Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

The rewards of customer satisfaction

I've been thinking about tips. Tips are one of the very few ways in which customers can (or are expected to) explicitly reward good service. Tips are more prevalent in some cultures than others. Here in the UK we only really tip service in a restaurant. We might tell the bar staff at our local to “get yourself one” occasionally, or round up in a taxi, but it's only waiting staff that we regularly give any meaningful amount of money to for service.

Just how significant is that? In many ways a more powerful reward for creating a great customer experience for the restaurant is the fact that, if I'm having a good time, I'm likely to stay longer and have a pudding, perhaps a dessert wine, a coffee, an armagnac...all of which, I imagine, are very high margin items. Incidentally they also bump up the bill, which makes the tip higher—a great example of aligning staff targets with organisation targets.

The reason tips are interesting is that they are on the spot rewards for the staff themselves  for delivering good service. Tips (as opposed to a service charge) are a very good example of a performance-related bonus. A bonus, moreover, that is fair, transparent, and decided by the customer. Few schemes could claim so much. I'm no management expert, but I suspect that the instant nature of the reward is also important—in behaviourist terms that makes it more likely to reinforce the actions that led to it.

The big question is whether tips make a difference. I believe they do. In my experience the average standard of service, the feeling of being treated as a valued customer, is significantly higher in restaurants than it is, for instance, in retail. Perhaps it is time we got over our British discomfort with tipping and spread it throughout the service sector. What do you think?

Apple tops for customer satisfaction...again

Image source

Apple have, once again, topped a customer satisfaction survey. That can't really be a surprise to anyone. can it?

The Register piece I linked to in the first paragraph comments:

“Satisfaction is, of course, a highly subjective concept. A consumer who regards a purchase as a reflection his or her own personal stylishness, hipness, or up-to-the-minute design savvy may be more apt to be satisfied with their choice than one who's merely buying a computing appliance.

And an argument can be made that a not-insignificant number of Apple iMac and MacBook purchasers may fall into that category.”

This seems, bizarrely, to be being trying to say that customers can be wrong about how satisfied they are. This is missing the point entirely. Perception, as Tom Peters tells us, is reality. Never mind whether Apple's computers objectively offer more, there is no such thing as an objective customer experience. No customers are simply “buying a computing appliance”

That's why customer satisfaction surveys are valuable—they are an objective measure of a supplier's success according to its customers' subjective judgements about the experience it offers. Apple is peerless at giving its customers what they want (and not giving two hoots about what its non-customers want).

Speed of response

Keeping customers satisfied is all about meeting their expectations. Sometimes you can do things to help set realistic expectations, but you can never have complete control over them. To a great extent, customers will set their expectations based on what they know they can get elsewhere.

As I always try to hammer home on our training courses, customers will go far outside your market for comparisons. This means that, if you have a call centre, you are being benchmarked against the best call centres that your customers deal with, not your industry. It doesn't matter if you're a manufacturer, a utility or a train company, you will be benchmarked against First Direct and other excellent companies.

Online, customers are increasingly coming to expect almost instantaneous communication. This means that if you offer an email address as a means of contact you must reply quickly (I'd say within 24 hours at the outside). Autoreplies do not count.

One of the greatest causes of customer frustration, in my experience, is having to chase an organisation for a response. This never needs to happen - all customers want is to be kept informed. People understand that not all enquiries can be answered instantly, but they should be replied to, by a human, instantly and with a realistic guide to when they can expect an answer.

Happy birthday Darwin

Today, as you probably know, is Darwin's 200^th birthday. It is well worth raising a glass to a man who had "the best idea in history", but a little footnote to the story has been this image:

A page from his notebooks in which he, tentatively and endearingly, outlines the concept of a “tree of life”. What intrigues me about this notebook entry is the importance of visual thinking and doodling in getting complex ideas down on paper. Darwin starts with “I think” and then gives up on words—drawing the concept is much easier and clearer. The same fundamental tool is still used in cladistics to this day.

The diagram is backed up by some more text

“Case must be that one generation then should be as many living as now. To do this & to have many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction.
Thus between A & B immense gap of relation. C & B the finest gradation, B & D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. — bearing relation”

The combination of diagram and words (written or spoken) is often the best way to think through ideas, and to communicate them to others. If your visual thinking is a bit rusty I'd recommend Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin. Despite the slightly lukewarm review I gave it back in December it really is a valuable read.

What is the best route to a satisfied customer?

Here's a question for you—how do you, as a customer, decide how satisfied you are with a particular encounter? Is it the average of all the events that added together to produce the total experience, or do certain events that were particularly good or bad loom larger in your mind?

The evidence seems to show that, at least in most cases, both are important. The average performance does make a difference, but positive and negative peaks also exert a direct influence on overall perceptions.

It's also reasonable to conclude that certain critical incidents can have a greater impact on overall judgements. In part this is because some things are more important to customers, but it also seems that the last event in a service encounter (often saying goodbye!) tends to have a disproportionate impact. Having a problem is another critical incident where the effect of any success or failure can be magnified.

The idea of negative and positive peaks ties in nicely with research showing that the relationship between performance and satisfaction is not necessarily linear. As seen in the Kano model and similar work, there are different categories of customer requirement. Some (“givens”/“dissatisfiers”/“satisfaction maintainers”/“hygiene factors”) are expected, will cause great distress if done badly or not at all, but bring little reward for being outstanding. Others (“delighters”/“satisfiers”/“wows”/“+1s”) offer the potential for creating great reactions when they are done superbly, but incremental gains offer little benefit.

This is an excellent way to think about ways to improve the customer journey—you can make incremental changes, and they will result in an improved average, but you also need to think about eliminating any poor performance on givens. On the positive side, excelling from time to time on delighters can bring you huge gains with individual customers, though it's very difficult to embed these things into processes.

For many organisations, by far the easiest and most effective way to improve satisfaction is to focus on eliminating low satisfaction, the negative peaks, in encounters with customers. There are still very few organisations who can claim to be routinely flawless on their givens, and that's where you need to be. Other organisations may feel that they can create enough delight amongst their customers that this is the best way to improve.

I'm going to leave you with a quote from Seth Godin's blog which captures the distinction nicely: are you aiming to make people love you, or to be less annoying?

Why customers stay

I've just been working on some slides I'm going to use at our client conference this year, and in the process I rediscovered a very interesting article from the Journal of Service Research entitled “Back from the Brink”. This research, which deserves wider prominence, looked at customers who had considered switching but decided not to. What were the things that motivated the decision to stay? The authors argue that these drivers fall into two camps, broadly speaking the costs of switching versus the benefits of staying.

I think this is interesting because so much emphasis is usually put on switching barriers, but so little on the positive side of the balance with customers that are considering leaving. Key motivations to stay are trust and confidence in the supplier, the relationship ties you may have to staff (touching on this post about relationships), and any experience of a problem that was handled well.

The key point, I believe, is that switching barriers are easily demolished by competition, whereas the ties on the “affirmatory” side are much harder to break. Building bridges is much more powerful than building walls.

Ban Arial (as well as Comic Sans)

Forgive me if this gets a bit ranty—type is something I feel passionate about.

I am becoming increasingly, and perhaps irrationally, irritated by the ubiquity of the typeface Arial in business communication. It's not a bad typeface, nor do I really object to its close association with Microsoft. It does grate on my nerves that it is a poor man's copy of Helvetica. A copy that is close enough to fool most people, while lacking all the understated elegance and subtle beauty of its more thoughtfully designed cousin (Helvetica is on the right, by the way):

No, even that is not enough reason to campaign for a ban of Arial. After all, Spartan (one of my favourite typefaces)is a knock-off of Futura. What I really object to is the utter ubiquity of Arial.

Typefaces are the written equivalent of tone of voice. They can be lyrical or straightforward, softly-spoken or bellowing, playful or severe. Choosing your typeface carefully is an important part of communicating your message...so why is it that every single business presentation is in Arial?*

Arial is safe. Arial is sturdy, functional, corporate, and boring. Really, really, boring. Helvetica is a bit bland, to be honest, but at least it has a certain Swiss elegance. Arial is boring and ugly. It's the type equivalent of a 1960s concrete office building.

We can do so much better. On the web we are hamstrung, dependent on the end user to have the typeface we want to use installed on their machine. No such limitation pertains to slideware, in which we can embed TrueType fonts if we need to share the presentation with others or use it on another machine. Complete creative freedom!

So here is a call to arms—discover your typographic voice. Cut loose from the lumpen fetters of Arial and find a font that reflects your individual message and tone. If you need some inspiration, I recommend browsing through myfonts.com. Jos Buivenga, for example, has a range of truly high quality free fonts, all of them brimming with personality.

 

Isn't that a refreshing change of tone from dull, dull, Arial?

* And why always BOLD...unless you are the sort of pompous dullard that believes talking loudly and monotonously shows how important you are?