Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

It's all about the experience

"Customer experience" is the buzzword of the day, but what is often sorely lacking from articles and talks on the subject is concrete ideas on what to do on the ground.

I've just come across an excellent list of 50 ways to improve your customer's experience, which is full of specific dos and don'ts. Some of my favourites are:

13. Don't give your customer too many choices.  You're the experts, so recommend a product based on what you learn from him/her.

This is really important, but so few organisations have grasped that choice is not always good. Too much choice bewilders customers and is likely to make them less satisfied with their purchase, not more.

15. If you can't fulfill a customer's need, suggest another company that may be able to do so.

Seems bizarre? Not if you're really customer focused. You can't make that sale anyway, but a helpful recommendation will make the customer like and trust you, increasing the chances they'll shop with you when they can.

16. Never ever say something negative about another company.

Any competent salesperson already knows this, but perhaps that knowledge should be spread through the rest of the organisation. This holds true even if all the criticisms you might make are 100% valid. It justs looks like sour grapes. What if the customer has already used the competitor? Are you telling them they're stupid?

Interestingly there's very little specifically "experiencey" about the list, no stories about Disney. It could just as well be a list of great "customer service" behaviours. Most of these things are timeless and universal, but that doesn't make them common!

Go and read the full list, or you can download it as a handy PDF from the blog.

Brand tags

Every so often the blogosphere comes up with a good idea. Once in a blue moon it's a really good idea.

Brand image has always been a tricky beast to pin down, but most people would define it as something like the sum of all the attitudes and associations that consumers hold about a particular brand. Some different ways of putting this:

It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com

Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon. Jeremy Bullmore

A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures. Michael Eisner

We have the power to shape brands to be what we want… Wally Olins

A brand image is shaped by the products and services themselves, by the consumption environment, by marketing communications and, perhaps most importantly, by the behaviour of the organisation and its employees.

So how do you measure something so vast and intangible? One technique is to ask people what associations they have for a particular brand, something along the lines of "what 3 words come to mind", and over a sample of hundreds some interesting patterns will emerge.

Brand tags is a website that does exactly the same thing, across a whole host of brands, and represents the results in the form of a "tag cloud" similar to the one to the right of this blog. A fascinating concept, and there are some revealing results. You can take part in the tagging or simply browse through the  brands.

Here's a snippet of the cloud for a famous sports shoe brand:

Can you guess who it is? If not peek at the image title/alt tag, or listen to more hip hop!

Reputation management

As many of you know, we held our annual client conferences this week, and I thought there was lots of interesting ideas from both the TLF talks and from the floor. Some of your stories about companies you like and dislike were fascinating!

Martin's piece on social media and its role in spreading news (good and bad) about companies made me think of the growing trend to perform "reputation management" online. As Martin said, there are numerous tools to help you do this, including automated alerts when a blog post is made that mentions certain keywords.

There was an excellent example of this in action on our blog a while ago. When I made this post mentioning Fred Reichheld someone from his company was very quick to follow up with a link to his blog (hi Net Promoter people!). How long would it have taken your organisation?

Learning from success?

There's an interesting article in the New Scientist this week critiquing a forthcoming book for making recommendations based on analysis of a few very successful individuals. As the article points out, this approach is common in self-help books and also in business books:

Gates is not alone in believing that society can be improved by studying successful folk. Some of the best-selling non-fiction books of recent years include The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (over 15 million sold) and Built to Last: Successful habits of visionary companies (almost five years on Business Week's best-seller list). So what do these books tell us about the roots of success? From a scientific point of view, almost nothing.

Ouch. Why not? Problems include a lack of suitable controls (i.e. as well as looking at what successful people have been doing we should look at what the unsuccessful have been doing) and the rarity of huge success compared to normal performance.

In addition, business books often tend to look for very simple, monocausal, explanations. The world is rarely so simple. Even if it is, there's a limit to how successful you can be by aping others—you need to be different from competitors.

You also need to know what to copy. Contrary to the advertising, wearing the same shoes as Kevin Pietersen, or silly earrings, won't make me a great cricketer. Likewise using the same CRM software as Wal-Mart is unlikely to allow you to take over the world.

These and other failings are pointed out in an interesting book, The Halo Effect, which I'll be reviewing here early in the new year. The message is: be very careful about which aspects of top organisations you seek to emulate. They may not be as good as you think they are, and the reasons for their success may not be as simple as they seem.

Better to focus on what your customers say they want, and deliver that consistently, than to get carried away by the latest exciting idea topping the bestseller lists.

Research...it's not brain science

The New York Times has received a bit of a roasting over this piece (published a couple of weeks ago) using brain imaging (fMRI) to draw conclusions such as:

When we showed subjects the words "Democrat," "Republican" and "independent," they exhibited high levels of activity in the part of the brain called the amygdala, indicating anxiety.

This is nonsense. More to the point, it's such obvious nonsense that the piece should never have made it to print, which would have saved the NYT the embarrassment of this scathing response and an enthusiastic pile-on from the blogosphere—Ben Goldacre's piece was where I picked up the story, and Language Log has a guest post from the astonishingly distinguished Martha Farah thoroughly eviscerating the original.

Neuroscience is fascinating, but it's also particularly prone to abuse and pseudoscience. Merely showing pictures of the brain to people has been shown to make them more prone to accept flawed explanations...in other words "brain scans indicate" is much more persuading than "researchers think". Even though that's basically the same thing. The research behind this is summarised in a Language Log post, or you can read the journal article[PDF] in press.

All of which should make us very sceptical whenever someone claims to have done anything useful with "neuromarketing". Interestingly, the best blog I know of that claims to deal with neuromarketing has precious little brain imaging, but rather a lot of well-designed traditional experiments. We're not going to be stopping people in the street and asking them to stick their heads in a fMRI scanner any time soon.

Which, on balance, is probably a good thing.

Hidden decisions that ru(i)n your business

One of the points I try to make as forcefully as I can in my training course is that seemingly trivial decisions about reporting can have important effects in the real world.

The biggest danger area for many businesses is data flowing into traffic-light coded dashboards, where pre-defined criteria are designed to spot any warning signs and highlight them for attention. How carefully have those criteria been chosen? Should such criteria ever be allowed to take the place of scrutinising the data itself, looking for patterns and trends?

Nicholas Bizzantz has an interesting post about the problems Sachsen LB (a publicly owned German bank) ran into despite—or perhaps because of—a dashboard full of green lights. The key point is:

People who deliver green lights instead of the underlying numbers have made a decision instead of supporting the decision-making process.

Exactly! Someone, somewhere, has made a decision that hid the key data from executives under the guise of simplifying, and the business suffers as a result.

What does a successful dashboard get right? Some essentials:

• Monitor the right things (attitudes like customer satisfaction as well as financials)
• Sort, group and organise for clarity
• Show the numbers
• Consider trends and relationships

Get all those right and your business should avoid nasty surprises.

More on dashboards in this article[PDF] from Stakeholder magazine.