Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Improving customer satisfaction, part 1

I'm going to be doing a series of posts about improving customer satisfaction, based on lessons we've learnt with our clients. A gentle start today, with three maxims to guide our thoughts.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gettysgirl/3400383586

Finding out what customers want is sometimes less than half the battle. Not only do you have to get from understanding to implementation, you often need to deal with the fact that gearing your product or service to an average customer can mask a range of underlying requirements. A standard approach risks dissatisfying almost everyone.

There is no average customer.

We can address this problem with good staff or through tailoring, but it's also well worth finding out the impact of over or under delivery. Often the impact is not symmetrical. We asked one client's customers whether they were contacted “too much”, “about right”, or “not enough”. Opinion was divided—does that make it an impossible situation? Not when you know that customers who were contacted too much were as satisfied as those who thought it was about right. Only customers who weren't contacted enough were unhappy.

Goldilocks notwithstanding, “too cold” and “too hot” are not equally bad.

The lesson we learned with that client is applicable to most organisations. Active* contact with customers is almost always a good thing, improving customer satisfaction and often reducing the number of inbound calls. Using SMS and email is, increasingly, an attractive way to keep customers informed (guess how many people have that as one of their priorities for improvement!) while keeping cost under control. 

You can't talk to customers too much...(unless you're selling)

All of which could be distilled to "find out what customers want and give it to them".

* I refuse to say "proactive"!

Service - as basic as it gets

I don't normally bring whinges from my life as a customer onto this blog, but this one is too perfect an opportunity to miss.

Two weeks ago I had a question I wanted to ask Leica; specifically I wanted to know if they could tell me where to hire one of their stratospherically expensive, uniquely desirable, cameras. Simple question, but my Googling was letting me down so I took the easy way out and emailed Leica through the “Contact us” bit of their website.

I'm still waiting for any response. *UPDATED BELOW*

This is, frankly, absurdly poor service. There is no excuse, in this day and age, for not responding to email. What makes it even worse is that Leica is a (very) premium brand. From my perspective as (maybe one day, when I'm very rich or very drunk) a potential customer, what is this telling me about the service I can expect if I experience a problem?

I posted on Twitter about this last Friday. A company competent at reputation management would have been dealing with that post the same day—monitoring the web for mentions of the brand “Leica” is not hard. In fact numerous photography-linked Twitterites have since followed me, which demonstrates that other people are looking for mentions of Leica, even if they aren't.

Anyway, moving on from the rant, what are the lessons? Couldn't be simpler:

1. Posting contact details is a promise—you MUST respond in a reasonable time. No excuses.
2. Simple reputation management is cheap and easy. You MUST know about it if people are talking about your brand online.
3. If you want to be a premium consumer brand, those two things are exponentially more important.

*UPDATE 11 November* : Today, nearly four weeks after my enquiry, Leica responded. They couldn't answer, but it was quite a helpful response. Sadly, it took them 19 working days when it should have taken hours.

Satisfaction measurement - should you go deep or broad?

At the WCCF conference this week there was quite a lot of talk about the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of measuring the customer experience, which I'll probably post more about next week.

One of the things that struck me about what some organisations are doing, particularly with NPS, is that the focus is incredibly strong on getting very frequent data at the lowest possible level (even down to individual call centre agents).

This kind of granularity can be a very powerful tool for change, as it gives people a sense of ownership and accountability for the score, and of course could be used with any metric—there's nothing special about NPS in that regard.

The flipside is that NPS, or to be fair any survey that you can realistically run at these frequencies and volumes, tends to give you very shallow data. You get a score, and perhaps a verbatim comment, but no quantitative insight or specific qualitative information into the reasons behind it.

 

The choice here, it seems to me, is whether you should go for deep or broad understanding of the customer experience. For many organisations the ideal answer will be a combination of both, with some sort of automated (web, email or IVR) option to take the “pulse” of the organisation at a granular level combined with a detailed telephone interview survey backed by thorough analysis and insight.

Reporting that motivates change

Last week, Richard and I ran the Stakeholder Showcase in London (which did not cost the £99,999 it's currently advertised at! We're good, but we're not that good).

One of the things I talked about was that the way you report and communicate the survey results has a big impact on whether or not change happens. For me, this is the ultimate test of whether you have succeeded or failed with the survey.

For this reason, I would encourage companies to embrace "gimmicks" when they are an effective way to engage staff with the cutomer survey. Most of the time, the best way to do this is by bringing the survey alive through real customers' stories. Verbatim comments, focus group videos, VoxPops and even cardboard cutouts are all effective techniques.

Once you've won their hearts, you can start worrying about their minds. On my analysing and reporting course (worth every penny of £100,000, but a snip at £325) I talk about ways to present survey data to motivate and enable action. I think there are three essentials:

• Focus. You can't improve everything at once. Keep the number of Priorities for Improvement as low as possible.
• Ownership. Give people a score as specific to them as you can. This sense of ownership (and responsibility) helps concentrate their minds on the importance of the customer. Make sure that PFIs are owned by the people who can affect them. Internal league tables of branch scores are a great way to motivate change.
• Actionable outcomes. People must know not only what to change, but how to change it. Verbatim comments are usually your best source of specific customer stories about where they are being let down.

Are you loyal to your customers?

 We talk with organisations on a frequent basis about their desire to gain or improve customer loyalty. It's a 'holy grail' in some respects, achieved or earned by initially doing the basics exceptionally well taking Tom Peters' view, which in turn delivers high levels of customer satisfaction and, so the story goes, will ensure that customers will react by being more loyal, staying as customers longer, spending more and recommending organisations to other people. This, (if you could use the phase in the current exponentially changing world we have come to realise we live in) guarantees (or comes as close as you can get) future sales, increased revenues and potentially ssafeguards the survival of the business, as long as customers remain the central focus. 

However, consider this view which I came across when reading an e-newsletter by Steve Yastrow, author of 'Brand Harmony' and  We, The Ideal Customer Relationship;

"It is obvious to customers when they are means to our ends. If they perceive that we view them merely as instruments for transaction, they will view us similarly in return. The loyalty they give us will not be real loyalty. It will be nothing more than barter. There's nothing wrong with barter, but it isn't loyalty. Loyalty lasts, but barter is only as good as the current transaction.

It is also obviousus to customers when we are loyal to them. Show your customers that your interest is them, and not what you get from them, and you automatically earn their loyalty in return."

I suppose the questions I would urge you to ask is;

Are we truely loyal to our customers?

What are loyal behaviors?

Are we only loyal to the extent of what they pay us or what they will pay?

What more could we do, or would be prepared to do to show our customers that we are loyal?

What would you do if it was your wife or partner instead and wanted to show your loyalty?

An interesting twist on the subject I think and an insightful way of taking a different perspective. One extra conversation I'll definitely be having with my customers... How about you?

Why excelling at customer satisfaction is hard

People sometimes say (in fact I have said) that satisfying customers is easy—all you have to do is consistently give customers what they say they want. This is, in itself, not as easy as it first sounds. Meeting customers' requirements flawlessly every time is a task beyond most of us. Still, perhaps good companies achieve it almost all the time—shall we say 95% of the time?

What happens when you give customers what they expected? They are satisfied...but satisfied is a relatively lukewarm word isn't it? A solid 8 out of 10. Good, but not great. How often do we create really high levels of satisfaction, giving customers a more positive sense of delight with their experience, a 9 or 10 out of 10? Let's say a good company manages 9 20% of the time and 10 5% of the time.

Let's make some assunptions and play with some numbers. Our typical, good, company is dissatisfying only 5% of its customers—let's assume they give us an average score of 5 out of 10. Then we have our 8s out of 10 (70%), 9s (20%) and 10s (5%). Sounds like a company doing pretty well? It works out as an average satisfaction index of 81.5—just above halfway up our league table.

These numbers are pretty meaningless—they're based on all sorts of generalisations and untenable assumptions that have little relevance for you business—but what I'm trying to demonstrate is that the typical performance of organisations we deal with is actually pretty good.

How hard is it to get this company's index up towards 90? What if we kept our 5% dissatisfied, but managed to have 20% 10s and 40% 9s (leaving us 35% 8s)? Pause for a second to guess what index that would come at as. The answer is 86.5, which I suspect is lower than you guessed.

So what point am I trying to make? In a nutshell, companies who have very high satisfaction indexes are very, very, good. They get to the top of the league table because the majority of their customers are scoring them 9 or 10 out of 10 for nearly everything. Being that good takes commitment and drive that verge on obsesssion.

Understanding the customer journey

Organisations focus on particular points of the customer journey, looking at the experience of a wide range of customers at each point and trying to improve performance bit by bit.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but sometimes it's worth stepping back and looking at the customer experience in depth rather than width. Doing so can reveal bottlenecks in your processes that you've been completely unaware of. It also gives you an insight into what it feels like to be a customer, helping you to see ways round the way things have always been done.

How do you do this? It's often valuable to use an "adopt a customer" scheme, where senior people can adopt an individual customer and follow them through their journey, understanding how things work for one person. Following the processes inside the company, which are usually opaque to customers, can reveal where things are being slowed down unnecessarily. "Why has my customer's order been sitting in your in-tray for 3 days?"

In my book, anything that gets senior people closer to customers is worth trying.

Do you really want to hear from your customers?

Answer the question honestly. Then point me to the page on your website where I can find email addresses and phone numbers for real people in your organisation. What about if I phone up and ask to be put through to a Director? Thought so.

Tomorrow, at our client conference, I'm going to be using this slide with a quote from Darren Cornish, Director of Customer Experience at Norwich Union (now Aviva):

It's from a blog post he made to his staff in which he distributed his email address and phone number for them to give to customers at their discretion. That's so unusual it's almost shocking, but I think it's where we all need to get to in an increasingly communicative market.

Big brands need to learn the lessons of the cluetrain manifesto—the era of one way conversations (brand broadcasting) is over. We need to allow customers and staff to engage at all levels of the organisation. Taking the first steps is scary, but it'll be a better, more honest, world.

It's the little things that make a difference

The other day I went for a meal in a little restaurant in Glasgow (eating alone is one of the downsides of my job!). I sat down, and ordered a glass of wine to drink while looking at the menu. When the waitress brought the wine she also brought a glass of tap water. A simple thing to do? Absolutely, but it showed an ability to think herself inside the customer's head that immediately let me know I was in good hands.

The point is not that a glass of tap water is important, in itself, but that it was a signal that put me at my ease. If the “total customer experience” has something to teach us, I believe it is that everything staff do sends a message, conscious or unconscious, to customers. If the first cue the customer gets is positive that starts the encounter off well, relaxes the customer, and leads them to expect good things. Contrast that with a restaurant in which you struggle to catch the eye of staff who are pretending not to see you because they are busy.

You and your staff send messages to customers every day through the things you say, the way you say them, and the things you do. The more time you spend trying to get inside customers' heads, understanding the messages you're sending, the better. Often trivial details, particularly at the beginning and end of a service encounter, can be surprisingly important.

CC licensed image, credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xslim/692740924/sizes/o/

A ten step guide to getting high satisfaction scores

People often act as if the aim of a customer satisfaction survey is to get a high score, or hit a target, rather than to improve how customers feel about the organisation. Here is our 10 step guide to faking a high satisfaction score without the hard work of satisfying customers.

1. Ask customers about things you know you do well
In order to measure satisfaction properly you have to use the “lens of the customer” rather than the “lens of the organisation”. This partly means language, partly means customers not caring about your internal hierarchies and processes, but most importantly means which aspects of the relationship you measure.

If you come up with your own questionnaire, without involving customers, then by definition you will be asking customers about the areas you focus on. These are likely to be things you are good at, but they may not be the most important things to customers.

The [Building Society] has sent her a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Does she like the decor of her local branch? How long does she have to wait in line? Do staff smile? She has responded positively to each question. There is no opportunity to do anything else.

Suddenly she writes at the bottom, “But I hate you.”
Geoff Ryman – 253, a novel for the Internet

2. Use a positively weighted scale
After all, we know that customers are mostly satisfied, right? So we must need more positive response options. Let's go for the old “Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor” and count everyone who doesn't say “poor” as satisfied. Organisations focusing on their customers rather than the score might make the mistake of opting for a long enough balanced scale to pick apart the scores of satisfied customers, but that's dangerous. What if they all score us 6 out of 10?

3. Force customers into a score you can misinterpret
Well apparently the board don't like that scale. Someone seems to have read a book that said it was “biased”. Oh well, at least if we go for a short enough verbal scale we know the vast majority will give us a “courtesy 4”. Never mind whether that would be a 6 or 9 on a ten point scale, we can still count them as satisfied, and that's what makes the press release.

4. Pretend that “satisfied” is a good thing
“Satisfied” is such a useful word. On the one hand it sounds pleasingly positive—“90% of customers are satisfied”, excellent. And yet at the level of the individual customer, it's so easy to make people satisfied—all you have to do is meet their basic needs and expectations. After all 6 out of 10 is satisfied.

5. Only talk to happy customers
It's much more fun to talk to the customers who like us, why don't we ask them to do the survey for us? They know us much better, after all. Anyway, you shouldn't really worry too much about what Bill says—he's always complaining. Can we delete that score? Excellent.

I think the actions of almost all marketers say, “we’d rather you were happy, but if you can’t be happy, please go away.”
Seth Godin

6. Find an easy benchmark to compare yourself against
This one is 100% bullet proof. No one in your organisation will ever question that your market is completely different from every other market (and yes, you do have the most demanding customers). That means that no benchmark from outside your market is fair, particularly if you don't emerge well from the comparison. The really clever bit is that you can define your market exactly how you want to—genius!

7. Use mystery shopping or internal KPIs as measures of satisfaction
This is like an extreme form of technique number 1. By measuring yourself not only on the things you think are important, but using your own criteria, you can almost guarantee a good result. Companies that were not just focused on getting a high score might use these tools in addition to a measure of customer attitudes, rather than in place of it.

8. Pick your timing
Just made a big change? Don't survey.
Something went wrong? Don't survey.
Rainy day? Don't survey.
England just won the World Cup? Fill your boots.

9. Make sure they know you're watching
Offer to help customers with anything they don't understand on the questionnaire. Stand over their shoulders as they fill it in with the pen you've lent them. Why not offer to fill it in on their behalf, after all it is a bit of a hassle isn't it? Make sure you understand any reasons for dissatisfaction by challenging any low scores, preferably in a slightly aggressive way.

10. Bribery
Offer customers an incentive for filling out the survey—if it's good enough the warm glow should carry over to the scores they give. It's a shame you can't make the incentive conditional on good scores, really (though see point 9).

All of these things are much easier than the prospect of, gasp, actually improving the products or services we offer customers. You may feel that I've ladled the sarcasm on rather thickly here, but you come across these mistakes on a regular basis in current satisfaction measurement. Many organisations take the path of least resistance and adopt the comforting appearance of a high score they don't deserve.

Companies that do this are living in a fool's paradise, and they'll be rudely shaken out of it as initiatives like the UKCSI increasingly provide a published, objective, and stringent measure of customer satisfaction. If you're serious about measuring and improving customer satisfaction you need a tough measure. Find out more in our Improving Customer Satisfaction course.