Combining user satisfaction scores with technical metrics for the complete picture of user-experience

As a company who specialises in many types of monitoring we know the importance of having metrics to give you visibility into the user-experience of IT services. But in many cases, user-experience is subjective and can’t be measured through monitoring alone. It is often very difficult to determine the users’ satisfaction levels based only on technical data. Users are human beings and their perception about the quality of a service can be influenced by many things.

Of course you could survey your users as many companies do, but this has limited value if it isn’t targeted properly. For example if you send out a company-wide survey on how users perceive the service delivered by IT, the response rate will be generally be low as people just don’t have the time. Also you need to be careful not to burden users with too many questions which aren’t relevant to them or the response rates will be even lower. Therefore you would typically only send out this kind or survey annually which means that once you’ve acted on the feedback you still need to wait a whole year before you can see whether the user perception has improved.

Introducing Nexthink User Feedback

AP partner Nexthink believes it has the solution to these problems with the release of its User Feedback module. It allows the IT department to be very targeted in asking the right users at the right time, specific questions related to their behaviour and satisfaction levels.

A single question is delivered to the target users as a personalised popup which they can click to answer or defer till later. 

Here are some other examples of how User Feedback could be used to gain insight into end user behaviour and satisfaction which could never be understood by just monitoring their devices and what they are running.

Use case 1 - Understanding the reason for Shadow IT use

Nexthink sees every binary executed across every user’s machine so you can easily target users who you can see are using applications not approved by the IT department. For example you could target users of Dropbox or Google Drive to ask why they don’t use OneDrive if that is the corporate standard. It could be that they have problems running it or simply didn’t know about it.

Use case 2 - Affecting user adoption of a new application

Often when IT launches new service some users will continue to do things the old way. For example a company has Skype for Business as part of its Office365 subscription but Nexthink can see that some users are still running GoToMeeting or Webex. Nexthink can target those specific users asking them the question about why they choose to use those other applications. Again it could simply be that they didn’t know about it.

Use case 3 - Understanding the reason for hard resets

Nexthink sees when machines are hard reset; that is when they are powered off by pulling the power cable or hitting the off button rather than cleanly shutdown or rebooted. Nexthink can target those specific users asking them the reason they took this action to determine if it was due to a system crash, application crash, loss of network connectivity, printing problems or maybe they didn’t know.

Use case 4 - Laptop satisfaction score

Question….On a scale from 1-5 how happy are you with your laptop?

This can be useful when going through an upgrade cycle in knowing which model to choose and also which users really need to be upgraded. 

Use case 5 - Overall satisfaction score

Question… On a scale from 1-5 how happy are you with the IT Department?

Much like a NPS (Net Promoter Score), this single question allows you to gauge overall satisfaction with IT.

Comparing Subjective and Objective Measurements

By using Nexthink User Feedback understanding your end-users can become an automated process. You can continuously receive feedback from users by minimising the burden and only asking relevant questions at the right time. Then you can see how your satisfaction measurements are trending over time. What’s more, you can compare user satisfaction scores with technical metrics to see how they relate.

We see the introduction of User Feedback as completing the circle of monitoring - and commend Nexthink for they way they have implemented it.   To learn more about Nexthink, please download our brochure.