Natalie Sansone, PhD

Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations

Info-Tech Research Group

Often when we ask service desk leaders where they need to improve and if they’re measuring customer satisfaction, they either aren’t measuring it at all, or their ticket surveys are turned on but they get very few responses (or only positive responses). They fail to see the value of collecting feedback when this is their experience with it.

Feedback is important because traditional service desk metrics can only tell us so much. We often see what’s called the “watermelon effect”: metrics appear “green”, but under the surface they’re “red” because customers are in fact dissatisfied for reasons unmeasured by standard internal IT metrics. Customer satisfaction should always be the goal of service delivery, and directly measuring satisfaction in addition to traditional metrics will help you get a clearer picture of your strengths and weaknesses, and where to prioritize improvements.

It’s not as simple as asking customers if they were satisfied with their ticket, however. There are two steps necessary for success. The first is collecting feedback, which should be done purposefully, with clear goals in mind in order to maximize the response rate and value of responses received. The second – and most critical – is acting on that feedback. Use it to inform improvements and communicate those improvements. Doing so will not only make your service desk better, increasing satisfaction through better service delivery, but also will make your customers feel heard and valued, which alone increases satisfaction.

Emily Sugerman, PhD

Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations

Info-Tech Research Group

• The service desk relies only on traditional metrics such as time to respond, or percentage of SLAs met, but not on measures of customer satisfaction with the service they receive.
• There are signs of dissatisfied users (e.g. shadow IT, users avoid the service desk, go only to their favorite technician) but no mechanism in place to formally capture those perceptions.
• Transactional ticket surveys were turned on when the ITSM tool was implemented, but either nobody responds to them, or nobody does anything with the data received.
• IT leaders lack information to help inform and prioritize where improvements are most needed.

• Service desk leaders don’t know how to design survey questions to ask their users for feedback and/or they don’t have a mechanism in place to survey users.
• If customer satisfaction surveys are in place, nothing is done with the results because service desk leaders either don’t understand the value of analyzing the data or don’t know how to analyze the data.
• Executives only want a single satisfaction number to track and don’t understand the value of collecting more detailed feedback.
• IT lacks the resources to take accountability for the feedback program, or existing resources don’t have time to do anything with the feedback they receive.

• Understand how to ask the right questions to avoid survey fatigue (where users get overwhelmed and stop responding).
• Design and implement a transactional survey to capture satisfaction with individual ticket experiences and use the results to inform immediate improvements.
• Design and implement a relationship survey to capture broader satisfaction among the entire user base and use the results to inform longer-term improvements.
• Build a plan and assign accountability for analyzing feedback, using it to prioritize and make actionable improvements to address feedback, and communicating the results back to your users and stakeholders.

• Don’t understand the value of measuring customer feedback.
• Don’t have a good mechanism in place to collect feedback.
• Don’t think that users would respond to a survey (either generally unresponsive or already inundated with surveys).
• Worried that results would be negative or misleading.
• Don’t know what questions to ask or how to design a survey.

• Don’t understand the importance of analyzing and acting on feedback collected.
• Don’t know how to analyze survey data.
• Lack of resources to take accountability over customer feedback (including analyzing data, monitoring trends, communicating results).
• Executives or stakeholders only want a satisfaction score.

Gather insight into both the overall customer relationship with the service desk and individual transactions to get a holistic picture of the customer experience.

Collect data to inform decisions about where to spend limited resources or time on improvement, rather than guessing or wasting effort on the wrong thing.

Better understand your strengths and weaknesses from the customer’s point of view to help you identify gaps and priorities for improvement.

Make customers feel heard and valued; this will improve your relationship and their satisfaction.

Use the same annual relationship survey to be able to monitor trends and progress in making improvements by comparing data year over year.

Understand where potential problems may occur so you can address and prevent them, or who is at risk of becoming a detractor so you can repair the relationship.

Turn negative survey feedback into coaching and improvement opportunities and use positive feedback to boost morale and engagement.

Understand the main types of customer satisfaction surveys, principles for survey design, and best practices for surveying your users.

Learn why and how to design a simple survey to assess satisfaction with individual service desk transactions (tickets) and a methodology for survey delivery that will improve response rates.

Understand why and how to design a survey to assess overall satisfaction with the service desk across your organization, or use Info-Tech’s diagnostic.

Measure and analyze the results of both surveys and build a plan to act on both positive and negative feedback and communicate the results with the organization.

Take the time to define the goals of your transactional survey program before launching it – it’s not as simple as just deploying the default survey of your ITSM tool out of the box. The objectives of the survey – including whether you want to keep a pulse on average satisfaction or immediately act on any negative experiences – will influence a range of key decisions about the survey configuration.

While transactional surveys provide useful indicators of customer satisfaction with specific tickets and interactions, they tend to have low response rates and can leave out many users who may rarely or never contact the service desk, but still have helpful feedback. Include a relationship survey in your customer feedback program to capture a more holistic picture of what your overall user base thinks about the service desk and where you most need to improve.

Satisfaction scores provide valuable data about how your customers feel, but don’t tell you why they feel that way. Don’t neglect the qualitative data you can gather from open-ended comments and questions in both types of satisfaction surveys. Take the time to read through these responses and categorize them in at least a basic way to gain deeper insight and determine where to prioritize your efforts.

Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

Design and implement transactional surveys

Design and implement relationship surveys

Analyze and act on feedback

Ticket surveys, incident follow-up surveys, on-going surveys

Annual, semi-annual, periodic, comprehensive, relational

One-time, single, targeted

• Survey that is tied to a specific customer interaction with the service desk (i.e. a ticket).
• Assesses how satisfied customers are with how the ticket was handled and resolved.
• Sent immediately after ticket is closed.
• Short – usually 1 to 3 questions.

• Survey that is sent periodically (i.e. semi-annually or annually) to the entire customer base to measure overall relationship with the service desk.
• Assesses customer satisfaction with their overall service experience over a longer time period.
• Longer – around 15-20 questions.

• One-time survey sent at a specific, targeted point in time to either all customers or a subset.
• Often event-driven or project-related.
• Assesses satisfaction at one time point, or about a specific change that was implemented, or to inform a specific initiative that will be implemented.