Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey

The Help Desk customer satisfaction survey (CSat) is used by Help Desk Managers to measure the customer’s experience of the support they received. Commonly a Help Desk customer satisfaction survey is used to obtain feedback from customers after completing a support interaction.

Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey Process

Question 1 – Does your help desk have an established Help Desk customer satisfaction survey process?

The Help Desk customer satisfaction survey process is more than just sending the customer a survey. The actual customer satisfaction survey form is just a tool used in the overall customer satisfaction survey process. The customer satisfaction process includes developing surveys, the delivery process, result follow up actions, agent training, and implementing process improvements. The process also includes meeting with internal business leaders and staff to obtain their direct feedback on the overall customer experience.

Survey Oversampling

Question 2 – Do you have a process to ensure that you are not oversampling your customers?

Requesting the customer to complete a customer satisfaction survey after an interaction with a Help Desk agent is expected. What do you do if the customer has multiple interactions with the Help Desk in one day or week? You should not oversample a customer. Oversampling customers may skew your results. Also, customers may become very annoyed receiving a lot of requests to complete surveys. The industry recommends not sending more than one survey out in a week to the same customer. Some Help Desk managers will only limit the frequency to no more than one survey per customer per month.

Survey and ticket linking

Question 3 – Is the sending a request for a customer satisfaction survey linked to resolving or closing a support ticket?

Asking people what they think of the service provided by the Help Desk is important. Ensuring that a survey is sent to the customer in a timely fashion is critical to obtain good input. If the survey is sent to a customer too long after their support interaction with the Help Desk, then it will reduce the odds they will complete the survey. The industry best practice is to have the Help Desk ticketing application automatically send a survey when the customer’s ticket is resolved.

Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Question 4 – Are your surveys brief and succinct with no more than 5 questions to minimize customer disruption?

When you make your survey, you should be respectful of the customer’s time. Focus your questions on information that can be actionable. Offer a field were they can provide more information. This will be helpful when review the survey. Too many question and the customer make just try and complete the survey.

Survey Response Rate

Question 5 – Do you receive at least a 30% overall response rate to your surveys?

While a 30% response rate may sound low, it is near industry average. Customers typically will not complete surveys unless it is easy for them or they have an interest in doing so. Ensuring the surveys are sent timely and the size is not too bid, your response rate should reach this level.

Survey Results

Question 6 – Are you able to sort, group or filter survey results by categories such as customer’s department, support issue, or location?

Receiving survey responses to your surveys is not enough. Being able to associate the survey to specific information can really create actionable items. This information can lead to uncovering support issues for a specific department, support issue, or location.

Publish Survey Results

Question 7 – Do you publish the overall results of your customer satisfaction measurements to the customers?

Collecting and analyzing survey results are important. Publishing the cumulative survey results to your customer base will provide transparency. Wayne Schlicht author of the Help Desk Management book recommends publishing survey results monthly. Internally or to certain stakeholders the reporting may be more frequent such as weekly. However, many Help Desks have found that there are not enough surveys in a week to provide a stable number.

Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey Follow Up

Question 8 – Is it mandatory that someone follows up on all negative customer memo feedback and poor satisfaction scores in a timely manner?

If following up on customer surveys with negative feedback and scores is not mandatory at your Help Desk, it should be. You customer survey questions will have scores from the customer with a range of 1 to 5 with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. All ones and twos should be mandatory to follow up on with the customer.

Improvements based on Customer Survey Results

Question 9 – Do you use customer feedback to establish your strategic and tactical plans for improvement?

A customer satisfaction score can give you an overall gauge on how satisfied your customers are with your Help Desk. The power of the customer survey really comes from the customer follow up by Help Desk supervisors and managers.

Employee Performance Review

Question 10 – Do you utilize your Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey results in the employee performance review process?

Direct customer feedback from customer satisfaction surveys is great data to use for employee performance reviews. If you have a process where each of the customer survey results are linked to a Help Desk ticket, then you can query survey results by agent.