Specific OR General Feedback?

[fim]

Its usual for the service providers to get their functions evaluated – by customers they serve, in order to improve their performance and to win customer loyalty. In a Technical Support Model where the IT Unit (such as Customer’s SAP Center of Excellence) provides services to end-users of the solutions across different organizational units, a structured feedback could help technical team in learning from past experience and improving their future services.

As part of measuring the solution adoption rate by system end-users, we have a feedback-seeking practice in place, according to which we run a survey periodically through a Third Party (an internal department). The results do give a general understanding of how happy our customers are with given support. However, with the practice we can’t (exactly) determine how well the enhanced & new solutions are being received & perceived by end-users in practical environment.

To tackle such situation, I am thinking of a Solution Specific feedback process according to which we may seek beneficiaries’ response upon providing them the services. I was wondering if someone here at forum has gone through similar situation before and could share his/her experiences?

[Rashid_Javed · Accepted solution]

Well if survey is the only option available, then of course solution specific feedback or survey is better then a generic survey.

However feedback or survey results should not be used as a stand alone measure to estimate solution acceptance/usage in end users. Other factors(may differ for each solution) such as Database logs, number of page hits, number of searches in a day/hour, ratio of errors or number of incomplete transactions versus number of completed transaction, etc should also be considered.

I think that providing feedback is like an overhead from end user point of view, so it should be either

1: Short and clear (questions that can be answered with a Yes/No). On the other hand questions like how do you rate your experience (A:Very Good, B:Good, C:OK, D:Bad, E:Very Bad) are very subjective in nature and depends on the mood of user.

2: Some reward associated with it. think about gamification of feedback process (in fact if possible it can be applied to both feedback and learning/training process). Gamification can increase the user interest and involvement in any given task. following link has some good examples of this concept.

Top 10 Groundbreaking Gamification Examples

[fim · Accepted solution]

Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts : - )

Currently we have survey which is conducted through an internal department at equal intervals. It gives a good-enough picture of day-to-day support - provided to the business against incidents raised by end-users. What we are trying here to achieve is to get their feedback on enhancement / implementation services to improve the CoE services against Change Requests / New Requirements - raised by business users.

As you rightly indicated the end-users see such thing an overhead; they may provide us the required feedback initially but if it becomes a routine they may not respond, at all or in time. I think gamification is good idea to increase their interest level. 

Regarding the measures, we do have other parameters, including system utilization reporting to assess whether / not they are using it for their daily business. We are also getting Governance (a department within organizational hierarchy) involved to ensure that end-users use the system.

[former_member66888]

Another approach to measure user adoption and satisfaction on specific functionality / processes is to use software which collects data and statistics while the user is processing a transaction. As example, the software measures How long the user stays on each screen or how many errors the user makes before being able to successfully complete the transaction. The navigation pattern of the user can provide insights into whether solution is intuitively easy to use for that user or not.

Not meaning to promote any software but for more information about what such products can offer, you can look at KNOA http://www.knoa.com

Best regards,

Zubair Naseer

[fim]

Thanks Zubair for the suggestion : - )

I had a quick look at KNOA and it sounds quite a good solution. But due to budget constraints, I'm not sure if we would be able to get such tool anywhere soon. However, at least by knowing that there's a tool available for such needs, at least it could be considered in future as an option.

Hope others also have some thoughts to share!