In IT the tendency is to look from the inside outwards. Achieving KPIs does not automatically mean you are doing a good job. According to Neeskens, the question is, who are you doing it for. He signals a need to increasingly adopt an approach of looking from the outside in. SLAs are still important, but processes around outcomes need to be managed, too. Neeskens: “ITsat helps you to do that. It is not just ‘the voice of the customer’, it is also a tool to link the internal world of SLAs to the outside world.”

He continues: “ITsat acts as a type of early warning system. For instance, we noticed that satisfaction in Latin America suddenly took a nose dive. KPIs such as average time to answer were being met, but there was a marked drop in satisfaction. Before our service provider’s account team was even aware of it, we could advise them that there was a problem on the central service desk in Mexico City. This all became apparent in reports on user satisfaction in individual regions. It shows that ITsat allows you to identify problems often at an earlier stage than SLA reports.”

Through ITsat, DSM has been able to cut various sourcing governance costs within their management organization by 40 percent. A great deal of DSM’s time and effort went into trying to detect problems. ITsat makes diagnostics better and faster avoiding a lot of guesswork and time spent on discussion. “An incident that you prevent is the cheapest as it doesn’t cost anything,” Neeskens explains, “and an incident that you resolve first time round will not recur. Our score for getting it right first time has risen from 70 percent to over 95 percent. Overall, the TCO has gone down by at least 10 percent with ITsat.”

The nature of DSM’s outsourcing contract has changed due to ITsat as well. They now have a model where they as DSM are responsible for the amount of work they generate for their provider, yet DSM also benefits from the savings if they get satisfied customers while doing less work. Neeskens: “ITsat is a catalyst for this.”