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Measuring satisfaction with
web surveys
Cast your mind back for a moment to the
last time you had a customer services issue to
discuss with your mobile phone operator, bank or
favourite store. |
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Did you count how many times the phone rang
before it was answered? Did you time how long it took to get a
satisfactory response? Did you come away from the call happy that
the issue had been resolved or angry that it had not? What was more
important, the time spent on the call or the professionalism of the
person who took it?
Chances are you would have judged the call not just on the time it
took or whether the issue was resolved but also by how helpful,
polite and/or sympathetic the company’s representative had been.
The importance of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure
customer satisfaction and customer experience has long been
appreciated by consumer-focussed organisations. Depending on the
quality of a customer’s experience, a company can gain real
competitive advantage or, alternatively, its reputation can head for
the dustbin…
Interesting customer satisfaction programmes and the KPIs to measure
them can be found everywhere; one prestige car manufacturer ensures
that its new customers are happy by making a high satisfaction
rating across a range of KPIs a pre-requisite to its dealerships
receiving their sales commission. This tele-survey approach to
determine if targets have been met is not a cheap option though -
ratings are collated from hundreds of telephone interviews. However
for this company, its sales margins and the importance of protecting
its brand make the exercise worthwhile.
Turning closer to home, an obvious reason for an IT organisation to
solicit and measure feedback from its end-users is to improve its
overall performance. Crucially though, it also allows IT to become
more proactive with less ‘fire-fighting’ with a new (or renewed)
focus on improving services and service delivery.
Your organisation is probably already measuring some IT support KPIs.
A fairly typical list might include:
- average time to resolve specific problem types e.g. hardware, software
- average time to respond to support requests submitted via phone, email or web
- number of open/resolved issues at a given point in time
- number of issues resolved by 1st, 2nd or 3rd line support staff
Interestingly, whilst these KPIs may show that
your IT support operation is performing well, are you getting the
complete picture? Hard KPIs have their place but you still have no
way of knowing what the end user actually thinks of the service
you’re providing: unless, of course, you ask them…
Collecting feedback for KPIs could be achieved by a telephone survey
like our prestige car manufacturer (expensive) or by a paper-based
survey (slow). Besides cost and speed, a common drawback to both
approaches is the delay that often occurs between contact between an
end-user and support and the collection and production of the
feedback - a delay which is likely to alter an end-user’s perception
of the service they received. An additional problem with a telephone
survey is that the agent’s mis-interpretation of responses to
unprompted questions can skew the data. So too can the reluctance of
the end-user to disclose their true feelings of the service they
received during a telephone call (we all know IT staff are sensitive
types!) So how can IT managers incorporate customer satisfaction
KPIs into the help desk without incurring huge overheads?
With the introduction of web survey tools all of the drawbacks of
more traditional feedback methods can be avoided and at minimal
cost. A web survey enables customer and employee feedback to be
solicited immediately following contact with IT support when it is
still fresh in their mind. To achieve this immediacy, the web survey
functionality must be automated and tightly integrated with the help
desk/service desk. In this way, an email with an embedded link to
the web survey form could be sent to the end-user automatically once
their issue is resolved and marked by support as closed. Feedback
collected via the web survey form can then be collated and reported
as real-time statistics or exported into industry-standard
management reporting tools such as Crystal Reports.
OK, so now you have feedback on the customer experience, what do you
do with it? You could set a higher priority response for end-users
that said nice things about IT…not very ethical though – or you
could use it to identify weaknesses in the support process and
technology or to determine if there is any support staff training
short-fall! |
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