Why Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys Matter

Why providing customer satisfaction feedback  to your IT support provider helps them deliver a better service for you👍.

Reviews and feedback are the lifeblood of any service-oriented business, including IT support companies. They provide invaluable insights into customer satisfaction, highlight areas for improvement, and reinforce what is working well. Constructive criticism and positive reinforcement both play a role in fostering a culture of continuous improvement. When IT support companies receive regular feedback, they can identify and address issues promptly, refine their processes, and ultimately deliver better services to their clients.

In this blog, we’ll look at the ways you can gather and offer CSAT feedback to your IT partner and explore why encouraging staff to leave reviews is useful for showing business leaders how staff feel about service.

• Benefits of providing feedback
• Making the most of different feedback channels
• Navigating positive and negative feedback
• Perceived barriers to feeding back

Benefits of providing feedback

1. Enhancing communication and transparency

Encouraging staff to leave customer satisfaction feedback promotes open communication and transparency between partners. It sends a clear message that both companies value the opinions and experiences of the customer. This, in turn, can lead to increased engagement as staff members feel heard and acknowledged. Moreover, transparent communication with IT support companies can build trust and strengthen the partnership, ensuring that both parties work collaboratively towards common goals.

2. Insights into employee satisfaction

One of the key benefits of encouraging staff to leave reviews is that it provides business leaders with valuable insights into how the rest of the company feels about the service they receive. Employee satisfaction is a critical metric for any organisation, and understanding how IT support impacts this can inform decision-making at the highest levels. A 2019 study noted that poor ICT can significantly affect employee satisfaction.

3. Powering data-driven decisions

Business leaders rely on data to make informed decisions. Reviews and feedback from employees offer a wealth of qualitative data that can complement quantitative metrics. By analysing trends and patterns in the feedback, leaders can gain a deeper understanding of the IT support landscape and make data-driven decisions that align with the needs and expectations of their teams. This approach ensures that investments in IT support are targeted and effective, ultimately contributing to the overall success of the organisation.

Positive reviews can highlight the effectiveness of current IT strategies and justify the continuation or expansion of the current partnership. Negative feedback can pinpoint areas that require attention and improvement which can direct discussion, and if required can even form specific contractual clauses or service level agreements (SLAs).

Feedback information from staff is invaluable when it comes to discussions with your IT partner, especially when renewing support contracts.

4. Encouraging accountability

When customers leave honest reviews, it holds IT support companies accountable for their actions and services. Knowing that their performance is being evaluated by clients motivates these companies to maintain high standards and continuously strive for excellence. Accountability fosters a sense of responsibility and professionalism, ensuring that IT support companies remain committed to delivering quality services and meeting the needs of their clients.

Making the most of different feedback channels

There are many ways that feedback can be gathered and passed to your IT support partner. We’ll look at each below.

1. Internal

Creating mechanisms to gather internal feedback about IT support is hugely beneficial to companies. Encouraging staff to provide feedback through structured channels such as regular surveys, feedback forms, and periodic review meetings provides valuable insight into the experience of all staff, and not just that of decision-makers who may benefit from the ‘VIP treatment’.

These channels allow employees to share their experiences, concerns, and suggestions systematically. You are unlikely to gather quantitative metrics directly from this approach but you will get qualitative data that can be invaluable for informing discussions with your IT support company and can be converted into quantitative metrics.

Quantifying qualitative feedback involves converting subjective opinions into measurable data. This can be done through rating scales, numerical scores, and thematic analysis of qualitative comments. For instance, a survey might ask employees to rate their satisfaction with IT support on a scale from 1 to 10, or to indicate how often their issues are resolved within a specified timeframe. These data points can then be aggregated to produce an overall performance score for the IT support company.

Many AI-powered feedback tools can also provide sentiment analysis to provide a quantitative score based on the language used in the feedback provided. In our experience, these AI sentiment analysis tools are not particularly accurate, more often than not interpreting feedback entirely inaccurately.

Using this quantified feedback, business leaders can gain a clearer understanding of the IT support company's strengths and weaknesses.

2. Direct to your partner

Many managed service providers utilise some form of CSAT platform to allow their customers to provide feedback directly to them via CSAT surveys.

This feedback opportunity is usually included in a notification an issue has been resolved and the service ticket has been closed. The survey will often ask the person to click a link to leave positive or negative feedback with an option to expand on their sentiment with a comment.

This type of direct feedback is used by IT support companies to help with both monitoring customer satisfaction and helping to identify areas for improvement and training.

Feedback should be visible to you as the client either through regular reporting or a live dashboard or portal. Seeing how your staff rate individual tickets provides valuable insight into the day-to-day sentiment and type of recurring issues that business leaders may wish to be aware of.

There are several benefits to encouraging staff to leave feedback on individual tickets. Not only do you get a granular view of sentiment and performance per ticket, but it also ensures that the IT partner knows if a customer is or isn’t happy.

Timely negative feedback on tickets affords your IT partner the opportunity to remedy the situation through follow-up action, potentially even escalating an issue to more senior staff.

3. Public reviews

Public feedback can appear in a variety of formats. Outside of social media, it usually refers to reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp or Trustpilot.

For businesses providing services public feedback can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, public reviews are essential to help provide social proof that you deliver great service. Positive reviews on platforms help increase exposure and rankings and therefore help grow the business. On the other hand, negative public feedback can be very damaging and if it is unwarranted then it can be next to impossible to remove. There are many instances of a person who hasn’t interacted with a company leaving a negative review of the business and forever staining their reputation.

We recommend that staff are not generally encouraged to leave public reviews. Public reviews should be produced by management to ensure they reflect the considered view of the organisation.

That said, we would strongly encourage leaving honest reviews about your IT partner. The main reason for doing so is for social good. Although you may not gain anything from it, you can help other businesses to either find a great partner or… to learn from your experience. The one golden rule when leaving public feedback that isn’t positive is to make sure that you have fully explored options with your partner to resolve any issues before leaving negative feedback.

4. Social media

Social media is deemed important and almost every company will have some sort of social media profile. More often than not, they will be used to push marketing messages and might even be automated.

Large corporations hire staff to manage social media accounts and they will monitor them for customers using them as a means of contacting them. Most small companies do not have the resources to do this so they are often not given much attention.

What this means is that they aren’t a useful route for providing feedback to your IT partner as there’s a good chance that feedback won’t even be seen. If you want to publicly praise your partner on social media for others to see then this is generally acceptable by tagging them in, so long as you aren’t relying on the comment being noticed.

As with public reviews, it’s good practice to bring any problems to the attention of your partner privately to try to resolve them before making public declarations.

Navigating positive and negative feedback

It’s worth talking about the differences between positive and negative feedback. Both are equally important, although people tend to usually think only of leaving negative feedback.

Positive feedback 👍

Leaving positive feedback creates a positive reinforcement loop. All customers should be treated equally, but at the end of the day everyone working in any company is still a person and we inherently try harder and do better for people that we like. If technicians receive positive feedback from a customer, they are quite likely (rightly or wrongly) to try that little bit harder to help them next time. That in turn will generate more positive feedback and so the cycle produces excellent service that benefits you.

Negative feedback 👎

Leaving negative feedback when something isn’t right or is handled badly can help identify areas where your IT partner needs to improve. Whether that is through process improvement or simply staff training. Without this feedback, the IT company will not know that there are areas for improvement.

It’s important to train people on how to leave negative feedback. Negative feedback can be very helpful, but if the tone is confrontational or abusive then its benefits can be overshadowed. Although management will still be able to extract the salient points and improve processes and training on the back of negative feedback, the subject of the feedback may end up bearing a grudge. (coming back to the point we made above about people still all being human at the end of the day).

The perceived barriers to leaving feedback

Feedback is often overlooked and frequently withheld for a variety of reasons. We’ll explore a few below and explain why these hesitations should be overcome.

Waste of time

People at all levels of a business often view leaving feedback as a waste of their time. They think that messages they leave go into a void and have no measurable impact but the reality is that feedback can be, and should be, vital to how you see your relationship with your IT partner.

Staff need to understand what happens to the feedback that they leave, how it is used by management and how it is used by the IT company. When negative feedback is left, they need to see action as a result to justify them leaving feedback in the future.

Politeness

In Britain, we often suffer from the particular national affliction of politeness. We don’t want to upset other people or hurt their feelings. As children, we were probably all told “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. This, unfortunately, doesn’t help us in the world of B2B transactions. If something is great, we should say so. If something needs improvement, we should equally say so. If we keep quiet, nothing will ever change.

Fear of reprisal

Sometimes staff are worried about leaving feedback for fear of being punished by the IT company with poor service in the future. This shouldn’t be a consideration and if an IT support company acted in this way then it should lead to very serious discussions about the continuation of service. Companies can only improve when they understand their weaknesses and negative feedback is one mechanism by which this is gathered. So long as feedback is constructive and isn’t personal or mean no one at the IT company will take offence. And even if they do, that shouldn’t be your worry.

Fear of admonishment

Sometimes employees don’t want to provide feedback for fear of being reprimanded by their employer for saying something that they feel they weren’t permitted to. Sometimes, especially in junior staff, there may be a worry that saying something to a third-party that hasn’t been authorised is not permitted. Staff should be told as part of their onboarding that they should feel free to leave honest feedback as it benefits the business.

Conclusion

The practice of leaving reviews and providing feedback to IT support companies is a powerful tool for both businesses and service providers. It fosters a culture of continuous improvement, enhances communication and transparency, and provides business leaders with valuable insights into employee satisfaction.

Honest public reviews on the likes of Google reviews play a crucial role in assisting others to make good choices and can bolster good relations with your IT partner by helping them with their online visibility and credibility. By embracing the importance of reviews and feedback, businesses can empower themselves and their IT support partners to achieve greater success and deliver exceptional services.

Next steps...

If you'd like to learn more about how we gather feedback from our customers to deliver great service then get in touch today.