Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Omit needless words

One of the books I like to keep next to my desk is Strunk & White's classic "The Elements of Style". It really is as good as everyone says it is, and well worth returning to whenever you suspect that your writing style is getting muddy.

My most pernicious lapse is probably "the fact that", which Strunk includes in a list of unnecessary words and their conciser alternatives, such as:

used for fuel purposes........	used for fuel
he is a man who.................	he
in a hasty manner...............	hastily
this is a subject that...........	this subject
Her story is a strange one....	Her story is strange.

The little book is absolutely crammed with similar pieces of terse wisdom. Business writers are renowned for their unwillingness to get to the point, and their use of ridiculous, pompous, buzzwords. White's description is telling:

People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; exectives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights.... A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

I'm on board with that.

Customer experience and retention

Interesting post on Bruce Temkin's blog about the latest ACSI results. The message he picks out is the importance of retention in a recession economy. And what drives retention? The customer experience, of course.

Colin Shaw of Beyond Philosophy comments that "retention" is a more effective word for selling the importance of customers than "customer experience". I suspect he's right, and the reason is very simple. The "customer experience", however valid a concept, is merely the latest in a string of buzzwords that have been used to talk about customer attitudes.

Retention is one of the key resulting behaviours, which are not subject to the same changing fashions, and have a much more obvious link to business performance.

Join the slide:ology revolution

A quick book review and recommendation. I was amazed to discover that there is a better book than Presentation Zen on presentation design. slide:ology is both beautifully designed and overflowing with quality content*.

The scope of this book is simply incredible, incorporating colour theory, the use of type, grid systems, and even basic principles of photographic composition. Nancy Duarte clearly thinks that you need to know at least a little about all of these things to produce really compelling presentations, and I suspect she's right.

Join the slide:ology revolution today, and make an immediate impact on your presentations. Probably the best £22 you'll ever spend on a business book. My only criticism would be that her section on presenting data could be bulked up, but I suppose that reflects the nature of business I'm in.

You can get a flavour for the slide:ology way at slideology.com.

* Despite losing 10 points for using the dreadful cliche "The art and science of...." in the subtitle.

A thought on reporting

Edward Tufte rails tirelessly against the clumsy stupidity of the average PowerPoint "slideument", preferring a detailed report that respects the intelligence of its audience, and presents data appropriately. One of the members of his forum makes this interesting contribution:

How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.
William A. Wood

It's definitely an approach worth trying, particularly for the executive summary of a report.

Emotional intelligence and customer satisfaction

Daniel Goleman, the leading expert on emotional intelligence, has a fascinating post about the role of EI in customer service.

He cites an article in the Journal of Services Marketing which showed, unsurprisingly, that the level of EI in customer-facing staff correlated with customer satisfaction. Interestingly, this effect was strongest in potentially difficult "moments of truth", such as when returning an item. Goleman comments:

This suggests that while EI drives customer satisfaction in the vast amount of day-to-day routine transactions in a store, the lack of it matters even more when a customer has a complaint. Hiring, promoting and training employees for EI, then seems one key to repeat business.

Goleman thinks that the main driver of this link is emotional contagion - the tendency for emotions to be catching. In other words, happy staff make for happy customers. Sound familiar? This ties in well with the service profit chain and value profit chain.

One of the subtleties of understanding how customers form perceptions, which Nigel picks up on in his book, is that negative events tend to have much greater prominence than equivalent positive events. This is underpinned by our brain's emotional network, and accounts for the big difference between staff who are emotionally intelligent and others when things go wrong.

How not to feed customer survey results back to staff

Many of you will have seen thestoryof the Abbey customer who claims to have been terrorised by a member of call centre staff in revenge for a bad customer satisfaction score. Whatever the ins and outs of the story, and I'm willing to bet that there's more to this than Mr Bates is letting on, this is clearly unacceptable.

The deeper concern, though, is that members of staff are able to get hold of the scores given by particular customers. Obviously, that's extremely dangerous when you have rare events like this one. More troubling is that it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of customer surveys, one that is encouraged by event-driven satisfaction surveys such as this one.

A customer survey exists to get to the bottom of the root causes of customer satisfaction, not as a comments card to allow you to react to specific instances of dissatisfaction. Individual scores are almost never of much interest. The only exception to this is in some business to business markets, in which individual customers may represent an enormous percentage of your business. In which cases I would suggest that a more qualitative approach is probably logical in any case.

Most staff have the sense not to get petty vengeance like this, but it's not fair on either your staff or their customers for them to be exposed to individual scores about them, particularly in a consumer market.