Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Happy christmas, and some New Year reading

A quick note to wish all of our readers a Happy Christmas.

Just in case any of you are bored over the festive break, or looking for something to read in the New Year, here are some of my favourite blogs:

Customers Rock
Celebrating its second anniversary, this blog has excellent content that belies its chatty tone. Well worth subscribing to.

Mind Hacks
A great book, and an ongoing fascinating read on the cognitive side of psychology.

Presentation Zen
Another must-read book, and a consistently inspiring blog from one of the planet's best thinkers on the art of presentation.

Phil Dourado
Phil is always worth a read—an excellent way of keeping up to date with customer trends is to let Phil do the hard work for you!

Experience matters
I've only recently discovered this site but the blog, and other content such as articles, is consistently excellent.

What are your favourite blogs? Post in the comments if you think I've left someone out.

The way we really do things around here

Some time ago now, at a customer service conference in Edinburgh, I saw an Australian speaker named Steve Simpson. He was one of the most engaging speakers on the day, but also had good content to back up his delivery.

His key point was that most organisations have a set of “Unwritten Ground Rules” or UGRs that define the organisation's culture and often undermine its ability to deliver to customers. Some examples of UGRs might be:

• Management say customers come first, but they don't really mean it
• It's better to keep your head down in meetings than risk speaking out

You can find out more about Steve's theory of UGRs at his website, starting with this article[PDF].

I think Steve's approach is a very powerful way to think about the potential effects of a poisonous culture. The main benefit is that it acknowledges the resistance of culture to “plexiglass management”—if you want staff to act as if customers come first then you need to show them that's what you want, not tell them.

So how do you do that? I believe people follow the money—if you reward on sales instead of satisfaction then that sends a message that you care about sales more than satisfaction. Time to put the balance right.

Can do

I stayed at a Holiday Inn not long ago, and was impressed by their concept of a “can-do promise”. They say:

Our promise is that we will genuinely do all we can to make your stay as relaxing and enjoyable as possible.

If for any reason, you think we have not lived up to this promise, we want to know about it. Tell any member of staff and they will do everything in their power to put it right straight away.

I may not agree with their punctuation, but I think that's a pretty good description of what makes for good customer service.

We run a lot of training courses in hotels, and the thing that makes the biggest difference to how comfortable I feel on the day is, without question, the feeling that once you ask a member of staff to provide something or solve a problem you can forget about it.

Analysing qualitative data

Delegates on my training course often ask me about analysing qualitative data, usually in the form of verbatim comments from customers. Compared to quantitative data, qualitative data often seem bulky and time-consuming—surely there must be an easier way?

Sadly there isn't, really. There is no software with a magic “code all this data” button, and even if there were it would be a drastically bad idea to use it. This is an area in which a human brain needs to be employed for any real insights to emerge. Mind you, so is quantitative analysis...but that's a post for another day!

There is software designed to make your life easier when it comes to analysing qualitative data. Collectively these programmes are known by the stunningly unwieldy acronym CAQDAS*. If you want a full list you can find one at the ASC website (caution—ugliest website ever). Prominent names include NVivo, Qualrus and The Ethnograph.

While they can't do the analysis for you, computer programmes do give you tools that make your life easier. You can get your computer to produce a word frequency count and concordance (key words in context), as well as to search for key phrases. But this kind of automated work is rarely very interesting.

CAQDAS software really comes into its own in easing the process of building up a coding frame and then using that to generate theory. Many CAQDAS programmes are built around an academic approach known as Grounded Theory, which is great for inductive reasoning in your PhD thesis but, frankly, probably overkill for your customer satisfaction survey.

Whatever software tools you use, effective analysis of qualitative data will always take time and care. Coding is a back-and-forth process that takes frustratingly longer than you expect. Above all you need to remember that coding can take you away from the depth of the underlying data—the codes are there to help you think, not to convert your data into arbitrary quantifiable categories!

* Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software or sometimes QDAS or QDA for short!

The Back of The Napkin

Quick review of Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, which I've just finished. It is an excellent guide to visual thinking in business, and a passionate call to arms to get back to the brass tacks of marker on whiteboard or biro on napkin.

It is certainly a must-read book but, for reasons I can't quite articulate, I found it strangely disappointing. Perhaps I expected it to revolutionise the way I see the world, and was sad to find it merely good.

Don't let me put you off though, it is a very useful book. I particularly liked Roam's comprehensive "visual thinking codex", which you can download from the website (though it probably won't make much sense on its own). This offers a complete palette of visual solutions, categorised by problem and offering a selection of versions for different audiences.

Not the emotion you want to create in your customers

A series of tweets [language warning for the easily offended] from Stephen Fry perfectly captures the intense emotional reaction that a poor customer experience can cause.

I hate Vista so much I want to cry...

...How insultingly dreadful can software be?

Too late. It's going out the window...

As usual, the cause of dissatisfaction is the failure of a product or service to do what it is supposed to do. Designing complex software packages that work flawlessly and effortlessly is hard, but that's what customers have come to expect.

Failing to deliver on the basics is the main cause of dissatisfaction for almost every business.

My manager is killing me

Link to an interesting study via neuromarketing. Apparently people who think they have good bosses have a 20% lower risk of heart attack. Comparing relative risks is notoriously misleading, but this is still important stuff. The researchers also report what looks like a dose-response relationship, with the link between management style and heart disease growing stronger the longer individuals keep the same boss.

Specific behaviours identified by the study as having the strongest impact are:

• My boss gives me the information I need
• My boss is good at pushing through and carrying out changes
• My boss explains goals ...
• I have sufficient power in relation to my responsibilities

All of these are staple elements of staff surveys, and it's interesting to see empowerment and information scoring so highly.

Perhaps it's time we started adding employee health to the long list of reasons to focus on satisfying staff?