All members of the IT service and management team needs feedback on service satisfaction from clients. Ideally integrated with your help desk software, send a survey request upon the completion of every service; do this automatically or manually. In the absence of feedback, how will you know which personnel or service requires attention? Think of your survey as the data feed of your IT Service Scoreboard.
Survey Best Practices and Implementation Steps
- Start with a strategy. A customer service survey strategy could be as simple as: Survey X% of clients on an X frequency with questions that will guide the service department in the delivery of services, incident management and problem management.
- Set a go-live date for your survey and supporting help desk system that is not far into the future. The process of implementing surveys is neither difficult nor time-consuming.
- Use technology to help. Use a help desk system that will trigger the survey process.
- Ask simple, clear questions. Design your survey a maximum of six clear questions with responses that will not create bias or require any keying. If questions are biased, meaningful information is unlikely, and customers will not answer them. We have prepared questions and responses for you to download. For more information on this read this white paper from Survey Monkey.
- Pilot your survey with two of the most helpful and engaged IT help desk and project management staff and fine tune the survey till you get a good measure of response (40% is a minimum). This process will take some time to complete but is critical to the value of the process and achievement of the strategy.
- Reward survey responders and provide a coffee card with one coffee on it. Rewards encourage the responder and provide a WIFM with which they can connect. Also, if the service received was bad it may be the only way to entice a response.
- Roll out the survey process to the entire IT helpdesk and project management team with appropriate training.
- Post the responses for the weekly management meeting or on the company’s Intranet.
- Report frequently. Update weekly, act promptly, use the information to optimize and continually improve.