The Ultimate Guide to Conducting An It Help Desk Survey

When technology fails, so do people. A hardware problem prevents an employee from logging into their computer and responding to urgent requests from the company's largest customers. Network problems can prevent your email or Internet access and prevent you from working entirely.

Fast and efficient IT support is essential for office productivity. For this reason, it is important for the IT support team to take the time to ask their customers (employees of other companies) what they are doing well and how they can improve. The best way to obtain this information is to submit a help desk survey.

The help desk service  teams with data to support the need to increase departmental budgets. Justify the company's investment in new tools or more support staff by providing survey data that shows how increasing budgets increases overall productivity.

Managing a help desk survey is not always a large and time consuming effort. By following some of the best practices and using the right tools, you can collect feedback with minimal effort and use it throughout the year to find new and better ways to provide technical assistance.

Why It Is Important To Track Customer Satisfaction?

Help desk surveys provide two important pieces of information to your IT support team. A list of factors that contribute to employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction after using IT support.

While this information will help the team improve their services, and perhaps most importantly, it will also provide comprehensive evidence of the need for larger budgets.

Being able to demonstrate to company decision makers that employee dissatisfaction is the result of waiting too long to receive support is a compelling argument for hiring more help.

Similarly, if we can demonstrate that dissatisfaction is due to lost tickets, we can insist that we invest in better admission and problem-tracking tools.

If you're having trouble convincing company leaders to invest in the resources your team needs, survey feedback can provide compelling evidence.

Follow these Five steps to begin collecting that evidence.

Step 1: Define The Strategy And Objectives

Before choosing a survey tool, writing your first question, or submitting your first survey, be sure to document your reasons for researching your customer over time and what you want to learn.

First, decide what information you want to collect from the survey. The most basic information answers two questions:

1.       Are your clients satisfied?

2.       If not, why?

Their strategy is simply to find answers to those questions.

Then define why the answers to these questions are important. This is your goal:

Strategy: Use a help desk survey to 

(1) measure customer satisfaction and 

(2) identify the factors that lead to dissatisfaction.

Purpose: This information will help 

(1) find ways to improve the team, 

(2) provide better service, and 

(3) improve productivity within the team and across the company.

Documenting your strategy and goals helps you focus on what really matters and helps you move to the next step.

Step 2: Write a List of Possible Survey Questions

You are ready to create a list of possible survey questions using your defined goals and strategies. Survey questions measure the elements defined in your strategy and provide the answers you need for your goals.

Use the sample questions below, or work with your team to compile a large list of potential questions. You don't have to worry about creating the final list right now. Document everything you can think of.

Examples of employee survey questions:

How satisfied are you with the quality of the support you receive?

How do you assess the technical knowledge of the support team?

How do you rate the professionalism of your support team?

Step 3: Explore Best Practices For Your Survey

In future steps, you will choose the right tools to administer your survey and complete your questions. However, before making these decisions, it is important to understand some of the best research practices to help guide your decisions.

Keep the survey short. A single question is ideal. If you need to lengthen it, take no more than 5 minutes to complete it. Remember that clients are already late for work due to technical problems. As a result, customers are unlikely to respond to long surveys.

If you need a longer exit survey, submit it later. Don't send long follow-up surveys right away. Wait a day for the client to catch up on his work. If your exit survey takes more than 5 minutes to complete, consider submitting it monthly or quarterly.

Ask open-ended questions only when absolutely necessary. It only takes a second to answer a multiple-choice question, but it takes a long time to leave a comment. Minimize open-ended questions to increase response rates.

Allow to answer "not applicable". Survey questions can confuse customers. If you don't know how to respond, we can stop the survey. Instead, provide an "Other" or "N / A" answer so you can skip questions that don't apply or don't make sense.

Show progress if possible. Include a progress bar or proactively indicate expected commitments. People who don't know how long it takes to complete a survey generally don't want to complete it.

Avoid asking unrelated questions. Find a tool that can incorporate logic to enter or omit a specific question based on the answers to previous questions.

Step 4: Complete The Survey Questions

The final question of the survey should provide the most detailed information, that is, the information necessary to achieve the objectives defined in Step 1.

There are several ways to limit your long list of questions to the most important.

Eliminate redundant questions. Delete it from the list or combine it with a similar question.

Choose the one that is most relevant to your goals. If your goal is to minimize the number of support requests you receive, the question of why people need support may be more important than the question regarding the effectiveness or expertise of your support team. 

Hypothesis and proof. Start with a question and ask after each support interaction for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how often you receive support requests. At the end of each period, ask another question. Create a final list from the list that generated the most informative responses during the trial period.

Conduct a pilot survey. If your hypothesis and test are not your options, ask your volunteers to spend 30 minutes researching their latest IT support experience. See all the answers to determine which question produced the most valuable results.

Use these methods to narrow down your list of questions as much as possible. Please limit yourself to just one question. Once you have a final list, you are ready to decide how to administer your survey.

Hypothesis and proof. Start with a question and ask after each support interaction for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how often you receive support requests. At the end of each period, ask another question. Create a final list from the list that generated the most informative responses during the trial period.

Conduct a pilot survey. If you can't formulate hypotheses and evidence, ask your volunteers to spend 30 minutes researching their latest IT support experience. See all the answers to determine which question produced the most valuable results.

Step 5: Select The Survey Tool

If your existing ticket software or support system automatically sends emails to your customers when a team member closes a ticket, the easiest way to collect feedback is to include a survey link in the email template.

Create a survey using popular survey tools like Survey Monkey, Question Pro, and Type form, and add a link to the closed ticket email template.

This method is the simplest, but not always the most effective. For example, you must click a link to provide feedback. They may not know the link and simply delete the email or they may not have time to wait for the website to open to complete the survey.

Customer Thermometer offers a solution to this problem. Use this tool to insert a survey button into your email. This saves the customer from having to open another site to provide feedback, and the image used to provide feedback makes the request more prominent than a simple link.