Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Classic charts...and beer

Interesting article in the Economist looking at three of "history's best" charts.

Ever since Tufte published the Visual Display of Quantitative Information*, Charles Minard's graphic of Napoleon's march on Moscow has been the standard example of a thoughtful and compelling "infographic". I even use it in my course...despite its somewhat tangential relationship to Customer Satisfaction Measurement!

Playfair is a fair choice too. He invented, for better or worse, many of the graphic forms that we are familiar with today, including the bar chart, line chart and even the dreaded pie chart. The Economist shows an early attempt to make political mileage out of charts.

The third person featured is Florence Nightingale, who is sometimes thought to have invented the pie chart, but didn't. She did come up with the "Nightingale Rose", or polar area chart, which is the one covered by the Economist. Frankly this is an odd choice, as it is not one of history's best charts by any means. Nonetheless the outcome of the analysis was of great importance, forcing a review of the sanitary conditions of army barracks and hospitals at a time when disease killed far more soldiers than enemy action.

For similar reasons, my preferred third choice would have been John Snow's map of cholera deaths in Soho.

A map that forced the closure of a lethally infected water pump (the Broad Street pump) and finally began to convince people that cholera was water-borne and not spread by smell.

Next time you're in Soho or Carnaby Street, find your way to Broadwick Street, as Broad Street is now known, and have a pint in the John Snow pub. It seems an ideal way to commemorate the closing of an era in which drinking beer was safer than drinking water.

* You can read our review of VDQI here[PDF]

Learning from success?

There's an interesting article in the New Scientist this week critiquing a forthcoming book for making recommendations based on analysis of a few very successful individuals. As the article points out, this approach is common in self-help books and also in business books:

Gates is not alone in believing that society can be improved by studying successful folk. Some of the best-selling non-fiction books of recent years include The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (over 15 million sold) and Built to Last: Successful habits of visionary companies (almost five years on Business Week's best-seller list). So what do these books tell us about the roots of success? From a scientific point of view, almost nothing.

Ouch. Why not? Problems include a lack of suitable controls (i.e. as well as looking at what successful people have been doing we should look at what the unsuccessful have been doing) and the rarity of huge success compared to normal performance.

In addition, business books often tend to look for very simple, monocausal, explanations. The world is rarely so simple. Even if it is, there's a limit to how successful you can be by aping others—you need to be different from competitors.

You also need to know what to copy. Contrary to the advertising, wearing the same shoes as Kevin Pietersen, or silly earrings, won't make me a great cricketer. Likewise using the same CRM software as Wal-Mart is unlikely to allow you to take over the world.

These and other failings are pointed out in an interesting book, The Halo Effect, which I'll be reviewing here early in the new year. The message is: be very careful about which aspects of top organisations you seek to emulate. They may not be as good as you think they are, and the reasons for their success may not be as simple as they seem.

Better to focus on what your customers say they want, and deliver that consistently, than to get carried away by the latest exciting idea topping the bestseller lists.

Employee Satisfaction - A Key Part of Customer Satisfaction

The BBC News website carried a fascinating article yesterday "Staff appraisals 'waste of time'". Apparently appraisals are viewed rather dimly by many UK workers. 29% of people said their appraisal was a complete waste of time and 44% believed their appraiser had been dishonest.

The article goes on, but the bottom line is that appraisals don't have a great reputation for many workers.

So what's this got to do with Customer Satisfaction? Well, quite a lot actually.

Concepts like the Value Profit Chain show that employee and customer satisfaction are inextricably linked. Now of course, employee satisfaction doesn't just revolve around appraisals, but they do form part of the mix that determines overall employee satisfaction.

The work of Harvard has labelled this "the customer-employee satisfaction mirror". They've demonstrated that employee satisfaction produces higher levels of customer satisfaction. Plus, it's been shown that higher customer satisfaction produces higher employee satisfaction (wouldn't you want to work in a place where the customers are happy and don't keep having a go at staff!). More satisfied employees stay longer, by doing this they retain expertise and customer relationships within the organisation.

So, satisfied employees help to make highly satisfied customers which is good for profits.

If you're working on boosting your customers' satisfaction remember to consider your employees' satisfaction levels as well. This course might give you some ideas.