CSC’s services received an excellent rating from users
Customer and user experience of service use are at the core of CSC’s operation. We map user experience through conducting broad and regular survey studies and where needed, service specific surveys, interviews, user testing and workshops. The annual user survey is a key part of customer and user surveys which CSC develops systematically.
In Data Management and Computing Services’ user survey 2025 which was carried out in November-December 2025, we collected feedback on CSC’s services, service support and developmental wishes related to the services. The survey was sent to over 9,000 users affiliated to Finnish higher education institutes, research organizations and customer companies. We received altogether 648 responses, which is by number more than in previous years.
How likely are users to recommend CSC’s services?
The feedback on CSC’s services was mainly positive. NPS (Net Promoter Score) that represents the willingness of users to recommend services to colleagues was 62, which is in line with the results from previous years. The 8.8 means for the variable that measures respondents’ willingness to recommend CSC’s services to colleagues talks about strong user loyalty and satisfaction with the services provided by CSC.
As far as I know, there is no other entity to provide services like CSC’s services, and even if there was, it is hard to imagine that the services would be of the same quality. The services have not reached anywhere near this level in any other country where I have used HPC resources.
Professor or a senior lecturer, 7+ years of user experience
The services that were included in 2025 user survey were MyCSC, Sensitive Data services, Fairdata services, Noppe, high performance computing services (Mahti, Puhti, LUMI), and cloud services (Allas, Pukki, Pouta, Rahti). In total, the survey covered user experiences of altogether 24 services or service entities.
In addition to MyCSC portal the respondents used on average 2.3 services offered by CSC. The most popular services were super computers Puhti, Mahti, LUMI and cloud services Allas and cPouta.
Importance of services to the user was measured on a scale from 1 to 5. In the survey, computing services scored 4.5, data management and storaging 4.3, software and databases 3.9, customer support and guidelines 3.8 and trainings 3.4. These were all perceived important to the respondents’ work or studies. High Performance Computing and Data Management services were thought to be especially important.
Support for service take-up
CSC caters for the needs of very different users who come from different backgrounds and disciplines, with different levels of skills, and with different roles in carrying out research. The most common purposes for the use of our services were basic research or scientific research (63%), applied research (25%), studies (23%), Research Development and Innovation (16%), education and training (13%), and management (10%). In addition, CSC’s services are available for company use.
Based on the survey results, the use of services can be challenging especially for users with no prior experience in programming, especially at the start. The steep learning curve has been detected also in user surveys from previous years as a core challenge for service users.
In the last couple of years CSC has put effort into facilitating service take-up in many ways:
- offering higher education institutes Noppe service as a platform for courses as well as self-learning
- developing the concept of student projects
- developing materials to support service use at research.csc.fi site
- organizing weekly support coffees in use of national services. Beginners are welcomed and taken care of.
- offering research support staff working in higher education institutes peer-support through ambassador network
- active trainings collaboration with higher education institutes
- offering new users CSC Computing Environment self-study course to get started in service use
Based on user feedback we have also developed service user interfaces that are offered alongside command line interfaces. Still, the take-up of many services requires persistent learning.
From assessing the quality of services to identifying development targets
In the survey, we measured service quality by asking respondents to assess service qualities (ease of use, benefits, availability, pleasantness of use, reliability) on a scale from 1 to 5. In all service quality questions, the means of answers was approximately four, which can be interpreted so that users consider CSC’s services to be of good quality. Following service quality questions, we also mapped out problems related to service use to be able to identify concrete development needs.
Even if monitoring service quality is important, the survey is not carried out just to be able to report service quality. The service owners and experts at CSC take actively part in both planning the survey and going through the results. Especially open responses are analyzed and read carefully.
I see a lot of effort in CSC trying to improve further and further. (…) sometimes things are pretty perfect the way they are and it’s not possible to make everyone happy. Please don’t forget old people who like text and command line in your future efforts (…) Not everybody wants GUIs and YouTube videos, so keep up the good work where it already is great!!! (e.g. your documentation)
Post-doc researcher, 5-6 years of use experience
Open feedback on the services talks about a great need for computing services and data management services. From the user point of view there can never be enough computing resources, quota, computing time, power, disk space or speed. Also processes related to data management such as project management and data management and data transfers could always run more swiftly.
Alongside the services, the documentation that supports the use of services and other support material is important and needed by the users. The feedback on documentation and support materials is mainly positive, but in open feedback there are some wishes for guideline updates and improving the findability of instructions. In survey responses a request for instructions in Finnish. Following development work, CSC will soon launch the Finnish version of docs.csc.fi site.
In the open feedback there was also a lot of feedback on user interfaces. Especially our new users wish that the user interfaces would be clear and intuitive. In the user interfaces we should also pay attention to communicating to the users about ongoing tasks and functions. On the other hand, the overall service experience and being able to use multiple services combined are important. The main challenge in developing the overall user experience is the heterogeneity of the user base and differences in the level of skill.
Developing services in collaboration
The feedback we get from our users is very important to us, because we improve our services and their functionalities by listening to our customers and users. Moreover, developing new services based on ideas from our experts and users takes more time. It also demands negotiations with customer organizations on sharing responsibility in developing solutions.
“At the core of CSC’s operations is to produce and develop the best-performing services together with our customers to support science and learning, as well as research and development-intensive businesses. We want to understand our customers’ needs and engage in continuous dialogue with them to develop our services. A warm thank you to everyone who participated in the user survey, your feedback helps us on the path of continuous improvement!” states director Mari Walls, responsible of CSC’s research organization collaboration and academic partnerships.
