IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys / IT User Satisfaction Surveys Assess IT's Impact on Employees and Customers:

While IT customer survey findings are unique for every company, there are many similar themes, problems and opportunities identified in almost every IT survey /IT user survey, regardless of the industry or company size.

Many c-suite executives don't fully understand the impact Information Technology has on their employees, customers and bottom-line performance:

A chef can't do his/her job without knives, and sharp knives work much better than dull ones. Likewise, many employees rely heavily on technology to perform their job. Without the right technology, they can't do their job. Using technology that is underpowered with significant shortfalls makes employees inefficient and frustrated.

Information workers use computers and smart phones to communicate from their desk, from the field and when working from home. They use computers to conduct transactions, create documents, gather and analyze information, to access, use and update company databases, and perform a wide range of tasks. Employees rely heavily on both enterprise and specialized systems. For many employees, most or all of what they do requires them to use their desktop or laptop computer and a phone (often a smart phone), supported by various peripheral devices including scanners, printers, copying machines and other devices.

Companies are already spending large percentages of their annual and capital budgets on technology. Survey findings indicate some organizations need to spend even more while others need to get much more value from the money they are already spending on Info Tech.

The fastest and most cost-effective way to assess the effectiveness of Information Technology and IT's impact on an organization's employee performance, customers and company performance is to conduct IT customer satisfaction surveys / IT user satisfaction surveys.

Questions About Information Technology's Performance the C-Suite Should be Asking:

For most companies, the question should not be "can we afford to spend more on technology"? The questions should be:

1 - How is IT impacting our employees, customers and company performance?

2 - Are we getting value for the money we are spending on Information Technology?

3 - How can we get more value for our Tech Support dollars?

4 - Do we need to spend more on IT?

5 - What areas of Information Technology need improved performance?

6 - How can we make IT's performance more effective and efficient?

7 - How can Information Technology make our employees more productive, our customers more satisfied and loyal, and our company more competitive and profitable?

Illustrative Comments from IT Customer Surveys / IT User Surveys:

IT surveys provide information and insight for making significant improvements in Information Technology performance, customer satisfaction / effectiveness and business performance.

Following are comments from various IT customer satisfaction surveys / IT user satisfaction surveys that illustrate the level of frustration and the impact on employee productivity and customers. Read these comments and you will likely agree that most companies have huge opportunities to get more value from their Info Tech resources. Is your company experiencing any of these problems?:

• I waste at least an hour a day waiting on my PC to do something. I am not alone with this – it's across the site. It scares me to think of the lost productivity and what that is costing us.

• People are very willing to work at home and complete additional hours, if they have access to a Laptop. Others can do so with a Blackberry. It may be false economy to limit these so much, and actually reduce productivity overall

• My PC is way too slow - if I had a decent platform to work with I would get a hell of a lot more work done in the same time. Manage2000 is a joke - long past its use by date and needs replacing. It's holding us back.

• JDE is a very user unfriendly program and is not an improvement over the old ICAPS system at all. JDE is complicated, difficult to use and takes an inordinately long time to get any information out of it; if you can retrieve information at all. The fact that our site was literally dumped in it at the deep end with no back up from the legacy systems and insufficient training was appalling and the business suffered because of it. Very poorly done.

• Trackwise is one of the worst programs I've ever seen, surpassed only by JDE for user unfriendliness. It's a complete waste of time and most people - myself included - just ignore it.

• I do not understand why our company will not allow sales employees that are out of the office the majority of the time to access their email via their private blackberry. This is not company owned property because our company does not provide Blackberrys, even for tenured major account reps. So, we are forced to buy our own and then management won't allow us to fully utilize this essential tool in today's business world. STUPID MANAGEMENT!!!

• I haven't worked with such a slow system in 20 years. I waste at least an hour a day waiting for screens to change. I hate to think if this is the same for everyone what this is costing the business in lost productivity.

• In our office there are only two network printing options which are undersized for the office usage and are frequently down due to print quality issues. I often have to outsource (at my own cost) printing a customer proposal to a local print shop in order to provide a good quality printed proposal.

• The state of the company network is ridiculous. I experience extremely slow network speeds 2-4 days every week. I often cannot download company information because it will tie up my computer for longer than 15-20 minutes. Sending and receiving email is often impossible, Lotus Notes just shuts down. Frequently the network connection is so bad I can't even use the internet, the browser times out. I cannot be productive when my most important tool doesn't work.

• Slow, unresponsive periods when e-mail is inaccessible and takes forever to navigate from one e-mail to another.

• Marty is always available to help out, however, he is beyond swamped with trying to support a growing organization. We need more Marty's on our business!

• Our Tech Support department operates with low sense of urgency regarding tech support challenges that I have been faced with.

• If John is not available we all suffer. Our life line is our laptops!

• I get answers and resolution to easy questions immediately. For that I am very satisfied. Answers or resolution to bigger, long standing issues take much longer... some are yet to be resolved. Major issues. I don't think that this is a function of the technicians. They don't seem to have the authority to make decisions or implement changes. They can only do what they are directed to do, so I am very dissatisfied.

• We have chronic issues - one or two computers are always crashed - feels like everyone has two or three days of no productivity when being resolved

• When I give an order to my admin, I never know how long it will take to get it in Oracle because there is so much red tape. Every month the system changes and it's ridiculous.

• Issues can drag on for weeks, and without my continual follow up, it feels like little progress is made on issues.

• I have experienced loss of key files during several incidents.

• Larger issues have gone unresolved for years. It's a cross platform tech support issue. Our technician does not have the expertise with the Mac OS platform, therefore his ability to help with certain issues is limited. We use Apple support when we can but the bigger issue is server and cross platform related.

• It's frustrating when we have to mail in our laptop. The down time is tremendous.....in our world we can't even afford a few days without a laptop and the internet alternative site is not an optional solution.

• Always seems to take multiple tries to resolve issues.

• My PC is very slow.....

• Very slow startup. wastes 10 minutes a morning

• Many of us would be better served with upgraded smart phones

• The printers are often down/jammed.