Finding meaningful insights in end-user feedback has long been a white whale chase for IT pros. What truths lie beneath the murky depths of user opinion, and how can IT track them down faster? More importantly, is doing so even worth IT’s time? This post will present answers to those questions and offer up strategies for how to use the input of an increasingly tech-literate workforce to improve end-user experience and boost employee productivity.
The case for qualitative end-user feedback
It’s no secret that users have a lot to say about their technology. Many IT leaders see this as an opportunity to learn about how business decisions around technology are having an impact on employees.
In a survey conducted through IDG Research, we asked IT decision makers about what methods they use to measure the effectiveness of new end-user technologies at their organizations. All respondents reported using one or more sources, with 74% of IT leaders identifying employee feedback as a method they use to judge the success of newly-implemented technology.
In another survey of IT leaders, as reported in “Do You See What I See? Removing Obstacles to Greater Visibility Across the IT Estate for a Better Digital Employee Experience,” 45% of IT leaders surveyed ranked “delivering a better digital employee experience to improve productivity” as their #2 priority for the next twelve months.
One way to gauge the employee experience with their digital work tools is to use quantitative data from endpoints. Hard metrics paint a clear picture about whether an employee’s laptop, desktop, or other endpoint device is meeting their expectations. It makes sense, too, to gather qualitative data. Leveraging subjective employee feedback is such a popular way for IT to understand the end-user environment. Firstly, the motivations behind asking end users about their perceptions around workplace technologies are simple:
- It’s cheap (the only cost being the labor involved)
- It provides an outlet for users to express their concerns and frustrations
- It can hold valuable truths: Users are the consumers of technology and, in theory, should be the most attune to how it affects their productivity
Secondly, users are generally responsive and more than willing to discuss their feelings about technology. The tricky part about relying on feedback as an indicator, however, is that humans can never be fully objective, even when judging machines (we all remember that scene from Office Space). On top of that, even the most truthful of responses may lack the technical details needed for IT to actually go in and solve user issues.
The primary filter for most employee feedback on technology is the IT help desk. Users call in or file tickets to report on any number of problems they may be experiencing, whether it’s a forgotten password, slow system, or more complex performance issues. While these interactions can indicate the effectiveness of new technologies, the help desk should not be relied upon as the sole indicator of the success of digital initiatives.
The problem with using help desk feedback as a guide is that doing so provides a narrow and heavily skewed picture of the environment. For example, a user who consistently calls the help desk to report issues may consume a disproportionate amount of help desk resources over users with objectively worse experience. Decisions based on feedback from the loudest voices are unlikely to result in solutions that benefit the average user.
That’s not to imply that users have nothing valuable to say. On the contrary, the true value of qualitative data, apart from the ease of obtaining it, is that user sentiment can be equally as valuable as analytical insights. The key is to seek more representative feedback and tailor it to IT initiatives—an approach that can be achieved through end-user feedback surveys that are appropriately presented and analyzed.
Incorporating surveys into your IT strategy
In a B2C context, surveys are widely used to assess consumer opinions on products or services. This trend seems to be increasing. Across industries, businesses are recognizing that there is value in gathering sentiment data straight from the consumer.
But the relationship between IT and employees is slightly different from businesses and customers. For one (excluding cases of outsourced tech support), IT and employees are batting for the same team. Both groups want the business to succeed and see technology as integral to that goal, but their top priorities can differ. Users tend to value mobility and ease of access while IT must factor in security and cost control. Despite their differences, both groups want technology to perform well and users to be satisfied. How can they work together to make that happen?
Just like in the consumer sector, IT teams can use surveys to connect with users and learn about their experiences. One advantage IT has over B2C survey makers is that they don’t need to wait for a purchase to be made or a service interaction to initiate contact. IT is a continuous service and teams can use surveys in creative ways to come out ahead of issues, enabling proactive fixes. Surveys can also be tailored to return information that aligns with a specific IT objective, such as a widespread Windows 11 deployment or the tech impact of a merger & acquisition.
Like help desk calls, however, surveys alone aren’t enough to meaningfully inform IT strategy. They still present issues of bias, returning users’ perceptions rather than data-driven accounts of what is happening on their systems. How can IT avoid this pitfall? By examining end-user feedback alongside real, user-level endpoint performance and usage data.
Value of combining qualitative and quantitative data
On their own, qualitative and quantitative data tell only one side of the story: the employee’s or the computer’s. Quantitative analytics can show a wide range of performance details about a system; such data can even be rolled up into a score based on key metrics that trends the stat of a user’s experience. But we know from conversations with our customers that there are cases where the data on a user’s system may look great, but the user still reports a poor experience.
By observing qualitative survey data alongside quantitative analytics, IT can identify problems that would’ve been difficult (if not impossible) to discover otherwise. One example of this is when a user is experiencing a low-level performance issue (such as moderate latency) that is having a huge impact on his/her productivity over time, particularly if it’s with a business-critical application. Such a problem may not be severe enough, however, to affect the overall performance of the user’s system to a degree that is noticeable to IT. By contributing qualitative feedback, a user can seek remediation to a problem that may otherwise fly below IT’s radar.
Another major benefit to this approach is that it allows IT to meaningfully improve service quality by looking for trends in both user sentiment and empirical performance data. An important application of this is the same one we had IT leaders weigh in on: analyzing the effectiveness of new end-user technologies. After deploying a new technology, IT can push surveys to users to gather qualitative feedback. That data can then be compared with performance data on the technology to see if adjustments need to be made, whether that’s enabling users through training or adjusting which users get the new technology. This application is particularly useful in cases where user buy-in is desirable, such as the adoption of new software that was purchased with the intent of improving business processes.
Qualtrics Integration for First Unified Dashboard for Measuring Employee Experience
Lakeside has partnered with Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management (XM) category, to revolutionize the employee experience. By combining leading technologies in quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Lakeside and Qualtrics will empower organizations to comprehensively understand their employees’ digital experiences with technology and drive meaningful improvements across their workforce.
Lakeside and Qualtrics will provide a holistic view of quantitative and qualitative data in a single dashboard. Together, this unparalleled data will inform a single employee experience health score to track performance and define the industry-standard for measuring Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), which are fast replacing the traditional SLA for IT Help desk support.
This blog was originally published December 15, 2017, and was updated on June 20, 2024 to add the latest survey data and more recent case studies and partnerships.
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