IT Support Profiles

In HappySignals measurement tool, we define employee into four different behavioural profiles.

In HappySignals measurement tool, we define employee into four different behavioural profiles. In this episode we explain those profiles and what drives different types of people in your organisation. You can download an free eBook about the profiles here:



Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to HappyToday Podcast. This is a podcast for those want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to episode six of HappyToday podcast. Today I think it's our favourite topic. It's IT Support Profiles, and this is something that is pretty unique to the product that we are offering, but I think the main concept is this really generic and is something you can learn from even though you wouldn't be our customer.

So what we do with every IT ticket is that once per year we ask from the employees two questions. If you are having an IT support issue how do you act? are you going to help yourself or just fix it yourself, or will you try to seek support, try to find a colleague or call the support or whatever it might be? But also, how confident are you with the IT devices, the IT services that you are using? And based on these two questions, we actually have four different profiles. The profiles are: Doer, Prioritiser, Trier and Supported. So maybe some of you can start telling us a little bit more about the bits of the profiles. How do they react and what kind of things they value.

Sami Kallio: I would just add one thing in that, in the beginning in the company, we deal with 500 people, one-to-one, and could be really difficult to find what people love and hate. And these profiles were done by our psychologist in those interviews, or after those interviews. So it is not me as an engineer that came up with that, this is how we divide people, these really are based on different kind of behaviour models and that's ... And these metrics is quite used, also, in consumer work. So even, you don't know if you enter any shop, might really be that they are doing this profiling for you about you in the shop.

But let's go through these one by one, and I will go through them in the order of volume, so how many people there are in certain profiles, and I'm going to start from the biggest one, and also from the most critical one, and that is the Doer.

So this person is always technical. They typically help others in the organisation as well, so they're kind of an extension to your organisation, IT organisation. So many of the other profiles are asking them before they contact you. But there is now 55% of all engineers who answer our survey are from this profile.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes, that's big.

Sami Kallio: And again, really technical profile and has tried to solve the problem. So they have Googled, and if they call you, they hate if you ask them, "Did you boot your computer?" Of course they have done that, and they are giving feedback. I think we have both read this quite several times, that "Don't talk to me like a baby."

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes.

Sami Kallio: So they really want to use technical terms, and even how they start a phone call is that "Do you know anything about SharePoint?"

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes, to try to actually vet the services person that, are you actually capable of serving me?

Sami Kallio: Yes. So they are critical, and that is because of their own skills. Also, I have to say that this profile is getting bigger and bigger all the time. I think that is about the millennials and young people entering enterprises, so they have better skills in the beginning and they are very used to using whatever channel to find a resolution.

Pasi Nikkanen: And I guess these are the guys that, if you think about self-services like automated password reset, these are guys who will kind of value that. And also having administration rights to your own laptop, is things that they will-

Sami Kallio: They will still think about it, dream about that.

Pasi Nikkanen: What about the next one?

Sami Kallio: The other technical profile is Prioritiser, so I think that term kind of already tells you the main core of this profile. So this is a technical person, but is not going to use their own time for solving problems. They think that it's your task, please, just fix it and help me.

Pasi Nikkanen: Or maybe they are startup people like you and me, so actually, we have so many things on our hand, that please have the moment and then let's discuss about this. I have so many other things that I'm involved with, so, I think I was thinking one day that I think I'm nowadays a Prioritiser. I probably was a Doer when I was working in a big organisation, so-

Sami Kallio: I think in many cases these are directors and project managers and people who really optimise their time very hard. It's kind of, in a way, this is a really easy profile to serve, because the only thing they appreciate is speed of service. They are not expecting you to do more than just get the things done.

Pasi Nikkanen: And I think some channels, like onsite support, when they can just to walk in and, "Now help me," or chat or telephone is probably something that they enjoy, because when they send an email or they use the self-service portal, they never know when you're going to get back to me. With chat, phone and on site, it's now we are solving the issue.

Sami Kallio: Next case.

Pasi Nikkanen: Then we have these non-technical profiles.

Sami Kallio: Sorry, mother, but I typically use my mother as an example of Supported. Will just start the phone call by saying, "Sorry, I'm so stupid with IT, please help me." So the most satisfied profile of all. Now there is about 14% of this in our benchmark, but it's ... They are kind of thinking that it's their fault anyway. So you have to talk them through the issues and solve them, help them, do it, but they are not really expecting you to teach them. They don't have that interest.

Pasi Nikkanen: And it's probably like you were mentioning with Doers that, "Don't ask have you rebooted your machine?" With this one it's that, "Okay, let's first power off your computer." Like, use ... They might not know what reboot means, so.

Sami Kallio: But this profile is typically not so stressful, but the smallest profile, which is Trier, is maybe the hardest profile of all to really recognise and really work with. These guys and girls, they are using technical terms, even though they don't understand them. They want to be Doers later on, so they want to learn, but they will sometimes do things that even with a risk. So it might be they broke things even worse, but they typically also use channels like email and portal, and that is because they don't want you to understand they don't understand.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes, so, like not having the interaction right in the moment when you suddenly ask something and then they're ... Because using the email, for example, they have time to think about their answer.

Sami Kallio: Yes, and, or even-

Pasi Nikkanen: Or even ask from their son, or another Doer, actually, so I think something we learn is that every Trier has a Doer next to him at the office.

Sami Kallio: Yes they do, and they, somebody who knows that they want to be better but they are not yet, so somebody they trust. Triers are really, and I said already, Doers are the extension of your IT support services. So if you get Doers, be happy, they will help you with the others automatically. So, I think many organisations we service are thinking when we start to talk about end-user experience, you're thinking that maybe we are not good at serving those untechnical people, but that seems not to be the case, typically. It is the Doers that you should be concentrating on more if you have to choose. So to have talented, skillful agents in the first line, to be able to meet the demands of these Doers, because if you are able to do that then they are supporting you and helping the others to use your services as well.

Pasi Nikkanen: And I think one question that they often get, because we have a benchmark, we have the Happiness Score, sometimes a new customer is asking that, "Hey, can we have this industry benchmark?" And I think what the profiles do is that, because it's more like, it doesn't matter which industry you're working, your employees are working on, it really matters the culture, what type of employees you have. So I think the profiles a really good way of showing that this is actually what you should be doing, because I know we have companies with ... Almost the same industry, but they have totally different profile distributions. So they would actually, they wouldn't learn from each other, each other's benchmark.

Sami Kallio: And, it's ... The industry is the third biggest influencer here. There is, where is where the employees are from, so the country, so depending on which country you're from you are rating services a different way because of the culture. Then it's about this how skillful people, IT skills is the more ... it has a bigger influence here on how you rate services and how you think about them than the, do I try to do it myself or not, that's the second one. After that it's the industry thing.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right, but that was our IT Support Profiles, and if you want to learn more, we actually have a free eBook that you can down from our website, so if you go to the Happiness Score page, there's this link that download the ebook on the profiles. So then you can read, so everything you saw on the video, you heard on the podcast, you can actually download the whole material and read it yourself. So, I think we encourage you also to use it, even though you wouldn't be having our product in use.

Sami Kallio: And also, try this: Talk about these profiles with your agents, that's always lovely thing to do because those guys, they know these people exist and they can start to name exactly certain people to these roles immediately, so this is just kind of giving them a language of a thing they already knew and now they can start to, kind of, react and work with these profiles a bit differently.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Next time I think we'll find something else to talk about. Please go and check on the blog, HappyToday, and you'll see what is coming up in the future. Thank you guys.

Sami Kallio: Thanks.

Related content

Episode 23 - Steps to Happiness Cover
3 minute read


Steps to Happiness in Employee Experience


Read more >
4 minute read


Internal Service Desks make Employees 47% More Productive with XLA?

Internal Service Desks make employees 22% happier and 47% more productive compared to Outsourced Service Desks, due to ...

Read more >