Think You're Awesome? Let Your Users Be the Judge

When you’ve spent hours developing and designing your ITSM self-service, chat, or walk-up experience, it’s easy to be biased because you’re so close to the project and forget whether it truly satisfies your business users’ needs.

But what do those users think about your operation? Are they satisfied?

Measure to improve and show value

Measuring the performance and publishing the results of successful new initiatives in business-impact terms lets you demonstrate the value ITSM brings to the business.

Referenced in a recent article by LinkedIn, Gartner’s 2015 CIO Survey revealed that only 54 percent of respondents reported that internal customer satisfaction is a major metric. Yet the Society of Information Management Survey 2016 finds that one of the most common metrics of CIO performance value is IT user/customer satisfaction, according to a recent trends study from Business Wire.

Implementations of new initiatives are never one-and-done activities. That is why ongoing user feedback is a necessary component.

Consider providers of feedback as mentors helping you improve. Perhaps the self service channel isn’t being used as much as anticipated. Maybe your business users aren’t booking appointments for 1:1 face-to-face support, but continue interrupting your team at will.

Use feedback to capture and analyze data that, for example, will help improve adoption and deflection rates from other channels such as the phone, or that will help you understand which groups of users fail to or embrace each channel.

Numerous methods exist for gathering valuable user feedback—user satisfaction surveys, web analytics, interviews, and focus groups.

There’s no single right way to understand your business users. Information may come from a variety of sources.

Organizations that continually measure and improve their experiences based on user input are the ones most likely to achieve their goals. This means incorporating processes for regular review and revision in response to shifting business-user behaviors.

By understanding the perceptions and attitudes of your business users and catering to their needs, you can offer experiences that are more engaging, consistent, and memorable.