use the user personas in the IT services. However, two companies were found, and interviews and desk research gave good and beneficial information to be able to proceed to the development of the user personas.

The key outcome of the research was user personas definitions, that included group segmentations based on shared characteristics, attitudes, expectations, and needs. In total, seven different user persona groups were discovered and technically implemented in the Cargotec ITSM tool. Employees were mapped to the user persona groups based on their job titles and job profile data. Technical implementation was done in a way that IT teams can easily access the data but also maintain and extend the information. A future roadmap including development items related to the user personas was created. In addition, a roadmap included other topics that had arisen during the research phase. The project goals were met, and the client was satisfied with the results and to the implemented solution that provides an easy way for further developments and improvements. One of the key findings of the research was that in a big global company, which has thousands of IT support tickets on a monthly basis, manual usage of the personas will not have the desired impact on employee satisfaction. To be able to utilize user personas efficiently, automation and the digitized employee IT journey are the elements that will lead to the targeted goal.