Supporting Statement

OMB Control No. # 693-0031 – NIST Generic Request for Customer Service-Related Data Collections

NIST IT Assistance Center Customer Satisfaction Measurement

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Technology (IT) Assistance Center provides IT support to the NIST community. To ensure a valid customer satisfaction measurement, the optional survey needs to be offered to all customers who utilize the NIST IT Assistance Center, regardless of their position.

When non-employees have an agreement in place with NIST, they are provided a welcome package, which includes instructions on utilizing the NIST IT Assistance Center for IT support. The NIST IT Assistance Center is trained on processes and tools that center around non-employees, as well as employees, to be able to address their specific IT needs. For these reasons, the management of the NIST IT Assistance Center needs to measure the customer satisfaction of non-employees and employees with quantitative and qualitative input to ensure the support provided is meeting the needs of all customers served when they experience an IT Incident.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

The NIST IT Assistance Center has been a member of the Help Desk Institute (HDI) for several years. HDI is the worldwide professional association and certification body for the technical service and support industry.  HDI has been involved in the support industry, since 1989 and has developed a survey tool based on their experience and knowledge. This tool was tested by staff at NIST, presented to the NIST IT Assistance Center management, and minor changes were made to the customizable text. The tool was then purchased, approved for use, tested in the production environment, and announced to customers.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

The survey will be offered, via email with a link to the web-based survey, to the NIST community when calling or walking into the NIST IT Assistance Center with an IT Incident, which is resolved by a member of that team. The survey will not be offered if the customer had a request or if the incident has to be escalated to another team. This survey is intentionally brief (it only asks 5 questions) and is specifically measuring the effectiveness of the NIST IT Assistance Center. NIST will utilize various communications outlets to help improve the response rate including:

• Our customer-facing newsletter

• Discuss at customer-facing meetings

• Email to the NIST community

Expected response rate: 30%.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

The survey measures customer satisfaction in four areas: courtesy, knowledge, timeliness, and quality. The results will be reviewed by the NIST IT Assistance Center management team to identify and reach out to customers who reported dissatisfaction with any of these areas. The results will be reviewed on a weekly and monthly basis with in the NIST IT Assistance Center staff to discuss how customers are viewing the support they have received. On a quarterly basis, a summary of the results will be provided to the NIST community. Each measurement is associated with a goal. The results will show the relationship to the goal.