Measuring User Satisfaction: Why It's Important and How to Do It

Published:
Briefs, Case Studies, Papers, Reports
Author(s) and Contributors:
Author(s): Leah Lang
Source(s) and Collection(s):
Sources(s): EDUCAUSE Research Collection(s): EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) Research Hub Research Report
ParentTopics:
IT Support Services

As institutions look to reduce or contain costs, CIOs, institutional leaders, and service managers are challenged to optimize service delivery based on costs, features, and quality. Evaluating service quality requires understanding users and their satisfaction with service delivery. This ECAR infographic and report synthesizes data from the EDUCAUSE 2011 Core Data Service (CDS) and three focus groups of IT professionals to better understand how and why institutions are gathering satisfaction data.

Report and Supporting Materials

Key Findings

  • Institutional leaders, CIOs, and service managers are focused on service delivery. Understanding the user perspective is instrumental in making good decisions about service sourcing, investments, and life cycles.
  • To best provide IT services that meet user needs, institutions should follow a formal feedback-gathering process that collects actionable data on a regular basis, uses those data to inform decision making, and closes the loop by reporting results and decisions to respondents and to the wider community.
  • Institutions are gathering satisfaction data in three main ways: homegrown surveys, professional standardized surveys, and professionally customized surveys.
  • A majority of institutions create separate surveys for different IT services—such as help desk, wireless connectivity, or e-mail—and in many cases the survey questions are very similar. This duplication of effort presents an opportunity for collaboration.

Related Resources

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