Have You Conducted a Customer Satisfaction Survey Recently? Why You Should
by Stephanie Faris on Monday, August 29 6:00
When your business provides tech support, you have an obligation. Whether your technicians support your own employees, external customers, or a combination of both, it s important to make sure your help desk workers represent your company well. For the many businesses now having a tough time finding and retaining talented IT workers, customer-friendliness has sometimes taken a back seat to skills and education.
The first step toward ensuring your IT teams prioritize customer service is to make sure they know it s important. Employees should be aware of your standards and realize the importance of upholding them. They should also have regular performance reviews where their customer service is rated along with other important items from their job descriptions. To accomplish this, though, you ll need a way to document customer impressions of their service and present that information to each employee in an objective way.
A customer satisfaction survey can provide just the tool you need to manage your customer service levels. Here are a few reasons customer satisfaction surveys are a good idea for your help desk.
You ll Be Able to Set Standards
If you sat down today to come up with a list of standards for your current support team, would you know what to include? You can randomly survey your customers or include a survey with each resolved ticket. In either case, you ll start receiving feedback that you can then use to rate your support team. Over time, you ll see the qualities that lead customers to rate someone low, as well as the qualities found in high-performing technicians. This will give you the foundation you need to create a code of conduct that lets every employee on the help desk know what they need to do to earn a top rating.
Employees Will Have Goals
Research has shown that employees who receive regular feedback perform better on the job. When you sit down with your technicians on a periodic basis and review their performance, they ll know where they stand. If they re conscientious workers, they ll come up with a plan to receive better marks on their next review, which will help your business as a whole. If you provide rewards to the employees who get the highest marks on these surveys, you ll likely find the spirit of competition kicks in and numbers naturally improve.
You ll Have Supporting Documentation
HR representatives know that no matter what they do, documentation must be on hand. Whether you re terminating, promoting, or awarding a pay increase, you ll reduce your liability by having paperwork that demonstrates a pattern of performance that merits it. Customer surveys can provide an objective view of a worker s service levels, which can be even more powerful than written notes from a boss or coworker who observed the behavior.
Your IT teams should be held to high standards when it comes to the assistance they provide each day. By putting feedback mechanisms in place and regularly giving performance reviews, you can improve the customer service your teams give your end users.