Consulting Services 2009 Annual Survey Results

Dartmouth Computing Services recently completed its fifth annual Consulting Services’ survey. The survey seeks input from faculty, staff and students to determine the campus’ satisfaction with support provided by the consulting group. Data gathered during the survey helps us look for areas of improvement. The survey was announced on October 19th and responses were collected over a two week period of time. Timing for the survey is consistent with prior years.

The survey consisted of seven questions. The questions were consistent with the questions that have been asked in the previous four years and relate to satisfaction and responsiveness.

Overview of Respondents

People taking the survey were asked to identify their primary association with the College. The respondents included 16 arts and science faculty, 95 staff, 8 undergraduate students, and 2 professional school faculty or staff.

When asked to respond to the statement, “I am generally satisfied with the services provided by the IT Service Desk” on a scale where 1 equates to strongly disagree and 5 equates to strongly agree faculty, staff and students gave the consultants an average rating of 4.60. In addition, when asked to respond to the statement “IT Service Desk staff members exhibit a customer-oriented attitude” more than 95% of those answering the question either agreed or strongly agreed with this statement. These ratings speak very highly of the staff in the Consulting Group and their commitment to the people that they serve.

Our goal is to respond to all requests within one day and we achieved a success rate of almost 95%, so we are doing very well in getting back to people. The data indicates that the service desk responded to a request within one hour more than 56% of the time. When the window is expanded to one day the survey indicated that the service desk responded 94.9% of the time.

When we look at the data regarding solving problems rather than just contacting the user, more than 48% of the problems are resolved immediately, and an additional 32% are resolved within one day. These figures from the 2008 survey showed 48% of the time problems were resolved immediately, with an additional 32% resolved within one business day; the 2007 survey showed 49% of the time the problems were resolved immediately and an additional 28% of the time problems were resolved within one day; the 2006 survey showed 60% of the time problems are resolved immediately, and additional 23% are resolved within one day.

In the past, the largest area of dissatisfaction was in relation to finding information on the website and in our printed materials. This trend continues this year with an average response of 3.58.