Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Keep it simple, stupid

I recieved an email last week from one of the UK's top climbers, Dave Macleod. It's the second time he* has emailed me, and the second time I've bought a DVD from him direct instead of going to Amazon or Play.

Both times I've been struck by how well written the emails are, combining a chatty tone with a refreshingly direct call to action.

Hi Stephen,

Dave MacLeod here. You bought a copy of E11 and Committed from my webshop last year – thanks!  Claire and I have been busy this year making our first film which is due out his month. I hope you don’t mind me emailing you to let you know.

...

If you are keen to get hold of a copy of the DVD, obviously I’m keen for you to get it from my webshop again rather than elsewhere, so I thought I’d drop you a line.

Often this kind of simple, direct, communication is what customers crave from their suppliers. It's one of the things that small businesses and individuals are consistently better at than the big companies. I suspect it's a lot of the reason the Services sector consistently tops the UKCSI.

Is it possible for big companies to achieve this kind of simplicity? I believe it is. One essential is to get good staff and give them the freedom to create relationships with customers.

Another fruitful avenue is to use the tools available on the internet. Blogging, for example, is a good way to maintain an informal dialogue with customers. As with most communication issues, Innocent provide a good model.

* If you think I'm being naive, and that the email came from one of his many underlings, you have a very rosy picture of how much money it's possible to make as a professional climber!

Choosing colours for charts

As with most aspects of reporting and data presentation, restraint is the key when it comes to choosing colours. You may have noticed that experts in charting, such as Edward Tufte or Stephen Few, tend to choose very muted colours for the majority of their work. Bold colours are used sparingly to highlight and pick out key areas.

In Envisioning Information Tufte quotes Ann Driver to explain way, by analogy to music:

"Music without accent lacks coherence....Conversely, if every note, word or movement is stressed, the result has even less meaning."

Charts in which all the colours are bold are like speakers who shout the whole time, or music without variation. They are boring, and the key information is lost in the general clamour. On top of that, bold colours tend to clash with each other.

Choosing the colours that go is not just a job for Dulux, though, and you don't need a degree in colour theory to make sensible choices for charts. You can't go wrong, for example, with grey as a base colour and any bold colour as a highlight (red is a popular choice).

If you want to get more adventurous, my advice would be to ignore the normal RGB and CMYK colour models, which are hard to think in, and work with Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV). This gives us the very intuitive colour triangle, which I've reproduced here after the version in the excellent Color &Type.

This is a simplification of the real triangle which is a continuum from black to white (left to right), and from fully saturated at the top to desaturated at the bottom. The three highlighted axes are fertile avenues for finding pleasing colour combinations. If we choose red as our basic hue:

That gives us three options: red and grey; dark red and white; light red and black, all of which work well. Choosing a more complex colour scheme, using more than one basic hue, is harder. But the same basic principles of contrast apply—using tints and shades (in other words varying the saturation and value) will often make colours work together. Consider the notoriously difficult red and blue:

Using both colours bold is disastrous. They clash badly, making it almost impossible to look at.

By using either a tint or shade of blue we can achieve a more pleasing result, one that will make it easier to appreciate the data in a chart.

It's worth noting how warm colours such as red have a tendency to rise above cool colours such as blue, which gives the illusion that the red is "floating" above a blue background. Used with care this can be a very valuable technique to highlight key elements of a chart or slide.

Emotions and decision making

I've talked on this blog a few times now about the role of emotions in decision making. The excellent blog Mind Hacks has a post on the topic. Vaughan makes the important point that understanding the balance between analytical and intuitive thought in the real world is not easy.

Of course, some problems need a measured, thoughtful, analytical approach, whereas in some situations this interferes with the outcome. However, these are largely findings from lab tasks designed to isolate these types of problems whereas in the real world, problems come as a chaotic mix of both elements.

Psychology experiments are notoriously bad at transferring from the lab to the real world. Nonetheless, it is obvious that most decisions are a mixture of emotion and cognition, something which we explore in the Customer Emotions briefing.