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Why customer feedback is important?

Feedback is extremely important to a help desk because it lets us know where we are excelling and where we need to improve. Feedback is like a product review, and allows our clients to express their opinions about the product they are paying us to deliver.

A common issue among help desks around the world is effectively gathering the feedback from our busy customers and compiling the information into readable data that we can study and analyze.

How do we get the feedback?

The way that help desk software around the globe gather the information is very similar and the process is almost always the same:

1. User call service desk with an issue.
2. Ticket is created.
3. Issue is fixed by the agent.
4. User receives an email informing them of the fix.
5. 1 in 4 of these emails will contain a link to a survey the customer can fill in.

A customer and the company that is providing the IT support will have a agreed level of service that they must adhere to; these are called Service Level Agreements, or SLA’s, and they will determine how many customers are asked to leave feedback for the help desk. Theses SLA’s will also determine what scores are required by the service provider in order to be considered worthwhile. If all of the feedback is negative then we can assume that either there is something wrong with the help desk software, or the help desk is doing a pretty poor job.

Judging the feedback

Most companies will have individuals whose job is to look through the feedback received and investigate what went wrong on the negative responses. We need to first understand that a client is more likely to leave feedback if they are unhappy, than if they are just satisfied with the service they received. Therefore it is easy to assume that a high level of negative feedback will be coming in, regardless of the way we operate.

Another issue is to understand problems that are out of our control. Very often, complaints will arise because a particular website is down, or some software does not work correctly once installed. We have to know our scope and customers are still likely to be unhappy if we fail to help them with these issues; even though they might be out of our area of responsibility.

We should also look at both the way the survey is laid out and the relevancy of the questions included, and the help desk software that is used to monitor the feedback received. We can’t truly get an accurate picture of how the service is doing until we fully understand and appreciate the customers’ needs.

Is there another way?

Is there another way we can ascertain how we are performing? Can we provide our customers with an alternative method of providing us with the feedback we need to improve our service? There can be other methods of obtaining feedback but they have to be agreed within the Service Level Agreement. We want as much feed as possible but we cannot be too invasive and start pestering our clients for answers; they are always going to be busy with their own work.

The team involved in gathering the data and analyzing it, could start to make calls to people that have recently called the help desk and ask them questions about the service. These would have to be native speakers and friendly people in order to get the best results. This would also have to be agreed with the client. We can always improve the help desk software we use and have a “Quality team” who are trained on how to use the software. They can investigate the negative actions and relay the information to the management.

We can introduce fun competitions for those who do leave feedback, with random winners drawn from the hat each month. We can also inform the agents to encourage our customers at the end of their call to fill in the survey should they receive one. There is no need to pester the customer to do it if the customer is not particularly happy, but if the agent did a good job then they can always add to the end of the call:

“You might find a customer satisfaction survey in your inbox shortly, we would be very grateful if you could fill that in for us.”