You can guess where I stand on this otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog and others like it …

Yesterday I was a guest speaker in an Axios webinar, called “Using ITSM to Increase Business User Satisfaction and the Perception of IT,” during which we ran four audience polls. I thought it would be great to share the poll results and my thoughts.

The webinar story arc …

I set the scene using many of my favorite graphics including the following which shows the gulf between the business’ and IT’s own opinions of how well the average internal IT organizations is doing …

… Before starting to look at how what we do and measure either increases or decreases the customer experience – including the fact that we often seem to be too focused on what we do in IT rather than what we achieve through what we do in IT (and IT service management (ITSM)). I also included a section on common metrics issues which I’ve previous blogged on here and here; and the customer experience work of my Forrester colleagues and its applicability to internal IT.

The poll results and my thoughts …

1. Do you consider the people that consume your IT services to be:

  • End Users                       17%
  • Internal Customers          49%
  • Business Users                28%
  • Other                               6%

Not unsurprisingly, given the webinar subject, half the audience was in a customer-centric state of mind and only 17% were aligned with the end-user mentality. The Other 6% might be external customers in the context of service providers.

2. Do you consider your IT department to be:

  • Technology-centric          50%
  • Service-centric                33%
  • Customer-centric             17%

The 50% that are still technology-centric is scary, and I admire the responders’ honesty. With hindsight it would have been interesting to ask a secondary question around whether there had been a corporate investment in ITIL and therefore some expectation of service-centricity.

3. Are you currently using a customer satisfaction metric to measure IT performance?

  • Net Promoter Score           9%
  • C-Sat                               9%
  •  Our own CS metrics       61%
  •  None                             21%

Key points for me here are:

  1. I’m surprised at the uptake of NPS but this could be employees of IT service organizations
  2. That one fifth or responders don’t measure customer satisfaction
  3. The 61% that do their own thing are missing the opportunity to compare against benchmarks. And yes I know industry benchmarks can be dangerous.

4. Do you have an agenda to improve business user satisfaction in the next 12 months?

  • Yes                                   60%
  • No                                    24%
  • We do now!                      16%

Again the high number of yeses was expected due to the webinar title but I’m pleased to see the additional 16% who have been inspired (maybe too strong a word?) to go away and look at customer/business user satisfaction after the webinar.

It is a quick blog but I know people love stats. If you would like to view the on demand version of the webinar it can be accessed here (registration required).

As always, your thoughts and opinions are encouraged – this includes you Roy Atkinson of HDI … how do these stats stack up against yours?