Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

10 second survey: what one thing would you change?

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Improving customer satisfaction, part 1

I'm going to be doing a series of posts about improving customer satisfaction, based on lessons we've learnt with our clients. A gentle start today, with three maxims to guide our thoughts.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gettysgirl/3400383586

Finding out what customers want is sometimes less than half the battle. Not only do you have to get from understanding to implementation, you often need to deal with the fact that gearing your product or service to an average customer can mask a range of underlying requirements. A standard approach risks dissatisfying almost everyone.

There is no average customer.

We can address this problem with good staff or through tailoring, but it's also well worth finding out the impact of over or under delivery. Often the impact is not symmetrical. We asked one client's customers whether they were contacted “too much”, “about right”, or “not enough”. Opinion was divided—does that make it an impossible situation? Not when you know that customers who were contacted too much were as satisfied as those who thought it was about right. Only customers who weren't contacted enough were unhappy.

Goldilocks notwithstanding, “too cold” and “too hot” are not equally bad.

The lesson we learned with that client is applicable to most organisations. Active* contact with customers is almost always a good thing, improving customer satisfaction and often reducing the number of inbound calls. Using SMS and email is, increasingly, an attractive way to keep customers informed (guess how many people have that as one of their priorities for improvement!) while keeping cost under control. 

You can't talk to customers too much...(unless you're selling)

All of which could be distilled to "find out what customers want and give it to them".

* I refuse to say "proactive"!

Are your processes serving you or your customers?

On the face of it, it appears simple. Business processes designed with the customer in mind to deliver an optimum customer experience when interacting with an organisation either when making a purchase, dealing with a problem or query or any other experience that could have a positive and incremental effect on a customer relationship. However, seemingly on the increase are business processes that serve the organisation rather than the customer. It's a subtle difference but with dramatically different effect.

Processes to serve the organisation are seemingly cost effective in the short term, convenient and allow customers to be put in buckets or dealt with on mass leading to frustration, anger, mistrust and very low levels of satisfaction in the customer experience and little perceived loyalty.

On the other hand, processes designed around the customer deliver the type of experience customer's expect; being valued, treated as an individual, getting to speak to a person and having someone listen with empathy and understanding their (perceived) individual position.

It seems to be a trade off between short term costs and convenience (to them - the organisation) and biased in favour of the organisation. However this doesn't take into account the long term benefits of giving the customer what they want in the way they want it and the repeat business, goodwill and positive word of mouth created - a much less tangible although a still very real effect of good customer service.

In a recent conversation about customers with an organisation, it was quite evident that one particular process was designed around the organisation. A process that required a customer who had called the organisation with an issue to be transferred or referred back to another party. Convenient to the organisation - yes - but not to the customer who just wanted to be dealt with there an then having made the call and not to have to talk to someone else. The customer clearly didn't understand nor care about the 'correct' process - and why should he? His frustration was evident and he'd not even started to talk about his issue.

I've experienced it myself and you don't need to look too far. I used to(past tense here is a give away clue)..buy Hackett toiletries from Boots, partly because of the 3 for 2 offers but more importantly because I liked the brand. Over the last few months, I have had two deodorant sprays whose mechanisms have decided to stop working but only when they're half empty - how inconvenient. Slightly put out by this, I decided to email Hackett expecting a response and experience similar to when I had a similar issue with a Reckitt product. Without quibble or hesitation, and on supply of the batch number from the product, Reckitt sent me vouchers to cover twice the cost of the product. A Perfect experience. Hackett, was not so straight forward. Their response was to refer me to back to Boots, as apparently they conducted the manufacturer on behalf of Hackett and if I took the faulty product back to the store of purchase (assuming my memory provided such detail) with my original till receipt (oh and I always keep this!!) I could get an exchange or refund. WAY too inconvenient for me. Might be a small thing but the impact - I've not bought Hackett since.

A simple plea - to all organisations. Please look at your processes as well as your customer satisfaction measures. If your processes are fundamentally serving you and not your customers, you won't get far if you don't change them....quickly. You could/will be losing sales and revenue as we speak...

Service - as basic as it gets

I don't normally bring whinges from my life as a customer onto this blog, but this one is too perfect an opportunity to miss.

Two weeks ago I had a question I wanted to ask Leica; specifically I wanted to know if they could tell me where to hire one of their stratospherically expensive, uniquely desirable, cameras. Simple question, but my Googling was letting me down so I took the easy way out and emailed Leica through the “Contact us” bit of their website.

I'm still waiting for any response. *UPDATED BELOW*

This is, frankly, absurdly poor service. There is no excuse, in this day and age, for not responding to email. What makes it even worse is that Leica is a (very) premium brand. From my perspective as (maybe one day, when I'm very rich or very drunk) a potential customer, what is this telling me about the service I can expect if I experience a problem?

I posted on Twitter about this last Friday. A company competent at reputation management would have been dealing with that post the same day—monitoring the web for mentions of the brand “Leica” is not hard. In fact numerous photography-linked Twitterites have since followed me, which demonstrates that other people are looking for mentions of Leica, even if they aren't.

Anyway, moving on from the rant, what are the lessons? Couldn't be simpler:

1. Posting contact details is a promise—you MUST respond in a reasonable time. No excuses.
2. Simple reputation management is cheap and easy. You MUST know about it if people are talking about your brand online.
3. If you want to be a premium consumer brand, those two things are exponentially more important.

*UPDATE 11 November* : Today, nearly four weeks after my enquiry, Leica responded. They couldn't answer, but it was quite a helpful response. Sadly, it took them 19 working days when it should have taken hours.

Satisfaction measurement - should you go deep or broad?

At the WCCF conference this week there was quite a lot of talk about the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of measuring the customer experience, which I'll probably post more about next week.

One of the things that struck me about what some organisations are doing, particularly with NPS, is that the focus is incredibly strong on getting very frequent data at the lowest possible level (even down to individual call centre agents).

This kind of granularity can be a very powerful tool for change, as it gives people a sense of ownership and accountability for the score, and of course could be used with any metric—there's nothing special about NPS in that regard.

The flipside is that NPS, or to be fair any survey that you can realistically run at these frequencies and volumes, tends to give you very shallow data. You get a score, and perhaps a verbatim comment, but no quantitative insight or specific qualitative information into the reasons behind it.

 

The choice here, it seems to me, is whether you should go for deep or broad understanding of the customer experience. For many organisations the ideal answer will be a combination of both, with some sort of automated (web, email or IVR) option to take the “pulse” of the organisation at a granular level combined with a detailed telephone interview survey backed by thorough analysis and insight.

Never trust an average

There aren’t many statistician jokes, I imagine, but here’s the only one I know.

Three statisticians go out on a hunting trip. After a while they see a deer. The first shoots and misses to the left. The second misses to the right. The third shouts “we got him!”

The point? Averages, even when true, are a mathematical fiction rather than a concrete reality—the notion of 2.4 children as the average nuclear family illustrates this well. We should bear this in mind whenever we use numbers to summarise people or experiences. Let me give you two examples.

Customers never have an average experience

Twice recently, when talking about excellent companies with a strong (and deserved) reputation for customer satisfaction, I’ve had the wind taken out of my sails by people objecting “well I think they’re rubbish!”, and they go on to explain exactly why. The thing is we’re both right, but I’m talking about an excellent average, and perhaps one or two even better highlights from conferences and case studies, while the other person is talking about their own unique experience. Even the very best companies get it wrong sometimes.

The lesson here is that, even if you are very good, it’s worth addressing the occasions when it goes wrong. In particular it’s a good idea to keep working hard on making sure you are as close to flawless as possible on the “givens”. Tracking percentages of low scores, as well as averages, is a good way to do this.

I am not a number

Where averages are really dangerous is when they are used to draw conclusions about groups of people (here we are a whisker away from statistically-backed bigotry if we’re not careful). The problem, really, is that statisticians know what they mean when they say “men are better than women at X” or “girls are better than boys at Y”. They mean, usually, that there is a small but statistically significant difference in the averages for the two groups. The problem is that’s not how normal people interpret the statement—which, at best, would be that almost all girls are better than almost all boys at Y.

Let’s look at an example I cooked up. Say we have administered a test to 1,000 girls and 1,000 boys, and they all have a score.

Gender	Mean	N	SD	Confidence Interval
Male	7.0	1000	1.4	+/- 0.1
Female	7.6	1000	1.5	+/- 0.1
Total	7.3	2000	1.5	+/- 0.1

The analysis shows that girls have a higher average score than boys, and we can run a t-test that shows this is a highly statistically significant difference. Confidence intervals tell us the same thing. In other words girls are better than boys at this. But what if we get away from the averages and take a look at the distributions underlying them, i.e. get back to the raw scores?

I bet you weren’t expecting that much overlap, were you? About 35% of females have a score lower than the average for males, and about the same number of males have a score higher than the average for females.

The lesson is that comparing averages, though it can be useful, tells us very little about any particular individual. Next time you see a story of this pattern in the paper (or in books that make a fortune using tiny laboratory differences to back up cliches about empathy and reading maps), ask yourself what the underlying distribution looks like.

Snake oil business

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niosh/2492023651/

Everyone loves science. Researchers, businessmen, journalists, PR and marketing people, everyone. Why? Because science is all about clever people in white coats “proving” your pet theory. Nothing sells the latest consultancy fad better than a tame PhD, and what kind of fool would pay £3 for an own-brand moisturiser when you can get one with Unobtanium QZ for only £30? Science sells.

Except it's not science, is it? Just like the snake oil salesman of old, con artists have always enjoyed dressing up in the clothes of science to rip off the unwary. Wearing a white coat and using complicated-sounding words does not make you a scientist any more than wearing a tutu makes me a ballerina.

So what does? There are hundreds of possible answers, but I think a defining feature is the willingness to be proved wrong. The ladybird version of science is that someone has a clever idea about how the world works, and then thinks of a way to test if the idea is true or not. The second part is the important bit—good ideas are ten a penny, but most of them are wrong.

Human beings are not very good at thinking like this. We are susceptible to something called confirmation bias, which means that we tend to notice information that confirms our preconceptions and discount the things that don't. So scientists have to be very careful to specify up front what their test is, and what different outcomes will mean for their idea.

Unfortunately, businesses are very reluctant to embrace the philosophy of science. Getting the authority of science by hiring PHDs and quoting figures to 5 decimal places is great, but the scientific method is hard. Worse still, facts have a distressing tendency not to tie in with the way we want the world to work.

So here's a challenge for you. Take your most cherished beliefs about your business and state them as hypotheses:

• Satisfied customers are more profitable
• Engaged employees have lower rates of absenteeism
• etc.

and devise a test for them. Now the hard bit, if the test doesn't support your hypothesis, throw it out and start again. If it does (actually even if it doesn't), tell the world. Congratulations, you are now a scientist—white coats are available here. 

The Decisive Moment

“X is like Y, because...” is a useful way to generate fresh thinking about pretty much any topic (and quite a good qualitative research technique to boot).

“Presentations are like films, because they are about telling a compelling story through a primarily visual medium” is so well established that it is now a cliche. Cliff Atkinson even suggests using a three act structure for your presentations (actually not as silly an idea as it first sounds, albeit over-prescriptive).

The lean forward moment

I've just finished a great book on film-making and editing called “The lean forward moment”, which has lots of useful advice about telling stories.

In a nutshell Hollyn argues that stories are about change, and that change (of any kind) can be used to signal important turning points to the audience. This might mean a change of acting style, a physical movement, a new camera shot, different lighting, music starting (or stopping) and so on. It doesn't matter what changes, as long as the moment has a chance to register.

As Hollyn points out, this is precisely the technique used by many public speakers when they use pauses to allow key points to land. They might also use visuals, props, changes in the pitch or rhythm of their voice, and so on. Change grabs attention.

Moments of truth

I, like Cartier-Bresson, believe that most things in life have decisive moments—lean forward moments—which are particularly powerful. When talking about the customer experience we call these “moments of truth”. Can we apply Hollyn's techniques to get the most out of moments of truth with customers?

If we take each customer interaction as a film scene, Hollyn suggests that we approach the scene with three questions:

1. Whose scene is this? Many organisations act as if it's their scene, but it should be the customer's.
2. How does that character change from the beginning of the scene to its end? Clearly we'd like them to be delighted by the way we've surpassed their expectations, not disappointed.
3. Where, exactly, does that change occur in the scene? Ah, now that's an interesting question. What are the moments of truth? Once we realise that this scene belongs to the customer we can start to look at the turning points inside their minds as they go through the change identified at question 2. We can start to control how the scene's going to end by understanding that the outcome is not based on a gradual progression, but pivots around a small number of key moments.

Reporting that motivates change

Last week, Richard and I ran the Stakeholder Showcase in London (which did not cost the £99,999 it's currently advertised at! We're good, but we're not that good).

One of the things I talked about was that the way you report and communicate the survey results has a big impact on whether or not change happens. For me, this is the ultimate test of whether you have succeeded or failed with the survey.

For this reason, I would encourage companies to embrace "gimmicks" when they are an effective way to engage staff with the cutomer survey. Most of the time, the best way to do this is by bringing the survey alive through real customers' stories. Verbatim comments, focus group videos, VoxPops and even cardboard cutouts are all effective techniques.

Once you've won their hearts, you can start worrying about their minds. On my analysing and reporting course (worth every penny of £100,000, but a snip at £325) I talk about ways to present survey data to motivate and enable action. I think there are three essentials:

• Focus. You can't improve everything at once. Keep the number of Priorities for Improvement as low as possible.
• Ownership. Give people a score as specific to them as you can. This sense of ownership (and responsibility) helps concentrate their minds on the importance of the customer. Make sure that PFIs are owned by the people who can affect them. Internal league tables of branch scores are a great way to motivate change.
• Actionable outcomes. People must know not only what to change, but how to change it. Verbatim comments are usually your best source of specific customer stories about where they are being let down.

Are you loyal to your customers?

 We talk with organisations on a frequent basis about their desire to gain or improve customer loyalty. It's a 'holy grail' in some respects, achieved or earned by initially doing the basics exceptionally well taking Tom Peters' view, which in turn delivers high levels of customer satisfaction and, so the story goes, will ensure that customers will react by being more loyal, staying as customers longer, spending more and recommending organisations to other people. This, (if you could use the phase in the current exponentially changing world we have come to realise we live in) guarantees (or comes as close as you can get) future sales, increased revenues and potentially ssafeguards the survival of the business, as long as customers remain the central focus. 

However, consider this view which I came across when reading an e-newsletter by Steve Yastrow, author of 'Brand Harmony' and  We, The Ideal Customer Relationship;

"It is obvious to customers when they are means to our ends. If they perceive that we view them merely as instruments for transaction, they will view us similarly in return. The loyalty they give us will not be real loyalty. It will be nothing more than barter. There's nothing wrong with barter, but it isn't loyalty. Loyalty lasts, but barter is only as good as the current transaction.

It is also obviousus to customers when we are loyal to them. Show your customers that your interest is them, and not what you get from them, and you automatically earn their loyalty in return."

I suppose the questions I would urge you to ask is;

Are we truely loyal to our customers?

What are loyal behaviors?

Are we only loyal to the extent of what they pay us or what they will pay?

What more could we do, or would be prepared to do to show our customers that we are loyal?

What would you do if it was your wife or partner instead and wanted to show your loyalty?

An interesting twist on the subject I think and an insightful way of taking a different perspective. One extra conversation I'll definitely be having with my customers... How about you?