How End User Complaints about the WiFi are Good for Business

It’s time to start thinking about WiFi complaints or problem tickets as opportunities handed to you by your end users. These complaints – whether from employees, customers, investors, board members, or any other users – are direct insights into how your business processes and WiFi network designs are actually working. Each problem ticket or verbal complaint can provide valuable information that tells you exactly what you need to do to improve your end user experience.

Advantages of complaints

Here’s how this feedback can help you:

1. Problem tickets identify technical issues within WiFi networks. This could be anything from an alert that speeds are slow to a security breach. This lets IT know which technical systems and infrastructure need to be improved, and which are working reliably.
2. End user complaints provide specific information about what is needed for an employee to effectively perform their job. Rather than pointing out that an existing technical tool is broken, these complaints allow decision makers to identify new or different tools or processes that will improve business performance.
3. Customer complaints can provide data that helps a company update processes and products to better meet customer needs. This improves a brand’s reputation.

How to get the most from complaints

If you want to benefit from complaints, problem tickets, and other feedback, then you need a system in place to make delivering and acting on complaints as easy as possible.

What you need

1. Make it easy for any end user to leave a complaint

Some companies seem to thrive on making it as hard as possible for end users to send an email, submit a problem ticket, or otherwise communicate an issue to someone. This is the opposite of what you want to do. First of all, this is only going to irritate your end users and damage your reputation. Secondly, if there’s a problem, you don’t want to ignore it. Make it easy for anyone who interacts with your WiFi to provide feedback.

1. Regularly review complaints

Working through the queue of problem tickets is second nature for most IT professionals. Make sure you don’t forget to review all complaints though. If end users are emailing complaints or suggestions to other teams, perhaps sales or marketing, IT needs to be regularly looped in so that directors and executives can contribute to plans to resolve issues, safeguard business continuity, and improve performance.

1. Analyze all upgrade/update suggestions from the end user perspective 

When it’s time to make WiFi network upgrade decisions, everything should be analyzed from the end user perspective. What capability will this change improve? What problem will it solve? What are the short-and-long term effects for end users? If there isn’t a clear answer, head back to the drawing board. Improving the end user experience is key for improving business.

How to get what you need automatically

As with anything IT-related, benefiting from end user complaints requires IT to have as much data as possible. Receiving that data automatically simplifies and streamlines the process: IT no longer has to depend on end users who might not know exactly what to share, nor do they have to spend time analyzing data packets looking for answers.

1. Automatically analyze data from the entire WiFi network ecosystem

An automated tool can keep eyes on the network at all times, analyzing thousands of data packets a second. This ensures that IT teams always know the health of all devices, infrastructure, and software.

1. Automatically test the network as an end user

Remember, the end user is key to success. An automatic solution should operate with this in mind. One way it can do so is by connecting to the network as an end user device when running tests. Scheduling consistent tests to run in this manner provides IT with extra peace of mind that issues will be identified proactively and that data reflects the end user experience.

1. Proactively respond to issues

Depending on the tool or platform used, IT can receive proactive issue alerts along with automatic analytics. These alerts allow IT to respond to issues in near real-time, often before end users are affected. Companies can look for a platform that provides root cause identification and actionable resolutions with alerts.

1. Review long-term trends for future-proofed networks

As mentioned above, all upgrade decisions need to be made with the end user in mind. To this end, decision makers need data on long-term WiFi health and performance trends. A platform that automatically saves historical wireless analytics makes it easier for administrators to design personalized upgrade plans.

One step better 

As you can see, with the right automatic process, it becomes possible to skip the complaint step altogether. Why wait for end user complaints when you can solve problems before productivity is impacted?

Companies that leverage WiFi automation platforms experience future-proofed WiFi networks with fewer problem tickets and faster resolution times. In fact, enterprises, educational organizations, and healthcare facilities that use the Wireless Intelligence Platform™ (WIP) report:

• 90% faster Mean-Times-to-Resolution
• 70% fewer WiFi problem tickets
• 80% fewer remote site visits

While you still want to make it easy for your end users to communicate with you, automating WiFi analytics and problem identification will restore time and energy to IT teams, improve the end user experience, and save you money. Experience WIP today with a free demo or trial.