3 Simple steps to improve Customer Satisfaction

1. Survey your users

Post-ticket surveys give you the opportunity to assess users’ experiences. When each ticket is closed, collect information to give you data per analyst, per issue type and more. By tying questionnaires to individual tickets, you’ll collect feedback in real-time and can look for trends. As long as your user- group is large enough, these responses can provide meaningful insight.

In your questionnaire, include at least one open question. This helps you to pick up user grievances that you might not have considered. It also gives the user a voice.

Try to keep your questionnaire short enough for users to complete while ensuring you get enough relevant info, these are some of the most useful questions to ask the user.

• Was the agent polite and courteous during all stages of the investigation.
• Do you feel the agent understood your issue?
• If the Helpdesk was not able to resolve your issue during initial contact, did they advise of the next steps?
• Were you satisfied with the time it took to resolve your issue?
• Were you kept up to date with the progress of your issue until closure?
• Were you satisfied with the overall service provided?
• Please provide any further detail of your experience when using the Helpdesk to log this issue.

In addition to these regular surveys, consider adding an annual (or bi-annual) survey that includes broader questions around systems and infrastructure.

2. Track your KPIs

Questionnaires alone won’t give you the full picture. Set out SMART (specific, measurable, achievable and timely) KPIs that align with your SLA.

Your Support Desk metrics are an excellent resource for:

• Tracking ticket volumes
• Identifying trends
• Checking first-time fix rates
• Identifying problems
• Foreseeing potential incidents

This quantitative data can enhance the overall experience of your users by giving you the tools to identify areas for improvement. If you are unsure about what you should be tracking, take a look at my previous piece on metrics your IT Service Desk should be be measuring.

3. Communicate & adapt

Set up a regular review for key stakeholders to attend. Aim for a monthly meeting to discuss the following:

• Reporting and analysis of survey and ticket data
• Verbal feedback from customers and management teams
• How you plan to improve customer satisfaction levels
• If you are hitting goals, consider tightening them to continually improve
• Discuss changes that pose risks (people, processes and technology)

If you are hitting your goals with ease, consider making your KPIs more ambitious. To demonstrate a commitment to revised KPIs, ensure your Service Level Agreement is kept aligned and up to date.
Now you have a solid process in place for customer satisfaction, just make sure you deliver on those promises and be ready to adjust.

Getting the Right Balance

Is our support provider delivering the service we need?

This is where the ‘scorecard’ approach can be useful. Take your metrics, ascribe a weighting for each one (depending on its relative importance), score each metric and then multiply the metric weighting by the metric score.

To help you with this, we have recently developed what we call the Service Desk Diagnostic Tool. By answering 20 questions you will be able to diagnose your organisation’s Service Desk and assess its strengths and weaknesses. You’ll then immediately be able to access a tailored report that ranks its performance across different areas and provides an indication of how your Service Desk is performing overall. Please get in touch for more details.

Otherwise, we’d be pleased to talk to you about any aspect of your Service Desk, including how to go about surveying the level of your end user’s satisfaction with its delivery.

Please feel free to contact us. Acora is a UK based, award-winning managed IT services and technology company, with more than 30 years’ experience. More than 300 clients trust Acora with the responsibility for part or all of their IT, from solutions design to support.