“I can’t get no satisfaction.” The Rolling Stones tried, and tried.
Ever looked at IT satisfaction survey results? You know, the ones asking, “On a scale of one to five, how satisfied are you?”
What were you hoping to find? Five out of five, four out of five?
Maybe you saw it, maybe you didn’t. If you did, did you think “phew” and carry on?
Then did you dig deeper and ask, “How did you feel, from happy face to frustrated face?”
What were you looking for? Happy faces, right?
Maybe you saw them, maybe you didn’t. If you did, did you think “phew” again and carry on?
Ever overheard the conversations around the coffee machine or in the canteen queue? People complaining about their laptops and the wifi, and about meeting rooms that never quite work.
Every day, I get a wake up call. The satisfaction results look OK, and there are happy and neutral faces. But the reality on the ground can be very different.
So I tried an experiment. I asked a virtual focus group of IT people:
- How satisfied do you think people are with our services, on a scale of one to five?
- How do you think people feel about our services, from happy to sad?
- What one word would you use to describe what people are saying around the coffee machine about our IT services?
The answers didn’t add up.
On the first question, the IT team thought most people would be relatively satisfied. On the second, they thought most people would be relatively content. But on the third, they said they would expect to hear some pretty distressing comments around the coffee machine.
When the answers came back, the room went quiet. People looked towards other people in the room. And the penny seemed to drop that maybe there was more to it.
That quiet said more than any of the scores.
So here’s the thing. Satisfaction and sentiment are what our surveys measure. Advocacy is what happens at the coffee machine: whether people are promoting your IT services or dismissing them.
Closed questions give you data. Open questions give you insight.
Your satisfaction and sentiment scores could look very different from what people are really saying about your IT services.
That distance between the score and the coffee machine is The Human Gap.
So what would I ask instead? If I could add one open question to every IT satisfaction survey, it would be this:
“If a colleague asked you what IT is like here, what would you tell them?”
It’s the coffee machine conversation, asked out loud. It doesn’t ask people to give us a number. It asks them what they would actually say, to someone they trust, when nobody from IT is listening. And that answer tells you whether they are promoting your services or quietly dismissing them.
The answers won’t fit neatly on a dashboard. Some of them will be uncomfortable to read. That’s the point. They are the conversations already happening in your organisation, whether you ask for them or not.
And then, and only then, read the scores again.
So let’s not take those one to five ratings at face value. Let’s get out there, talk to colleagues, have more conversations, and then decide how satisfied people really are with their IT services.
Whatever next?
