itSMF Bulletin November 2017 Bulletin - November 2017 | Page 14

As Professor Valarie Zeithaml, author of ‘Delivering Quality
Service’ said, “Only customers judge quality. All other
judgements are essentially irrelevant”.
“Only customers
Surveying your customers enables you to measure their
subjective experiences. Often the results are surprising…
judge quality.
All other
Forrester research shows there are twice as many IT support
teams who think they provide great support than there are
businesses who feel they get it.
judgements are
essentially irrelevant”
Measure, Track & Compare
We recommend you measure, track and compare these
customer satisfaction levels:
Transactional Surveys:
• With IT Support (overall)
• With each Support Team.
• Of each Business Unit (e.g. Marketing) and/or Loca-
tion.
Relationship Surveys:
Forrester: 60% of IT teams think they provide high quality
support. Only 35% of their customers agree.
The starting point for any change program is believing in the
need for change. And if IT, or any individual support team,
believes its already providing customers with a great
experience, they won’t see the need to improve.
Measuring customer satisfaction helps you align self
perceptions of performance with customer perceptions.
Measuring customer satisfaction helps teams that are in
denial (of their need to improve) become accepting of their
need to provide better service. From there customer
feedback can be used to plan a path to improved
performance.
And once you’re there, you need to stay there. Even if you’re
already great, it’s easy to get complacent and let standards
drop.
Customer expectations are increasing all the time too. In the
‘real
world’,
customers
are
interacting
with
organisations who are differentiating themselves on
customer experience. And your customers are comparing
their experiences with the ones they get from IT.
14 itSMF Bulletin—November 2017
• With IT (overall).
• Of each Business Unit (e.g. Marketing) and/or
Location.
By measuring customer satisfaction with each support
team, and of each business unit, you can see which teams
and customer segments need the most attention.
And by comparing support team performance you can
identify pockets of internal best practice that other teams
could benefit from.
Practical Tips
Tip 1 - What is a good target for a transactional or
relationship Net Promoter Score? To get a better score
than your last one! Establishing a culture of continual
improvement will deliver more lasting results than a one-
time attempt to beat a specific target. This is especially
important if you’ve only just started measuring
satisfaction levels and have no baseline .
Tip 2 - Track your survey response rates. These are an
indicator of how quick your survey is to complete and how
much customers believe that completing it is worth their
time.