Why You Need To Evaluate Your IT Service
Businesses are continuously trying to improve their products and services to survive in their competitive landscape and meet the demands of their target audiences. They use data to make informed decisions on how they can improve their products and service. In fact, data scientists spend approximately 80% of their time preparing and managing data for analysis. However, there’s is one business component that is often under-analyzed – IT services. These are the internal services dedicated to maintaining the employees. productivity. We’re talking about the individuals who make sure your computer is working so you can work. We’re talking about those who make sure the printer is working so you can print your presentations.
Evidently, they’re a big part of a business’ productivity but studies show a disconnect between employees and the IT department. In April 2013, Forrester Research conducted a study that revealed “significant gaps between what the business user experiences and what IT believes that its business users experience.” They go on to describe how the effects cost the company considerable loss across the business.
Not good.
For businesses to fully benefit from their IT services, the gap between employees and IT need to close.
But how?
Some IT departments already use Service Level Agreements to track quantifiable goals. However, what about the employees’ opinion about the service? In this case, the employees can be perceived as the customers. Therefore, isn’t their opinion valuable?
Of course. And you can bridge that awful gap by simply using surveys.
The good news is that most helpdesk/ service desks already have surveys integrated in them. Distributing the surveys through your service desk will help obtain the insight you need to improve employee experience with IT. Other reasons to conduct surveys include the potential to reveal unknown bottlenecks or other issues regarding IT services. For example, your departmental goal might be to close all tickets within 24 hours. However, employees might not be satisfied with the outcome and actually open more tickets to solve issues that were never properly dealt with. For all these reasons, surveys can be extremely valuable to your department.
So how do you go about distributing surveys? Let’s cover the most common questions.
What questions should you ask?
Define what you need to measure and make sure your questions reflect the information you need. In this case, we want to learn more about employee experience with IT. Thus, ask questions that will help you measure employee satisfaction regarding their experience. For example, rate your experience with IT regarding your ticket on a scale of 1 to 7 with 7 being the most satisfied. Taking an average of all respondents will give you insight on the level of satisfaction. For more details on how to create a survey, check out these tips.
How do you know if you have enough data?
You need to collect enough data for it to best represent your entire company. A 30 to 40% response rate is normal for internal surveys. However, your goal should be to get as many as you can. Once you’ve surpassed a certain threshold, you can use the data to make the appropriate changes to bridge any gaps between employee experience and IT services. You may also want to use the data to back up the departmental changes you wanted to make, to ask for more resources, and obviously reveal any other issues. Therefore, preserving data, in your service desk, for example, is highly recommended- you never know when you might need it.
When do you distribute the survey(s)?
Send out a short survey after each ticket is closed. This gets people to talk about their experience while it is still fresh in their mind. It also allows you to compile enough data to get better insight on potential bottlenecks or problems you didn’t know existed. An example of a short survey can be, “Were you happy with your overall experience with the company’s IT services?” Nevertheless, longer surveys can still be conducted but will definitely be harder to get a good response rate. Therefore, try to only distribute longer surveys periodically. If you need a better idea, here is an example of a longer survey.
Do you have to send the survey through your service desk?
The answer is no. However, there are multiple benefits in sending a survey through your service desk. For starters, leveraging your service desk comes at no extra cost to the department. The feature will also have no limit on 1) the number of questions, 2) the question formats, and 3) the number of surveys you can distribute. The best part of this integrated feature is how the surveys sync to the tickets/ issues submitted. Therefore, you can easily obtain information like issue type, devices affected, associated IT technician, department affected, costs associated, and sometimes the employee who submitted the ticket. This depends on whether or not your service desk has the feature to make surveys anonymous. You can then determine which type of ticket has the lowest satisfaction, which work team is mostly affected, or which department costs the IT department the most money. By using your service desk, you can determine the information you need to improve your services without asking employees for all this information. Finally, the information is all in one central location.
If you aren’t already obtaining feedback about your IT services, consider the potential consequences of not evaluating them. A disconnect between employees and IT services can impact business processes and expenditure. Get started by defining what you want to measure and creating the associated surveys. To ask us questions about surveys, tweet us @VizorCloud.
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