We put a huge amount of effort into ensuring that the process of gathering end-user sentiment using Tachyon Sentiment is, in and of itself, NOT going to annoy users. We ensure that surveys don’t pop-up when a user is screen sharing or in the middle of writing a document/working on a spreadsheet. We monitor for just the right time to prompt a user with a survey—and, most importantly, those “surveys” are always just a single item.
You can configure Tachyon to prompt for answers to different questions several times a day—but by default, it won’t. It’ll just ask, at most, one question per day, when the time is right. In most cases, users get prompted just a few times a month. We don’t need to ask every user something every day to drive a lot of knowledge. The average 1E customer has circa 40,000 end users. If we ask just 5% of them a question in a given day, we’ll get 2,000 responses a day and an end user will be prompted about once every 20 days to respond.
Now, let’s look at practical use cases for Tachyon Sentiment.
Take a look at this sample of data representing data from over 23,000 end users (we’ll be using it for the first two use cases):
Use case 1: Determining the root cause of negative sentiment
I can see that users with Precision 5510’s had opinions relatively in line with other users, across the board. But their opinions have started diverging across all four of these surveys. Their sentiment has become “out of whack” with other device users (both positive and negative) in the past few days.
This led me to do the following:
- Explore the other metrics for those devices. I noticed that they had more software crashes than other device types recently (under Stability).
- Drill down to a specific Intel Wi-Fi driver that was crashing. As a result, the users were reacting to that, thinking the issue was device performance or Zoom issues … but in reality it was the driver. You can see how the pink line starts deviating from the others in the graphs—that tells you that something is happening.
Exploring the other data points can lead you to the root cause. Fixing that cause and informing users of the update can help improve sentiment and show that you are a proactive IT department.
Use case 2: Optimizing workplace services
I can see that MS Teams has a satisfaction level of circa 60, whereas Zoom sits at 40% approval. That’s valuable information if I’m picking a communications package to enable my remote workforce.
I can also see that people are less enamored with working from home than before, but over two thirds of people still prefer it to working from the office.
Armed with this data I can reach out to those who have poorer opinions here and find out why. Maybe those users need some basic things like an external monitor or a new mouse? Identifying those areas where IT can help and proactively helping leads to massively positive user feedback and a sense in the end users that the company cares. This has an impressive positive impact on productivity and, ultimately, that’s what IT is for.
Use case 3: Juxtaposing sentiment with hard metrics
It’s also interesting to look at end-user sentiment as a juxtaposition to the Stability, Performance and Responsiveness metrics on a user-by-user level. Can we identify why a user may have negative opinions and again, proactively take steps to improve the situation?
Just one or two IT personnel monitoring this data and reacting to it can drive massive improvements. With Tachyon, when you identify a problem on one computer, you can search all devices in real-time to see if others are suffering from the same issue. You can use Guaranteed State to monitor for indicators of an upcoming problem in the future and react to resolve the issue in a fully automated way.
This in turn leads to continual improvement because once we solve a specific instance of a problem in this way, we can ensure we don’t suffer from it again in future.
And we all know that some users complain more than others … with or without cause. Using Sentiment, you can actively identify when a user is generally negative, or generally positive, and react to their pain points and opinions appropriately …
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Sentiment is in the purview of the entire organization
There are many non-obvious use cases for Sentiment—and our customers find more and more ways to drive business value from it every day. HR are often engaged and use Sentiment to monitor how well people like working from home and their stress levels, or even to ask questions about mental health. Reaching out can be the hardest part for someone who needs help, but a simple prompt can be enough to break the dam and help someone express their concerns and get some much needed help.
Later this week I’m hosting a webinar on this topic: “Gather user sentiment data to derive business value from bias, gripes and opinion.” If you can’t make it live you can certainly watch it later so sign up anyway to receive the on-demand recording. I’ll go into some do’s and don’ts for setting up surveys and discuss some of those more interesting use cases.
Over the coming weeks I’ll deep dive into some of these as part of the Tachyon Tuesday blog and vlog series—please check back for more each week!
