Dare to gather feedback from your users!

Posted in : Intune, Microsoft, Office 365, Powershell By Sebastian Stegrin Translate with Google ⟶

2 years ago

During the time I’ve been working with IT in general I’ve noticed a lack of feedback from users, well maybe not the negative feedback. That’s something I hope I can change in the future, at least for some of you, with the help of this article.

The feedback IT departments are used to receive are normally when something doesn’t work. Because who will actually contact the IT-department and tell them that the computer they have been using for a year without a problem actually is nice? Heh, good one! 😉

So what can we do about this? I have been asking around in several forums to see what solutions other IT-departments use, and the issue is that many tell me they rely on the ITSM-system they use. But then again the users will probably have to create a ticket which take time for the user, and the ticket will probably be about anything that doesn’t work as it should. Now I don’t say that negative feedback is bad, but how can we get some of the positive feedback? I believe that we have to keep the solution really simple and take up as little time as possible for our users.

Now this solution is my own and therefore may not be the best solution for your company, but hopefully this can be of any help when you want more feedback from your users. My idea is to create a form that will be visible to the user once they login to their computer. The schedule for the form to be visible is up you, my choice is every Friday as the users have been working for a whole week and probably gathered several ideas, thoughts or other feedback about IT-related things they can tell you about.

Tools that I use:

• Microsoft Forms
  • Perhaps Excel
• Powershell
• A tool to roll out the script to your environment.
  • I will be using Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune).
• PowerBI

Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms is a tool that is very easy to use to setup and configure forms with.

Once you have created your form, make sure to move it to a Microsoft group within your company. You don’t want the form to be erased once your account is deleted.

You can also connect your form to a Excel spreadsheet so all data that is entered into the form is gathered into Excel. You can also send an email directly into your ITSM-system.

Powershell

I have created a Powershell-script that will create a scheduled task to be run one day per week on a user logon.

This scheduled task will run another script that will open Microsoft Edge in a new private window and open the Microsoft Forms link for the user that logon to the computer. The reason I open the browser in a private window is because we allow our users to send us anonymous feedback. I believe that there always are some users that prefer this way or else they won’t raise their voice, and that’s fine for me since we actually want feedback about our environment or else we can’t make it better.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

We need a tool to roll out these scripts to our users, and my weapon of choice is Microsoft Endpoint Manager and the function Proactive Remediation. Proactive Remediation have 2 functions, one to detect something and the other to remediate things that doesn’t work as it should.

PowerBI

I’m not a expert in this area myself, lucky me that I have a team full of awesome colleagues that can help me with this part! PowerBI will gather all the information that I have in my Excel spreadsheet and make some wonderful dashboards with this information.

Sidenote

Remember that we do gather user information during this process, please lookup what local laws you have regarding this, for example GDPR. What data are you collecting, how are you storing the data, is the data up-to-date, for what purpose and for how long? That is some good question to start think about before you collect user information.

Now I hope this article will help you in your work to gather user feedback from your organisation. If you feel that you want an in depth look into the technical parts, feel free to leave a comment about it and we can have a chat.

You can also contact me on LinkedIn to keep discussing endpoint related things, thank you for reading my article. Please leave a comment if you feel this content is something that can be useful for you and your company! 🙂

Tags : #Excel, Endpoint, feedback, forms, Microsoft, PowerBI, user, Windows