Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

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?

Thinking short term

How many of you watched Undercover Boss on Channel 4 last night? I was expecting something fairly insipid and dull, but it actually turned out to be rather insightful. For the first episode we were following the back to the floor adventures of the new Sales and Marketing Director of "Park Resorts", a caravan holiday company.

There was lots of familiar stuff about the gulf between senior management perceptions and what's actually happening on the ground. A gulf, of course, that can be removed by good research! But the main takeaway, I thought, was that the problems which are too expensive to fix can be solved, with imagination and courage.

The programme focused on the contrast between the cleaning staff at the Norfolk resort, unengaged and poorly motivated minimum-wage slaves whose every piece of work had to be checked, with those at the Isle of Wight resort, paid twice as much and trusted and empowered to need far less checking up on. The interesting part was not that the better-motivated staff did better work, but that they were paid far more without increasing the total wage bill. How? Because they need less supervision, the company needs fewer supervisors...which adds up to a significant wage saving.

It's hard to think of a better example of how short-term cost-cutting can lead to higher long-term costs, as well as all the damage that comes from poor work that means customer dissatisfaction. The message? Get the right staff, give them the training and support they need, motivate them and then TRUST them. Staff are happier, customers are happier, and the company makes more money.

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.

What could your staff be telling you?

Great post by Phil Dourado on the importance of capturing information from your front line staff (call centre agents and so on) about what customers are saying to them.

Allowing this kind of informal "data" to flow, without giving undue prominence to anecdote, can be tricky. It's important that you don't let staff opinions count for more than hard data. But closing your ears to this potential goldmine of customer feedback would be as silly as ignoring the possibilities offered by the web and social media.

You are monitoring the web, blogs and Twitter for comments about you, aren't you?

The downside of new tech - hearing your own voice

We're experimenting with a new piece of software, Adobe Presenter, which allows us to put presentations online with a voice-over—essentially you can talk through a presentation as if you were delivering it normally, except no one can see you.

After some wrestling with the technology—setting up microphones, crying when it crashed for the seventh time—I finally managed to commit 14 minutes of carefully prepared thoughts about Customer Emotions to hard drive.

The result is great, except for one thing—I have to listen to the sound of my own voice. Shudder. Anyway, judge for yourself:

This one is a teaser for our new half-day briefing sponsored by Stakeholder Satisfaction.

If it goes down well, we'll be doing more of these in the future. It's an ideal way to share 10 or 15 minutes worth of our ideas without trying to organise a full course. Let us know what you think. Maybe in time I'll get used to the sound of my own voice?

Words, words, words

A perennial problem for researchers is how to deal with the reams of verbatim customer comments that a useful survey produces. We can sort, group and code; but ultimately the only real way to get to grips with them is to read them.

By and large this is a good thing, but when it comes to presentation it's much less clear what to do. We might select a few "juicy" quotes to illustrate a particular point. We might even play audio clips or use "VoxPops", which are certainly compelling. But there's no clear way to present a visual summary of customer (or employee) comments.

I think we should consider tools like the image above, a "Wordle" of all the posts from this blog, as a way to point the audience towards the benefits of reading the comments for themselves.

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.

Musicians and great customer satisfaction

One of the stars of Outliers, the bestselling book from Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker, is a psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson, who did an investigation of three different groups of violin students: the unquestioned stars, those who were good but not great, and those who had no hope of becoming professional musicians.

 

What separated the stars from everyone else? It wasn't raw talent, Ericsson concluded (every student had huge talent.) It was sheer persistence--those who practiced harder did better, and those who practiced insanely hard became wildly successful.

Gladwell dubs this phenomenon the "10,000-hour rule." Becoming great at anything--sports, science, business--requires ten years of practice and 1,000 hours of practice per year. "Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness," he argues.

 

So let’s do some maths;

Greatness takes 10 years to achieve

Greatness = 10,000 hours over 10 years

Greatness = 1000 hours per year

Greatness (assuming 4 weeks holiday per year) = 20.8 hours per week.

 

So if we work 40 hours a week on average, can we achieve great customer satisfaction in 5 years?

 

Social media - talking with customers, not at them

Many companies still seem unsure how or why they should be using the new tools offered by “social media” in their relationships with customers. The web is no longer a static, one way, channel. Instead of broadcasting a message to customers and hoping they hear it, we now see conversations being built between organisations (or rather their staff) and customers.

We've moved from a web that was little different to print—static reams of content updated once in a blue moon—to one of rapid bursts and interaction. The inevitable result is that organisations have lost control of the conversation, and the trick of social media is to embrace that loss of control. Why? Because it gives you an unprecedented opportunity to listen to customers and engage directly with them, one human being to another.

Sadly, many organisations listen to all this, nod sagely, and think to themselves “great, how do we fake this authentic communication?”. You can't, at least not for long. If you try to use the new tools as just another way to bombard customers with your ad messages then you're missing out on a great opportunity. It's worth looking at the people and companies who are popular on Twitter, to see what they get right.

Stephen Fry is probably the leading Brit on Twitter, and for good reason. Why? Because he understands that what is new and interesting about Twitter is the opportunity to build conversations with his fans.

Innocent Drinks can't compete with Fry in terms of numbers of followers, but then they are a company rather than an avuncular national treasure. Their "tweets" are a good model for unmoderated, real, conversations between customers and employees. Particularly interesting to see how they handle potentially unpopular decisions like the recent Coca Cola investment.

Aleksandr Orlov is doing very well for a fictional meerkat. He's a good example of how you can fake it, at least for a little while. On the other hand that tells you more about the success of a surprisingly joined-up advertising campaign than it does about customer engagement with comparethemarket.com.

Richard Branson, sadly, is an example of how not to do it. Despite having a lot of followers, Branson is treating Twitter as a channel to push news stories and events on his agenda, not to build conversations with customers.

So the secret is to let go, and allow your staff to have real conversations with customers. Organisations that embrace this will be jumping on board the cluetrain, allowing employees throughout their organisation to engage in natural conversations with customers through Twitter, blogging, forums and so on. My favourite soundbite from our client conference was from Graham Parker-Gore of VW Group (he was quoting someone else but I forget who!):

“Sacrifice perfection of message for honest communication”

This is the cluetrain philosophy in a nutshell.

The alternative is to try in vain to keep control over everything that is said about you. Delete any negative comments on your blogs or forums, edit Wikipedia articles to remove anything you'd rather people didn't know, pretend to be enthusiastic customers, pay professional fake customers to post positive things about your products, sue anyone who uses your name in a website (positive or negative) and allow no one but the marketing department to talk to the outside world.

The one thing we know for sure is that what worked in the past won't work in the future. Companies that behave like this are as clueless about the web as the music industry, destroying themselves in a desperate bid to protect their business because they just don't get it.