New Study Measures Customers’ Satisfaction with IT Support

HDI, a membership association for IT help desk and service management professionals, released the results of a landmark study measuring customers’ satisfaction with internal and external IT support. The study’s results are based on more than 257,000 customer satisfaction surveys collected from more than 200 help desks and support centers. Some key findings include:

Overall customer satisfaction ratings were quite high, averaging mid-to-high 4s on a scale of 1-5 (1 being “Very Dissatisfied” and 5 being “Very Satisfied”)

Participating support centers were asked to determine their “maturity level” – based on HDI’s Maturity Model – from “Reactive,” to “Proactive,” “Customer Centric,” and ultimately “Business Centric.” Not surprisingly, those support centers that classified themselves as “Business Centric” (the highest level of maturity) had the highest customer satisfaction ratings. However, somewhat more surprising and ironic was that those that considered their support centers to be “Customer Centric” had the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of the four groups.

The survey rated customer satisfaction on five different factors: courtesy of the analyst; technical skills/knowledge of the analyst; timeliness of the service provided; quality of the service provided and overall service experience. Customers consistently reported that their highest level of satisfaction was with the courtesy of the analyst, and their lowest level of satisfaction was with the timeliness of the service provided. These results suggest that while the frontline analysts may be polite to their customers, the incidents are not being resolved as quickly as the customers expect them to be.

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