Businesses are finally realizing that keeping customers happy is the key to healthy profits and sustained growth. Many are turning to customer satisfaction surveys as a means of getting a glimpse into how customers feel about the interactions with their brand, products, services, and employees. In last week’s post we explored how technical innovations and social media have reshaped the customer service industry. This week we’ll take a closer look at how companies measure customer satisfaction. This post reminds me of an interaction I had recently at Home Depot -- just as I finished paying for my items, the agent at the register took my receipt, circled an 800 number with a orange highlighter, and then told me that if I called and then took a satisfaction survey, I would be entered into a drawing for a $5,000 gift card. While I never called, I thought this was a very effective way for a company to get some immediate feedback on my customer experience. What’s more, since the agent at the register was part of this process, they were motivated to provide excellent service as they likely realized that the interaction would be part of the overall rating.What’s interesting is that survey exploration has moved beyond the retail counter -- earlier today (Feb 24) NJ Transit announced plans to unveil a new performance scorecard as a way of sharing operational performance with its customers. According to NJnet.com, a NJ Transit spokesperson said… “…a system of metrics is currently in development to provide a baseline for measuring NJ Transit’s performance in five areas: customer satisfaction, safety and security, financial health, service accountability and workforce engagement. The baseline will also incorporate information gathered from quarterly customer surveys, the first of which will be posted on njtransit.com in April and distributed to customers throughout the system” (NJnet.com). Companies in both the private and public sectors are now turning to customers for feedback.
In recent years, many of these surveys have moved online as the Internet provided broad reach to customers and was more cost effective that traditional telephone or mail methods. Don’t be surprised if after your next online purchase you receive an e-mail inviting you to take a satisfaction survey. Offline companies are joining in as well. I called a utility company recently and just before we ended the phone call the agent politely asked if it would be okay to transfer me to an automated customer satsifaction survey.
So, now that companies have our feedback, what then? Well, a few things likely happen. First, most surveys are broken into two parts: overall satisfaction and diagnostics. Overall satisfaction measures how satisfied you were with the overall experience, all things considered. The scale typically used is a rating range of poor to excellent. It has been my experience that many companies measure the “top two box” ratings, meaning a rating of very good or excellent. The thought is that either of these ratings strongly correlates to customer satisfaction. Therefore, a rating lower than the top two boxes relates to “poorer experiences” or that which was “less than memorable”. As a result, companies are motivated to create experiences that will likely result in a top two box rating. The second part of the survey is all about the “whys”. A top two box rating unto itself is far less significant if you don’t understand what aspect of the customer’s experience influenced the rating. Follow up questions are used to better understand the overall rating.These questions try to get at the specifics such as, “how friendly was the employee”, “how easy was the product to use”, etc.
Let’s take a very simple example of how these measures work in concert with each other: we receive a sample of 100 survey responses. Of the 100 responses, 30 of the respondents rate “overall satisfaction” as either very good or excellent. So our top two box score is 30 (30/100). A score of 30 unto itself does not tell the whole story, meaning why were so many customers dissatisfied. As a result, we will need to look one level lower in the responses. When we look closer at the 70 respondents who rated overall satisfaction lower than very good or excellent, we see that 63 customers rated our product “poor” on the “easy to use" question. If this were the only information that we had, we might conclude that product “ease of use” has a significant impact on the overall perception of customer satisfaction. That being said, the data would motivate us to go back to the drawing board to find ways to make our product easier to use.
Let’s say that one month later we did just that – we made a few product tweaks that we think made the product easier to use. So what now? We survey again. And since this is our story, we’ll have a happy ending. The second survey shows a top two box score of 100, meaning everyone surveyed scored the level of overall satisfaction as either very good or excellent. And not surprising, the score for “ease of use” was also 100. While our story was intentionally exaggerated, the concepts are likely similar to how businesses are using feedback to improve your customer experiences.
According to Forrester Research, measuring the right things is critical to research success. Forrester believes “…[t]he keys to a successful satisfaction study include measuring what is important to customers, segmenting customers by their intrinsic value to your business, and including some key driver questions that we detail. Done correctly, a satisfaction study will not only tell you how satisfied your customers are, but how such satisfaction ties to your bottom line, and how much effort you should put into trying to raise your satisfaction scores” (Bortner, B., 2008). As customers, through the use of surveys, we now have an opportunity to influence the design of products and services in ways that produce better experiences for all. Think about this the next time you’re invited to take a satisfaction survey.
Reference:
Bortner, B. (2008). Forrester on Why Customer Sat Studies Fail http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/best_practices_why_customer_satisfaction_studies_fail/q/id/45043/t/2
NJnet.com, NJ Transit To Unveil Online Performance “Scorecard” Read more: http://njtoday.net/2011/02/24/nj-transit-to-unveil-online-performance-%e2%80%9cscorecard%e2%80%9d/#ixzz1EvmUWqxX
4 comments:
I wholeheartedly agree, to be successful in business you must have a good product and exceptional service to ensure repeat business and customer loyalty. Having satisfied customers is vital for growth becasue they will recommend your business to others.
Surveys certainly are becoming integral to a company's image and relationship with consumers. In turn, they are also used as a method to measure employee performance and often have a direct impact upon the employee's ability to advance within in the company or retain their current position. Surveys remind us to be cognizant of our conduct when interacting with others as we play either the role of the employee or the customer.
Anon3: As a long-time Customer Service professional, I see little reason for hope in most companies regarding customer service, 3-D or virtual. My experience is that large, multi-national companies tend toward dollar-squeezing minimalism: the cheapest way to do the least that keeps customers from bailing or posting nasty things about the company online. That approach has led to off-shore, cookie-cutter, follow-the-process-no-matter-what, tech support at the consumer product level, which is frustrating to the customer. But consumer-product customers are not that important to the multi-national. They are focused on the Corporate customer, who gets an entirely different level of support. Because they potentiall or actually spend millions with the Multi-national Corp, their hands are held tenderly, and highly-paid professionals with a string of certifications behind their names do house calls and do the work for them that their own tech departments (if they had not laid most of them off) should have been able to do.
Smaller companies don't have the patience or awareness for customer service; for start-ups, it's considered a cost-generating activitiy rather than a customer loyalty builder. An ever-shrinking short-term focus leads to decision-makers looking for quick "fixes" rather than nurturing & growing a solid customer base. Customers see that low prices and mediocre service or quality are often interchageable between and among companies. Companies need to consider the benefits of a longer-term vision, one that includes THEIR loyalty to quality goods & services, to customers, to employees. If CEOs and Boards of Directors fail to see value in long-term planning and structures, in long-term relationships, they risk the life-spans of their companies being broken up and sold in pieces to serve the shareholders' ever-dissatisfied hunger.
This post gave me a great idea that will help in improving and measuring the customer experience. I do value all your suggestions and consider all these points.
enhancing customer experience
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