Getting feedback from the end users
Overview
Nexthink offers you deep visibility into your IT infrastructure from the perspective of the end users. With Nexthink, you get extensive information about the hardware of the end-user devices, the software that is installed and run on these devices, and the usage that end users make of the network. All this objective information is very useful for your IT department to know what is actually happening within your corporate network.
To complement this objective view of your IT infrastructure, it is important to know as well the subjective opinion of the end users. Measure the IT satisfaction level of the end users by asking them directly about their perception on the different IT services and pieces of equipment that are provided to them. Target only the concerned users by designing pertinent investigations in the Finder and keep track of their responses with dedicated dashboards in the Portal.
Analyze the results and compare objective information with subjective IT satisfaction to get a better and more complete understanding of your IT environment as a whole.
Planning a campaign
In Nexthink, the act of starting a survey to retrieve the opinion of the end users with respect to some aspect of their IT environment is known as publishing a campaign.
Campaigns are a powerful tool to let you know the opinion of your end users about a particular subject. The power of campaigns comes to some extent from the fact that you can address questions to potentially all of the end users with a single action. Contrary to the creation of an investigation or a metric in the Finder, the publication of a campaign has a direct impact on the end users. When you publish a campaign, users receive either notifications that prompt them to take the survey (if notifications are enabled) or the survey itself. Because answering the questions of a campaign may disrupt the daily work routine of the end users, you must plan your campaigns with special care.
To design a successful campaign, consider the following points:
The goal of the campaign.
State what you want to achieve with the help of all stakeholders.
Define the actions to take once the campaign has ended.
The target audience.
Clearly define the group of users targeted by the campaign.
Adapt the language of the questions in the campaign to the target audience.
The length and duration of the campaign.
Ask only a few questions per campaign.
Choose the type of campaign according to your previously defined goals:
One-off campaign.
Recurring campaign.
Continuous Satisfaction Measurement campaign.
Control the time for collecting answers in order to take action based on feedback.
Urgent campaigns are immediately delivered.
Non-urgent campaigns respect a Do Not Disturb period between them.
When you publish a campaign, you want to maximize:
The number of targeted users who answer your questions.
The quality of their answers.
And minimize:
The burden on the users.
Implicating the end user
People will tend to respond to a campaign if they feel concerned by its subject matter. If you define well the target audience of your campaign, users who are part of it should be willing to give their opinion on the subject. Remember, however, that this might not always be the case and that, by asking the users to participate in a survey, you are somehow asking them for a favor. Therefore, try to create a trust relation with the end user: use greetings and personalize the notifications of your campaigns, provide the reasons why you are asking about a particular matter, and take action based on the answers received.
Write the questions of a campaign ensuring that the targeted audience understands your questions. IT technicians tend to use a terminology that is often obscure to most of the non-technical users. Therefore, it is important to avoid technical jargon and adapt the language of your questions to the group of end users that you are addressing. For instance, when you are addressing to a group of generic users, ask How happy are you with the sending speed of your email? instead of How satisfied are you with the performance of the SMTP server?.
Defining the target audience
To define the target audience of a campaign, create or reuse an investigation based on users. Remember that you can create new investigations by saving the results of drill-downs or one-clicks. These are often very useful for clearly defining the target audience of campaigns which are related to a particular issue.
For instance, imagine that you find out that a group of devices are having high response times when accessing the mail server thanks to Nexthink. You may want to drill-down from devices to users and save the resulting investigation. Then, you can use this investigation in a campaign to get feedback from those users only who have been impacted by the high response times.
Services defined in Nexthink are usually a good starting point to define a campaign as well. From the Services tab in the Finder, it is easy to get the users that had access to the service during the last day by right-clicking the name of a service and selecting Display > Objects > Users. You can also get those devices that accessed the service (or had trouble accessing the service) from the Service view. Similarly to the previous case, drilling-down from devices to users gives you the target audience for a service-related campaign.
To refine the investigations that determine the target audience of your campaigns, filter out the users who should not receive it. For instance, system users will never answer the questions of a campaign; therefore, it is useless to include them in the investigation. You may also want to leave a group of special users out of the loop of notifications. Use categories and keywords to tag these special users and add appropriate conditions to the investigations of the campaign to filter them out.
Because the investigation on users that is linked to a campaign is periodically re-evaluated while the campaign is active, the time frame of investigations used in campaigns must be either of type full period or during last days / hours, and not a between fixed interval. Regardless of the results of the last re-evaluation of the linked investigation and while the campaign is still active, users who got a notification from a campaign at some point keep receiving notifications (with the frequency specified in the definition of the campaign) until they either fully answer the questions of the campaign or decline to participate. That is, once a user has been targeted, the user remains targeted.
Timing considerations
To make your campaigns more effective, do not overwhelm the end users with too many questions. A few precise questions are often enough, helping users stay focused and provide better quality answers; whereas lengthy campaigns may discourage users to finish the survey and not read attentively the last questions. Typically ask from one to five questions per campaign.
To communicate urgent or important matters that all targeted users should read, consider both declaring the campaign as urgent, to avoid delays in the delivery, and skipping the notification step of a campaign. Instead of displaying a notification, the first (and usually the only) question of the campaign is displayed right away on the screen of the end user. Thus, by saving the end user an unnecessary click to accept the campaign, the campaign cannot be rejected and its message is more likely to be read.
Depending on the type of campaign, regularly control the period dedicated to collecting feedback in order to take action based on the answers of the end users. For one-off campaigns, the moment to take action usually corresponds to the end of the campaign, when it is retired. For recurring and continuous campaigns, take action periodically before the same groups of users are targeted again.
Phases of a campaign
The life-cycle of a campaign comprises the following phases:
Created
The campaign has been saved but not published yet. You can edit the campaign and make any kind of modifications to it.
Published
Once you publish a campaign, the campaign becomes active and end users start receiving the set of questions associated to the campaign. You can edit a campaign that has been published with some restrictions.
Retired
When the time to end the campaign comes, stop sending questions to the end users by retiring the campaign. After the campaign is retired, its results are still available in the Engine and in the dashboards that you may have created in the Portal. You may later republish the same campaign or modify the campaign, with some restrictions, before republishing.
Republishing a campaign that was retired makes exactly the same campaign active again. Users may be retargeted depending on the type of campaign and on the status of the users with respect to the campaign (whether they fully answered, declined to participate, or other).
To republish an old campaign with new questions or other major modifications, you need to create a new campaign. A quick way for reusing an old campaign is to create the new campaign by duplication: right-click the name of the old campaign in the Campaigns tab and select Duplicate. Modify the new campaign to your taste and publish it when you are ready.
Before publishing a campaign, it is convenient to get a glance of how the end users will be notified (if the campaign enables notifications) and how they will see the questions of the campaign in their own computers. Click the Preview button at the bottom of the window where you edit the campaign to see your recently edited questions in the same form as the end users will see them. Every time that you make a change to the campaign, click Preview again to avoid bad surprises once you finally publish the campaign.
Remember to take action based on the results of a campaign. This will ensure that the end users see the value of providing quality answers and motivate them to keep answering future campaigns.
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