Ideally, your customer feedback initiative will already have the support of your CIO and the IT leadership team.

A CIO needs to exhibit visible signs of commitment to customer centricity, or employees will dismiss it as yet another flavour of the month. Your CIO can 'walk the talk' by:

• Sharing/selling the vision.
• Setting customer satisfaction goals.
• Encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
• Regularly asking direct reports how their NPS is trending, what they've learnt from customer feedback, and what they're doing to improve their NPS.

The leadership team should do the same with their own teams.

When you start using CIOPulse, three different groups of people will be impacted in some way:

• The customers who you will be asking to provide feedback.
• Support Leads whose Support Groups provide IT support to customers by resolving their problems and fulfilling their requests.
• IT support staff.

One of the most important things you need to do when implementing CIOPulse is to communicate with, engage and train these groups of people. You should use whatever channels are appropriate and effective within your organisation to communicate:

• What you are doing.
• When you will be doing it.
• Why it is important.
• How they will benefit.
• What they will need to do and when.
• How they need to do it.

It is also important that the CIOPulse administrator provides team leads and management with the URLs/bookmarks they will need to access CIOPulse information and analysis.  A complete list of responsibilities for the CIOPulse administrator can be found here.

Your customers need to know that:

• You will soon be introducing some new feedback mechanisms: the survey and Compliments, Complaints & Suggestions (CCS) form.
• They will from time to time be asked to complete a short survey after a support request.
• There is a CCS form available that can be completed anytime.
• You will be actively using this information to improve the service you provide them.

To ensure you continue to enjoy a high level of engagement from your customers (which will be reflected in the response rate for your surveys), we recommend that you:

• Always contact customers when they indicate that they're not satisfied or lodge a complaint.
• Periodically thank, encourage and remind them to complete the surveys.
• Give periodic updates on what you've learned as a result of their collective feedback and what you plan to do.
• Act on customer feedback to resolve systemic issues and realise improvement opportunities to make your service tangibly better.
• Tell customers what improvements you've made as a result of their feedback.

Here's an example of a launch email that one of our clients sent to their customers prior to going live with CIOPulse:

The IT team are launching a new service improvement campaign called “We’re Listening”.
It is underpinned by a Net Promoter* based survey process to help us understand your
frustrations with IT support and learn what you think we're good at. This will help IT
to improve internal service levels so you can get on with your job.

As Bill Gates once said, “Unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. We
really value your input and want you to be part of the solution.  

How does the survey work?

You can expect to receive a survey request whenever the Service Desk closes a job that
you have logged. It is a simple and quick survey that will take less than 2 minutes to
complete. Please take the time to give us your feedback, we promise we will listen and
take action!

If your survey response indicates that you're not happy, then you can expect a phone
call or a face-to-face follow up from someone in IT to explore opportunities for us to
improve and do it better next time.

Our aim is to understand your concerns and the negative effects of our performance on
you and your team so we can identify and prioritise improvement initiatives.

We will track all improvement initiatives so you’ll be kept in the loop.

*Net Promoter or Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that classifies
customers as Detractors, Passives and Promoters. It is used by 80% of the Fortune 500.
If you would like more information please don’t hesitate to contact xxxxxxxxxxxx.

Regards
xxxx,
CIO

Support Leads need to know:

• You will soon be introducing a new satisfaction feedback mechanism based on the Net Promoter System.
• What the Net Promoter System is and how a Net Promoter Score is calculated.
• They will automatically receive daily alerts when customers are unhappy and that they need to contact these customers (ideally, within one business day of receiving the alert).
• They will automatically receive weekly feedback from promoters (customers who have given a rating of 9 or 10). They should share and discuss this feedback with their teams.
• They will automatically receive a monthly report that lists all feedback for their team. They should use customer feedback for coaching their staff and for developing action plans to address the themes in the feedback. Support Leads can also request this report at any time in CSV or PDF format.
• How to access CIOPulse gauges and feedback for their team. This function will help you provide Support Leads with the relevant CIOPulse URLs.

Support Leads should be able to:

• Respond effectively to an unhappy customer (see this article for guidance).
• Share and discuss customer feedback with their team (collectively).
• Use customer feedback for coaching individual team members.

Contacting unhappy customers is critical because this gives the team lead the opportunity to:

• Acknowledge the customer's issue.
• Resolve the issue before it festers and/or becomes escalated.
• Identify and take steps to address systemic issues.
• Turn the customer from a Detractor into a Promoter.

Support staff need to know that:

• You will soon be introducing a new satisfaction feedback mechanism based on the Net Promoter System.
• What the Net Promoter System is and how a Net Promoter Score is calculated.
• The feedback mechanism will be used by their team leader or manager to provide feedback and improve the performance of the team.
• Their team leader or manager will be getting alerted whenever a customer is unhappy and will be calling customers to address their issue.