Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld

My ITSM software has a survey. Why would I want CIOPulse?

A survey, like that built into your ITSM software, or created with Survey Monkey, is just a tool for collecting data. CIOPulse is more than just a data collection tool  It is a comprehensive customer feedback management system. Out of the box CIOPulse provides you with the metrics, feedback, alerts, reports, dashboards and insights needed to act on user feedback and drive service improvement.

The capabilities of CIOPulse that you typically won't find in ITSM software include:

1. Beautiful, responsive, touch-enabled surveys..

2. Measures, tracks and compares customer satisfaction at multiple levels, e.g agents, teams, departments, customer divisions.

3. Includes SMS alerting when customers are unhappy.

4. Automatically distributes customer feedback to team leads for coaching and reward and recognition.

5. Includes built-in displays, reports and interactive dashboards.

6. Benchmarks your performance against other IT organisations every month.

7. Captures compliments, complaints and suggestions.

8. Runs one-off and recurring surveys for projects.

9. Runs one-off and recurring relationship surveys.

Click here to read more about how CIOPulse is more powerful than ITSM tool surveys.

Why not customise your own ITSM software?

Here are the most common reasons our clients chose CIOPulse instead of attempting to customise their own ITSM software:

1. CIOPulse can be ready to go-live in weeks. How long would you need to design, build, test and implement your own solution? A number of our clients tried developing their own solution before coming to us. They tell us they gave up because of the length of time it took to get started (due to higher priority ITSM enhancements) and/or because the effort was significantly bigger than initially estimated.

2. Replicating even part of CIOPulse's functionality would require significant budget/resources. A multi-year CIOPulse subscription is cheaper.

3. Some features are very hard, or impossible, to replicate. E.g. external benchmarking of Net Promoter Scores against other organisations; creating a fully-responsive, touch-enabled, great looking survey that works on all combinations of device and browser. We commonly hear that implementing Net Promoter scoring in an ITSM system sounds easy but is much harder than expected.

4. Why assign ITSM resources to building a solution that already exists? Your ITSM developers could be spending that time developing valuable enhancements that cannot be purchased.

5. We are constantly enhancing CIOPulse. An in-house customisation is unlikely to evolve or will evolve very slowly due to other priorities.

6. Every customisation you make to your ITSM software makes future upgrades of your ITSM software more complex, more expensive and riskier.

7. CIOPulse works with multiple concurrent ITSM/CRM solutions, enabling your other internal and external service providers to use CIOPulse too.

8. All customer feedback captured by CIOPulse is preserved should you change ITSM software, enabling continuity of your KPIs and feedback history.

9. If your ITSM software is run by one of your Managed Service Providers, this can undermine confidence in the integrity/independence of the data that is collected and reported.

Will CIOPulse work with our IT Service Management Software?

CIOPulse has different surveys for different purposes. Only the transactional survey - the one designed for ticket-based feedback - needs to be integrated with your ITSM software.

To integrate with CIOPulse, your ITSM software needs to create and issue a survey invitation email when a ticket is closed. Within that email there needs to be a button or hyperlink that points to the cloud-based CIOPulse survey.

The URL of the hyperlink has to include parameters that contain information about the ticket, e.g. the ticket number as &ticket=INC12345.  Other parameters include the staff member the ticket was assigned to and the customer who is being invited to complete the survey.

Your survey URL will end up looking a bit like this (URL split over several lines to make it easier to understand):
https://survey.cio-pulse.com
?ticket=INC12345
&team=servicedesk
&agent=sam.patel
&segment=london
&customer=carole.jones

If your ITSM software can send emails when tickets are closed, and is able to create the survey hyperlink, then it will be compatible with CIOPulse.

What is Net Promoter?

Net Promoter is an open-source methodology used by 65% of the world’s top 200 companies to increase customer loyalty. At its heart is a metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services.

An NPS is calculated by asking customers a question along the lines of, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”. CIOPulse uses a variation of this question to ensure the question is suitable for use by an internal service provider with 'internal customers'. Based on their rating, a customer is categorised as a Detractor (when they give a rating of 6 or below), a Passive (7 or 8) or a Promoter (9 or 10)

A Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. This results in a score ranging from -100 (all your customers think you’re terrible) to +100 (all your customers think you’re fantastic).

A follow-up question asks customers for the reason behind their score.

Net Promoter includes a number of practices for using the metric and verbatim feedback to drive service improvement and improve the customer experience.

How does CIOPulse integrate with our ITSM software? 

To start using CIOPulse's support surveys, you simply need to configure your ITSM software to send a survey invitation email to your customers when their ticket is closed. With simple ITSM software, like Zendesk, this can be done in as little as 20 minutes. In more sophisticated software, like ServiceNow, this might take a few days.

By sending the survey invitation from your ITSM software, you control who is surveyed and when. And your customers will get an email from your own, trusted domain.

The survey invitation email includes a hyperlink to the CIOPulse survey which your customer can click on. The hyperlink includes some variables in the URL that need to be dynamically populated by your ITSM software on a ticket-by-ticket basis, e.g. &ticketid=INC123456. In this way, CIOPulse doesn't need access to your ITSM software and doesn't need to store any data about your agents or customers. Which is great for privacy.

CIOPulse also includes an optional API that can be used to pull customer feedback out of CIOPulse and into your own applications.

How applicable is the Net Promoter question for an internal service provider?

Net Promoter is known for its 'likely to recommend' question. It is usually worded something like this: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague?".  This traditional wording of the question (and any variations involving likely-to-recommend) based on this, tend to be confusing to internal customers in an IT support context. Therefore CIOPulse uses a completely different wording.

How is CIOPulse different from SurveyMonkey?

Survey Monkey is a general purpose survey tool. It can be used for designing surveys and collecting data in numerous situations. CIOPulse provides a survey which has been designed specifically for IT teams to gather customer feedback. And, unlike Survey Monkey, CIOPulse is not just a data collection tool. CIOPulse provides you with alerts, analysis and actionable insights needed to improve customer satisfaction.

Put simply - SurveyMonkey is a general purpose data collection tool.  CIOPulse is a purpose built IT customer feedback system.

Can CIOPulse be used by non-IT teams?

CIOPulse was originally designed for IT support teams. But it is increasingly being used by other internal service providers, such as HR and Facilities.

CIOPulse does not use any IT-specific terminology.

Where is my data stored?

All data is stored in our data centre in Sydney, Australia.

Our privacy policy can be found here.

What aspects of the survey can be customised?

Two major aspects of the surveys can be customised: the branding (terminology, colours, font, images and logo) and the experience factors of Q2 of the transactional (support) survey. Q2 of the transactional survey asks the customer to nominate one or more experience factors that contributed to their rating. There are eight factors to choose from (e.g. Initial Response Time, Agent Knowledge). Each one of these factors can be customised.

How many questions are on the survey?

Both the transactional (support) and relationship (periodic and project) survey have three questions.

What sort of survey response rates can we expect?

CIOPulse's surveys are mobile and tablet ready, meaning that they work brilliantly on all combinations of desktop and mobile devices. This is increasingly important as the popularity of these devices continues to grow. The survey is also very short and quick to complete.

However, survey response rates are closely linked to whether or not your customers believe that their feedback will be used to improve service quality. If your customer thinks their feedback is going into a black hole, you can expect single digit response rates. 

But if you act on the feedback (which CIOPulse helps you do), and communicate regularly with your customers (here's what we've learned, here's what we've got planned, here's what we've done) you can expect response rates of 20% or more.

With CIOPulse, you can also embed the survey in your survey invitation email. Some of our clients who have done this have reported that this more than doubled their survey response rate.

What organisations does CIOPulse benchmark customer satisfaction levels against?

CIOPulse benchmarks your organisation's monthly Net Promoter Score against all other CIOPulse customers. Your position in the benchmark (e.g. Top 20%) is shown on a monthly management report and is visible at all times on an interactive dashboard.

Frequently Asked Questions