Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [91]
Another conclusion was that some of the respondents to the annual survey (especially a considerable amount of negative scores) were given by respondents who hadn't used the IT services—especially in the case of the service desk. Since the IT organization had a poor reputation from a few years prior when service delivery was way below par, the respondents were rating the IT department based on this poor reputation. This is akin to the perception of Japanese manufacturing in the mid-20th century. If you said “made In Japan” it meant that the item was junk. If it broke easily, didn't work, or failed to work more often than it did work—you would say, “it must have been made in Japan.”
Today, that reputation has been essentially reversed. Now “Made in Japan” describes the height of quality. Japanese-made cars are more respected for quality than American-made automobiles. We won't get into the story of how an American helped make this happen (look up the story of W. Edwards Deming) because he couldn't get our own manufacturing industry to listen. The point is that the Japanese had to overcome their negative reputation. It wasn't as simple as just delivering higher-quality products. Their potential customer base had to be convinced to give them a try. Those who only knew Japanese products as the answer to a joke had to be won over. The same was true for a good portion of our customer base.
Unfortunately those detractors Reichheld discusses can seriously damage your organization's reputation. If a good portion of your customer base is bad-mouthing your services and products, you will need to counteract that. Hoping and waiting for them to come around through attrition is a dangerous path to travel. You may find yourself out of business well before the customers realize that their perception is outdated and that the reality is that you were providing a healthy service.
The measures and follow-on investigation pointed to the need of a marketing program, and not a change in the service, processes, or products.
The Higher Education TechQual+ Project: An example
Timothy Chester's Higher Education TechQual+ project is a great example of how an annual survey can help provide not only satisfaction data, but also insights into what the customer sees as important. Tim is the CIO of the University of Georgia, and for the last six years, his pet project has been the development of the TechQual+ Project. The purpose of the project is to assess what faculty, students, and staff want from information technology organizations in higher education. It is primarily a tool for a higher education organization to find out its customers' perceptions of its services.
The TechQual+ project's goal is to find a common “language” for IT practitioners and IT users. This is part of what makes Chester's efforts special. But, the first brick in the project's foundation is “that the end user perspective” is the key to the “definition of performance indicators for IT organizations.” In other words, the customers' viewpoints are critical to the success of the IT organization and the meaningfulness of any metric program.
Chester writes, “With end-user-focused data in hand, one can easily understand failures in service delivery as one-time mistakes, as opposed to urban myths of recurring problems in IT.”1
In the Protocol Guide for TechQual+, Tim Chester explains that the tool's key purpose is to allow “IT leaders to respond to the requests of both administrators and accreditation bodies, who increasingly request evidence of successful outcomes.” The project intends to give IT organizations a tool for compiling evidence to answer these requests.
Chester goes on to explain, “[For] IT organizations, demonstrating the effective delivery of technology services is vital to the establishment of appreciation, respect, and trustworthiness…”
This project lists the most crucial inputs