July 6, 2016
Three take aways:
- How to get customers excited about a new service desk
- Creative ways to market a service desk
- Learn the right way to react to customer feedback
Service desk is a product. So you’d better start treating it like one. Preparation for the release and preliminary market research is of vital importance for any product in tech world, so why not to try that with Service desk.
So how do you successfully launch a product?
There are three main stages of a product launch where marketing efforts can be employed:
– prelaunch
– launch
– post-launch
At prelaunch stage
1) Define goals of launch – in order to be able to make a proper revision afterwards and to learn about your product you need to set a baseline and a goal.
For proper success measurement, you can also use Pirate metrics: AARRR
Those metrics are usually used for startup marketing purposes but can be easily adjusted to a Service desk in the following way:
Acquisition – How a user finds your service desk
Activation – A user creates a request in the service desk
Retention – A user comes back for their next ticket
Referral – A user tells other employees to try the service desk
Revenue – Customer satisfaction
With those metrics, you can define what you are looking for after implementation and how you are going to measure the results.
2) Define positioning and messaging
Just think of the answers to the following questions: what makes your service desk better and easier than status quo & how you are going to tell the story of the product?
As long as you have managed to clearly state the benefits of a new Service Desk, it is way easier to create a funny and engaging way to share your vision through a story that could ultimately comprise all of the consequent marketing efforts.
3) Beta/Pilot
When you test your product (in our case Service Desk) with the help of beta versions, you can see where it is confusing for the users, where they face any obstacles which would help you make necessary changes on early stages.
However, beta version can also assist in changing behaviors
As we can see from the slide the adjustment to the new way of behavior should be as smooth as possible and probably special attention is required at those transitional stages.
Rule #1: Make the product easy to use
At this stage, you can see how the users are gradually adapting to working with Service desk, and as in any up-do-date product development processб you want to create an MVP and then add some extra enhancements if necessary.
4) Get feedback and buy-in
True launch story: beta-testing in cafeteria
You can do that as well to test whether your product works well for the team. You can offer to buy coffee to everyone who is willing to try out the product and give you the feedback. These are essentials of Lean methodology that might work surprisingly well with Service Desk launch.
Different ways to launch:
Rule #2: Try to iterate on the product
Again, a lean method for product management that can be and should be employed when dealing with Service desk. Just a few things changed can mean a great deal to a team and there’s no better way to know that than go, ask people and then try it out.
At Launch stage
1) Launch promotion efforts
Pick your channels
Marketing channel – is a certain way that products or services get to the end-user
2)Announcements
Write content:
– Announcement blog posts
– How-to articles and FAQs
– Posters and flyers
– Announcement email
– Tutorials and demos
– Update onboarding docs
Rule #3: Go where the people are – define where your users are, what kind of social media they use and try to reach out.
3) Have a launch party – partying is one of the best way to engage people and familiarize them in a way with a new product, make them feel more comfortable around it.
Rule #4: Celebrate – to lift morale, unite the team around your Service desk.
At Post-launch stage:
1) Review key metrics
Try to find out:
– How many employees use service desk
– How many service requests were made
– What’s the percentage of categorized tickets
– How many employees use the customer portal instead of email
2) Review feedback – make note of all the feedback that you get. Cases when everyone of the users think that your product is perfect are rare and almost unachievable, however you can find a lot of valuable information if you start digging.
3) Retrospective – we should be interested in the outcome of our marcom efforts not less that in the inputs. Retrospectives could shed the light to many things that could help you in our future related projects.
4) Testimonials – make the most of the testimonials given and audit them carefully to emphasize strong point in you product while carrying out your post-launch marketing efforts.
Top Tips from Caroline and Sarah:
Go to market:
– Go where people are
– Be creative and funny
– Include multiple touchpoints
Your service desk is a product:
– Define goals
– Make it easy to use
– Iterate and improve
We would like to congratulate Caroline and Sarah on delivering a great speech and some interesting thoughts. All the pictures were taken from their presentation slides. If you have any questions regarding Service Desk launching or ITIL processes in general, feel free to drop us a line.
