IT user and customer satisfaction survey: Do it yourself or outsource?
Yorizon’s Top-10 reasons why not doing it yourself.
1. Importance of IT user and customer satisfaction survey.
Without feedback from your IT users and your IT customers, e.g. your stakeholders, you will not have insights in order to:
- improve IT-processes
- decrease IT costs
- set direction for your IT organisation
2. Specialism. If we agree upon that, you will also know that ‘garbage in = garbage out’. Measuring satisfaction is a specialism, yes it might be even science. We often face organisations using malicious questionnaires, not validated (they don’t measure what you want to measure), insufficient preparation and communication, wrong scales and methodologies, unusable data and wrong interpretation. The results are completely useless and could be even harmful for your organisation.
3. Best practices taken from many organisations in your industry. We don’t invent wheels, but serve you in a customized project, and of course based upon our experiences. IT user and customer satisfaction is not about just using a survey tool. On the contrary: IT user satisfaction survey is a serious research which has a big impact on your entire organisation. It has to be done right in a way which suits your organisation.
4. Management reporting. In recent years we have developed a management dashboard which is designed for 100% for IT user satisfaction survey. The used technology is based on QlikView, which is one of the leading business intelligence software suppliers in the world. This enables you to use the data in your existing BI environment, QlikView or others like Oracle, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects or Sybase.
5. Benchmarks and interpretation of results. First of all, results have to be valid and after that it actually starts: what do the results mean for the IT organisation? Which possibilities do we have and how do the results compare to the benchmarks? Interpretation of results is a profession.
6. Objectivity. When you outsource a survey to a specialised company, you will be certain that the results are objective. In our discussions with the business and IT vendors you will never give the impression that the results will be convenient to you.
7. Acceptation of results. If you outsource an IT user satisfaction survey to a specialist, you are sure that the results are 100% reliable. When there are only small doubts about the reliability when you execute a survey yourself, then all costs and energy are lost. Trust upon external specialists and be sure not to lose track of the discussion with the business.
8. Potential for improvement. Actionable results: results from the survey have to encourage improvements and changes. The survey has to be executed in a way that results have impact. This is again a specialism: which results are being reported and which relations can be made between the IT processes? Avoid results that only maintain in Powerpoint or Excel-exports.
9. Costs and controlling costs. A heard argument is to execute an inhouse survey from cost perspective. It looks easy just to send out an e-mail via Sharepoint… Your hours, licences and other tools are far from free. Trial and error, long lead times and all the other mentioned disadvantages of doing it yourself lead to a supposed advantage, which is actually an important disadvantage: a missed opportunity to improve your IT-organisation and to reduce costs. By focusing on the aspects which are important to your end users and customers, aspects in which with no end is being invested can be omitted and an investment in good research will be paid back in very short notice.
10. Reputation. We have been doing satisfaction surveys since 1993 and we are part of one of the leading research companies in The Netherlands. We are specialist in satisfaction surveys. Because of that we have a deep knowledge about customer experience, methodologies and techniques, state-of-the-art software, multilingualism, covering cultural differences, advice in frequency of measurement, sample management, reliability, benchmarks, reports, interpretation and supplying actionable results. Summarised: our specialism is delivering IT user and IT customer feedback. What is yours?
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