#stafffeedback

I found another interesting paper on dashboard design.

Using Feedback Intervention Theory to Guide Clinical Dashboard Design By: Dawn Dowding, PhD, RN, FAAN, Jacqueline Merrill, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, and David Russell, PhD https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6371234/

The authors recognized that dashboards could be used to provide feedback to staff to improve their performance. They used the Feedback Intervention Theory to inform the design of a dashboard. Usability testing/evaluation is used in the design process.

I am so happy that I returned to school to expand my knowledge of information systems (first a MS degree at UMBC and then my PhD studies). I learned a lot and was able to immediately apply the knowledge to improve my job performance. I am happy that I discovered usability. It is a good fit for me because I always championed the "voice of the user." Apparently, I was into design as well.

I have several years of experience designing screens/user interfaces (UI) for new software. I first worked with the UI Designer to ensure the UI would allow the user to complete all tasks/details included in the use case. Later, I prepared UI to go along with requirements for a financial area. I worked with subcontractors that represented the users as well as the users themselves.

When your customer base is small and customer support tasks aren’t very complicated, you can get away with pen and paper for a lot of customer queries or complaints. However, as your company grows, both in customers and staff size, you’re going to need some specialised software to keep your staff on top of things, following up on complicated support tickets and ensuring the quick response that all customers need.

Customer support software is a surprisingly diverse field, with a lot of competitors distinguished by pricing, extra features like social media integration, and overall complexity. There’s customer support software for newbies and startups all the way to the highly technical software suites used by large corporations and government offices, there’s free software and software that can cost up to hundreds of pounds in total, and it can be almost impossible to find customer support software that fits your budget, customer and staff size.

Here’s some customer support software that manages to meet most, if not all, of your company’s requirements:

Startups, Newcomers and SSBs:

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is one of the best Customer support software packages available for businesses who can’t cough up the money for a yearly subscription, as it’s free for small teams or individuals, and you can check if your company is eligible for that here.

On top of that, it’s both comprehensive enough for advanced users and accommodating enough for novices: its features consist of automated ticketing mechanisms, support inboxes accessible by the entire team, social customer support, knowledge bases or information portals, and community forums. The system also has integrated ticket-time tracking functionality that helps identify the bottlenecks that hamper support operations.

LiveAgent

LiveAgent prides itself on ease of use for people new to customer support software. Inside, you will find all vital help desk functions, including live chat, file sharing, contact forms, email support, and integration with social media. If you’re looking to go beyond the traditional help desk capacity, we suggest you look at the product’s gamification suite, POP3 accounts, and intuitive statuses that make LiveAgent different than its competitors. The same as with Freshdesk, you will be offered a comprehensive yet free trial to see what the product is about.

Mid-Size Businesses, Customer-Focused Businesses

Samanage

So what makes Samanage different from LiveAgent and Freshdeck? Completion of tickets and requests is one of the most cumbersome and time consuming tasks that some companies have to deal with, and Samanage can be used to streamline it. Initially, it will route support from the IT team to the self-service database, from where teams can later pull off best performance practices. It will also make it possible to monitor assets and contracts in real time, secure data better than most tools mentioned in this article, and manage and resolve incidents related to complex IT operations. In short, if you need tickets completed as quickly and accurately as possible, have a look at Samanage.

SalesForce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud provides users with a system for powerful customer engagement and interaction through popular channels, such as video and social media. With Salesforce Service Cloud, managing customer cases and other concerns is a breeze since they can be accessed from a single, unified interface. The platform is also built and optimized for various mobile devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Customers can also access the system’s knowledge base and reach out to other members within the Salesforce community who can help them with the issues they are experiencing. If you work heavily in social media and need to respond quickly, this versatile customer support system is ideal.

The term “Soft intelligence” sounds like something out of a spy thriller, but it’s actually a concept based around implementing feedback that usually gets ignored or never voiced. Things like having a vending machine stocked with a more diverse array of products, or better chairs that don’t creak and exacerbate back issues and other little improvements that go a long way to your employee’s well-being and motivation.

Soft intelligence can also alleviate a problem that comes with all businesses: an observation or complaint that might be awkward to explain as part of a quality-of- life improvement. Anonymised suggestions can help take the edge off of these improvements, as people can be more open about what they think without caving in to fear of disciplinary action or peer pressure.

While these little suggestions, observations and complaints don’t need to be acted on, it can go a long way to improving the lives of your employees. The fewer annoying niggles about their job that they have to contend with, the better, as they can wear people down after a while. This can take the form of being less efficient at their job, becoming disinterested in the company’s future and their job and can eventually result in them walking out. Meanwhile, when you make these small changes you can end up producing employees that are loyal, operating at 100% efficiency and not having to take time out of work for medical reasons, for things like back pain, Repetitive Strain Injury, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, eye strain and other office maladies that build up over time. Your employees know that their voices have been, and will be, heard – which is more than you can say for a lot of business, where the work day is a daily grind that makes them stressed and tired.