Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

What makes something an experience?

I went to the theatre on Saturday (to see the superb Monkey!, nothing high-brow). As we were waiting for the show to start we were chatting about what it is that makes live performances so special. Whether it's a concert, a play, or even a conference talk, there's something magical about a live performance that a recording never captures.

I suspect the crucial difference is that you know a live performance is unique. It'll never be done in quite the same way ever again, and that makes it captivating. With the aerial antics of Monkey! it also gives you a slight feeling of dread that you're going to witness an accident live on stage!

Can organisations seeking to give their customers a great experience tap into these same feelings? Not easily, but I think it is possible for them to create the same sense that the experience is unique. To do so they need excellent staff and flexibility in their systems. Flexibility doesn't mean that the system isn't there or isn't competent—rock-solid support is as crucial for frontline staff as the wires used by the performers in Monkey!

The one thing you can't do is boilerplate a customer experience—if it's not unique then it's not an experience.

Motivating employees - appraisals, rewards and incentives

Appraisal season is always interesting. Whether you're the appraiser or the appraisee, everyone seems to dread them. Why?

As Pfeffer and Sutton point out¹, the problem is that, just as with driving, we all believe we're above average performers in the workplace. The appraisal is when our comforting self-delusion comes up against the brick wall of objective fact or, more controversially, a manager's judgement.

Joel Spolsky argues powerfully that appraisals or performance reviews can only do harm in terms of staff morale and motivation:

"Most people think that they do pretty good work (even if they don't). It's just a little trick our minds play on us to keep life bearable. So if everybody thinks they do good work, and the reviews are merely correct (which is not very easy to achieve), then most people will be disappointed by their reviews. The cost of this in morale is hard to understate."

Frankly, it's hard to disagree with this assessment. Perhaps it's time to ditch performance reviews—what do you think?

Joel also slams incentive pay, seeing it as patronising and ineffective. This is probably more controversial, but also has some evidence to support it. Pfeffer and Sutton argue that individual incentives only work when performance can be objectively assessed and when results can be linked very directly to individual effort. Neither of those criteria is often met in practice.

1. Pfeffer, J. & Sutton, R.I. "Hard Facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonsense"

It's all about the experience

"Customer experience" is the buzzword of the day, but what is often sorely lacking from articles and talks on the subject is concrete ideas on what to do on the ground.

I've just come across an excellent list of 50 ways to improve your customer's experience, which is full of specific dos and don'ts. Some of my favourites are:

13. Don't give your customer too many choices.  You're the experts, so recommend a product based on what you learn from him/her.

This is really important, but so few organisations have grasped that choice is not always good. Too much choice bewilders customers and is likely to make them less satisfied with their purchase, not more.

15. If you can't fulfill a customer's need, suggest another company that may be able to do so.

Seems bizarre? Not if you're really customer focused. You can't make that sale anyway, but a helpful recommendation will make the customer like and trust you, increasing the chances they'll shop with you when they can.

16. Never ever say something negative about another company.

Any competent salesperson already knows this, but perhaps that knowledge should be spread through the rest of the organisation. This holds true even if all the criticisms you might make are 100% valid. It justs looks like sour grapes. What if the customer has already used the competitor? Are you telling them they're stupid?

Interestingly there's very little specifically "experiencey" about the list, no stories about Disney. It could just as well be a list of great "customer service" behaviours. Most of these things are timeless and universal, but that doesn't make them common!

Go and read the full list, or you can download it as a handy PDF from the blog.

The weird science of consumer decision making

A lot of the literature on customer emotions, the customer experience, and consumer decision making emphasises the idea that decisions are often largely unconscious. There is considerable laboratory evidence to support this view, although admittedly these experiments are very far removed from everyday life and the kind of decisions we're interested in. Lab psychology experiments are notoriously bad at transferring to social situations.

Experiments have shown that the "mere exposure effect" leads us to prefer images we have been subliminally exposed to, preferences which we justify and explain with all manner of clever rationalisations. They have also shown that free decisions can be predicted by brain imaging before they are consciously made.

Does this mean that our feeling of conscious free will is nothing but an illusion? Do we simply rationalise a decision made by our unconscious mind? In the May edition of Nature Neuroscience a team of researchers report on evidence that seems to support such a view.

Their research shows that volunteers' decisions of which of two buttons to press could be predicted up to 10 seconds before their decision was consciously made. The full article is subscription only (and fairly heavy going), but you can hear one of the researchers discussing their findings in the latest (May) edition of Neuropod, Nature's consistently excellent neuroscience podcast.

I think it's time to admit that we all massively overrate the role our conscious mind plays in our complex mental life...but that's no bad thing. The tremendous ability of our minds to make good decisions on very little data is a great asset—Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" makes much of this.

To understand ourselves and our customers we have to be comfortable with the role of the unconscious in decision making, and that's something we talk about on our Customer Emotions Briefing. Emotions may seem woolly and soft, but the science that says they matter is as hard as you could wish.

Customer emotions briefing

Last Wednesday Richard and I presented our Customer Emotions briefing in London. This half day session looked at the psychology of emotions and how they feature in decision making, the role of emotions in driving customer loyalty compared to rational evaluations and finally some tools to help you measure and manage all the drivers of loyalty.

The session managed to be both high brow:

and low brow:

with a whole spectrum in between.

We'll be running the briefing near Manchester in July, so if you're interested in customer emotions and you live up North (or couldn't make it to the London one) maybe we'll see you there?

Brand tags

Every so often the blogosphere comes up with a good idea. Once in a blue moon it's a really good idea.

Brand image has always been a tricky beast to pin down, but most people would define it as something like the sum of all the attitudes and associations that consumers hold about a particular brand. Some different ways of putting this:

It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com

Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon. Jeremy Bullmore

A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures. Michael Eisner

We have the power to shape brands to be what we want… Wally Olins

A brand image is shaped by the products and services themselves, by the consumption environment, by marketing communications and, perhaps most importantly, by the behaviour of the organisation and its employees.

So how do you measure something so vast and intangible? One technique is to ask people what associations they have for a particular brand, something along the lines of "what 3 words come to mind", and over a sample of hundreds some interesting patterns will emerge.

Brand tags is a website that does exactly the same thing, across a whole host of brands, and represents the results in the form of a "tag cloud" similar to the one to the right of this blog. A fascinating concept, and there are some revealing results. You can take part in the tagging or simply browse through the  brands.

Here's a snippet of the cloud for a famous sports shoe brand:

Can you guess who it is? If not peek at the image title/alt tag, or listen to more hip hop!

Scatterplots—they're really not that hard!

The intermittently good blog Junk Charts has another post highlighting the danger of thinking that you can analyse the relationship between two variables simply by plotting them next to each other on a line chart.

The problem is that line charts really don't give you the ability to tell if there is a relationship or not, but your brain may well con you into believing that they do because of our tendency to see patterns (even if they're not there). Take this chart:

Is there a relationship between the two lines? When you've made up your mind click here to see a scatter plot of the same data. It's a lot easier to tell isn't it?

Why are people so afraid of scatterplots? They're one of the most useful basic tools in any analyst's toolkit, and they're really a very simple idea—essentially a scatterplot is just a map. If you don't feel comfortable with them perhaps it's time you learnt to be!

How do customer emotions impact your business?

Customer emotions are often overlooked when organisations think about the customer satisfaction levels they are getting, or how to improve customer loyalty. But, the evidence is that customer emotions play a key role in this area.

When the concept of customer emotion is addressed by a business, more often than not it seems that it is of the 'wow - delight the customer' variety, but is this really the emotional engagement that customers are looking for?

Well, you can find the answers to the above points and read an article that goes into much more depth in the most recent Stakeholder magazine (see my previous post for the link).

There's also a half-day briefing that's being led by two of my colleagues in London later this month. You can see full details of the customer emotions briefing and book your place by following this link.

Stakeholder Satisfaction Magazine

If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you get hold of Stakeholder Satisfaction magazine, the most recent issue came out a couple of weeks ago. It deals with all aspects of customer & employee satisfaction. It has some great case studies as well.

If you are in the UK and qualify, you can sign up for a free print copy here.

Alternatively, read the articles online (including back issues) here.

Let us know what you think.

23 Years at the same company

I went to a friend's emigration party last week. Emigrating isn't that unusual, but what was unusual was the amount of time that he been with his employer in the UK - 23 years. He's been with the same company from joining them as a 16 year old apprentice working his way through to senior management and then finally leaving them for pastures new at the age of 39.

What struck me is just how rare this longevity is now. Of course, most people don't expect their employment with one organisation to last anything like this length of time, but that isn't the only factor. A quick strawpoll amongst other people at the party confirmed what I thought - in general terms, people get dissatisfied with their current employer / position / reward / prospects and move on. This begs the question, was my friend fortunate enough to work in an organisation that tries hard to satisfy its employees, or was he (as some would argue) not ambitious enough?

How long do people normally stay with your organisation? Why?