WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID DIY AND OUTSOURCE YOUR IT END USER SURVEYS

Your organization needs efficient and reliable IT to carry out operations and serve your customers. Worldwide, IT spending is projected to top $4.5 trillion this year, according to Gartner. That figure, which Gartner estimates will continue to grow, emphasizes IT’s relevance and necessity in our lives. The best way to optimize your digital processes is to assess how they’re working for employees and customers on a regular basis. Having this information makes it possible for you to:

• improve IT processes; 
• decrease IT costs; 
• set a clear direction for your IT organization; 
• increase productivity and employee satisfaction; 
• strengthen your team’s digital skills and digital health while decreasing stress; 
• increase external customer satisfaction through more efficient business practices; 
• and improve roll-outs based on frequent feedback. 

When it comes to IT, there are numerous websites and companies that offer to help you accomplish all of the above with do-it-yourself (DIY) templates and applications. You might also be tempted to create a survey of your own, despite the level of knowledge you bring to the project. But if you’re planning to obtain end user insights so that you can actually enjoy the results that come from feedback, you want to outsource the service to IT survey experts. 

Below, we explain why outsourcing is far more effective and promising than going the DIY route.  

Your survey will be reliable and sound. 

When you outsource your IT survey, you need to trust that it’s measuring what you need to measure to produce the most substantive results. Otherwise, the information you collect will yield very little impact. It’s crucial to lay the appropriate foundation and build a solid structure around your IT organization so that the results drive actual change.  

It’s tempting to go for the quick-fix, ad-hoc solution when you want to solve the problem as soon as you can. Commercial websites offer free tools and templates like ready-made quizzes and polls, tailored to massive audiences. But without proper care for customizing a survey to your organization’s needs and circumstances, you risk wasting money and time on a “one size fits all” template that so many other companies are already using. Worse, if you don’t have any experience in the field, you might not measure the correct areas at all.  

Good survey techniques take time to develop. Organizations who take the DIY approach typically don’t have the time necessary to devote to quality. No matter how much you invest in independent research and preparation, it’s likely that your first survey attempt will have errors and blind spots. That’s because success is a difficult formula to create or mimic — professionals in this field have dedicated years into making it. In our near 30 years of research (12 of which specific to the IT survey industry), we’ve encountered many organizations who use the wrong communication media, scales, methodologies, and questions that, altogether, produce results that are inadequate at best or detrimental to the organization at worst. They often lack proper analysis and reporting, too, thereby forfeiting the opportunity to use the data to their advantage.

Your surveys will prioritize confidentiality and objectivity.  

If you take the DIY approach to organizing your own IT end user survey, you run the risk of having implicit biases that will likely impact your results. Also, when your end users learn the survey was created internally, they’ll be less comfortable sharing their honest opinion. Employees are far less likely to respond openly because they know the raw data will be viewed internally by someone, somewhere, and you lose the value of anonymity. 

By outsourcing your survey, you’re giving yourself and your organization the greatest chance of  obtaining valuable information that can drive actionable results. We prioritize transparency and anonymity in our standard practices. We don’t have the same issue of bias you have with your employees. At each step of the process, we reassure users that their responses remain anonymous at all times, from their participation to the details of their responses to the data analysis and reporting. All of our services fully comply with data protection policies.  

You can also rest assured that your results are completely objective. An outsourcing partner who has no affiliation with and/or offers no services related to your results is more likely to provide you with information that hasn’t been altered (i.e. we won’t hold information behind a secondary paywall or try to entice you to pay for extra services). We have nothing to hide, and neither should you. We do our best to provide you with the most informative results possible.  

It keeps your focus and energy on your role and improving your organization. 

One common assumption that organizations have when they DIY their surveys is that they’ll be saving time by doing so independently. But starting from scratch, especially when you’ve never administered a survey before, takes an enormous amount of time. Each step from creation to completion requires hours because you need to form a well-rounded understanding of what that step entails, how you should approach it, who needs to weigh in on it, how to incorporate your colleagues’ input, and what the step will ultimately look like so that it is clear and concise for the respondents and still maximizes data input. For more complex surveys, you also need to put energy into customized audiences—as in, you’ll need to define who will see what question and why, which requires extra steps and extra team management and time. When doing this, you’ll still need to create  a questionnaire with an acceptable length while ensuring information value at the same time. If you don’t do each step well, you’ll diminish the quality of the results. 

Here’s a breakdown of what you can expect to invest, time-wise, when you DIY your IT survey:  

• Communicating to your IT end users about the survey: 2 to 4 hours 
• Methodology and scaling: anywhere from 16 to 32 hours  
• Developing a good questionnaire, finding the right survey tool, programming the survey, testing the survey, sampling, distributing the survey, and collecting responses: 8 to 16 hours each, for a possible combined range of 56 to 112 hours on these steps collectively  
• Two rounds of data analysis: 16 to 32 hours per round (32 to 64 hours total) 
• Data interpretation: another 16 to 32 hours 
• Reporting: 8 to 16 hours
• Sharing the results: 8 to 16 hours 
• Comparing results to external organizations: 4 to 8 hours (at best and if you know what to look for and trust that it’s an accurate sampling) 
• Making improvements for action steps: another 4 to 8 hours 

By the time you reach the end of your DIY survey project, you’ll have spent 144 hours at least and 288 hours at most — a range of 3.6 to 7.2 total work weeks. That’s time you could have devoted to your own work performance and improving your organization. When more team members are involved, it takes even more hours away from the organization overall. Do you have that much time on hand to pause all your existing responsibilities?  

You’ll collaborate with established IT survey experts.  

At Yorizon, we’ve already developed solutions, systems, and processes for every single step outlined above. You don’t need to lose weeks of your time to research and development, and you can trust that our services produce sound analyses that you can rely on. We’ll work with you to customize your survey to meet your unique needs, and as trusted advisers on this essential process, we’ll be available to address questions, concerns, or ideas that might arise along the way. 

As one of our partners, you’ll also gain access to our dashboard where we provide translations, analyses, reports, and other resources which we’ve anticipated you might need. Our dashboard is based on QlikSense, one of the leading business intelligence software suppliers in the world. We’ve aggregated data from millions of respondents across the world, giving us a comprehensive set of global benchmarks. These allow us to shed light on your results compared to others, a key performance indicator you wouldn’t otherwise have.  

We’ve spent 12 years overseeing IT surveys, and our reputation speaks for itself. We have extensive research experience, and our team of professionals handles all scaling, statistical modeling, sampling, and reporting. We’ve had the opportunity to work alongside firms of all shapes and sizes with employees working in all corners of the world and taking cultural differences into account. It’s equipped us with the ability to develop several best practices that optimize your experience. That deep well of knowledge includes: 

• customer experience; 
• methodologies and techniques; 
• state-of-the-art software; 
• multilingualism; 
• cultural differences; 
• advice in frequency of measurement; 
• sample management;  
• reliability; 
• benchmarks;
• reports; 
• and the interpretation and supply of actionable results. 

Put most succinctly: Yorizon guarantees a comprehensive, experience-backed spectrum of IT end user and customer surveys that allow your organization to fully optimize their IT experience. We’ve honed our expertise so that you can focus on yours. Allow us to serve your organization today.  

If you’d like to talk to us, please feel free to schedule a meeting with one of our experts.