published on Monday, January 18, 2010

Results of SARA Customer Satisfaction Survey October 2009

SARA aims to offer the best possible service to the academic community. Because we wanted to know "where we are today", a Customer Satisfaction Survey has been carried out in October 2009 among users of the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens and the national compute cluster Lisa. We were curious to find out how users experience the services on these systems, which aspects they find important and on which points we can improve the service. We are very grateful for your cooperation to this survey.

Commissioned by SARA, GfK Panel Services Benelux has queried the users of Huygens and Lisa on many aspects related to the High Performance Computing (HPC) service through an online questionnaire. The research shows that users give SARA an excellent rating with an overall number of 8. Nevertheless, there are of course aspects which can be improved. Provision of documentation is an aspect that needs attention and improvement.

Notes to the research
Below, we summarize the main findings of the survey with a reference to the slide on which the results can be found. A complete overview of the results of GfK can be found in the PDF.

Respondents
* 63% of respondents are Lisa users and 43% use Huygens. 9% of the respondents are users of both systems. 17% also uses the consultancy activities that SARA offers to its customers (slide 5);
* nearly 30% has been making use of the services of SARA since 2009, 20% is a customer of the SARA services since 5 years or more (slide 6);
* the survey reveals that 60% of the users work at a university; 34% works at a scientific institute (slide 8);
* the largest number of users can be found in the life sciences, computational chemistry and computational physics (slide 9);
* 75% of the users are male. Nearly 75% is younger than 40 years (slide 10).

Assessment for SARA (slide 11)
On a 4-point scale SARA gets a high score on the following aspects:
* professional (3.37)
* expert (3.32)
* service (3.31)
* quality (3.29)
* reliable (3.23)

Main results of users of Huygens
* nearly 60% of the users are using Huygens weekly (slide 13);
* system availability and user support are the key issues for the respondents (slide 15);
* the speed of answers to questions, the availability of the system, and the quality of support to reported problems are best rated by respondents (slide 17);
* points for improvement are: user documentation and scheduling of jobs (slide 18);
* general assessment of the services on Huygens: rating 8.1 (slide 19);
* 44% of users indicate that the service has remained the same. 11% indicates that the service has improved. None of the users indicate that the service has deteriorated compared to 2008 (slide 21);
* 53% of the users have no suggestions for improvement measures (slide 22).

Main results of users of Lisa
* nearly 50% of users are using Lisa every week (slide 25);
* the respondents find the availability of the system, scheduling of jobs, and quality of support when having problems the most important aspects (slide 27);
* highest scores are given to the speed of answers to questions, the quality of support when having problems, and the provision of the system (slide 29);
* major points for improvements are: user documentation, scheduling of jobs and the availability of Lisa (slide 30);
* general assessment of the services on Lisa: rating 7.9 (slide 31);
* 19% of users indicate that the services of SARA have been improved. 2% indicates that the service has deteriorated compared to 2008. 28% does not know (slide 33);
* 50% of the users have no suggestions for further improvement (slide 34).