Mystery shopping or Transactional surveys: Which is better?

January 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Mystery shopping has been with us for many years but recently a new way to measure the customer experience has become popular: transactional customer surveys.

Transactional surveys, such as transactional Net Promoter Score surveys, have only become practical in the last few years.  This style of survey collects customer views and perceptions in a short survey instrument just after the customer has passed through a key business touch-point.

Until recently it was more difficult perform transactional surveys for several reasons:

1.      Knowing when a customer accessed a touch point was difficult.  Now, almost every interaction (call centre, web, email, invoicing, payment, etc) with a company is logged via some type of back end CRM system.  Generating an outbound customer survey in reaction to a customer interaction is now much easier.

2.      Collecting survey feedback was expensive.  The widespread consumer acceptance of email/web based surveys has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the completion rate (when designed correctly) of customer feedback surveys.  Gone are the days of expensive, and low completion rate, mail/paper surveys which need additional data entry costs.

3.      Collating and using feedback in real-time was difficult.  Having the data is all well and good but making use of it requires that you be able to analyse and interpret the data quickly. Software as a Service platforms such as CustomerGauge (disclaimer – we re-sell this product) have now made real time analysis and action easy.

Now that transactional customer surveys are easy to implement does it spell the end of mystery shopping?  Not necessarily, as they perform different functions.

Put simply mystery shopping is about checking that a task is being done right and transactional surveys are about doing the right thing.

A mystery shopper will perform a test transaction with a company and compare actually how it was performed with how it was designed to be performed.  For each element of the interaction there will be a tick or cross: did they answer the call in the approved manner, did they sign off with “thank you for calling company x”, etc.

This is an audit process and does not take into account whether the process is “good” from a customer perspective.

On other hand a transactional customer survey gathers feedback on the customer perception of the interaction and lets you know if you are doing the right things.

Working together the two approaches make sure that you know the right thing to do and that you are actually doing it.

Want to learn more about how to implement an effective customer feedback system?  Download our report.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Surveys, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: , ,

Are you stuck on the delight the customer merry-go-round?

September 19, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’ve always considered that the delight the customer approach to customer loyalty and retention was a little misguided.  It’s not so much that a delighted customer is not a good thing to have.  It is.  We’ve all heard stories of the sales rep who goes above and beyond the call of duty and generates a very loyal customer.

The problem is how to put this idea into a repeatable process for the organisation.  Exhorting staff to delight the customer is not a very repeatable nor trackable process.

So I was delighted, no pun intended, when “Stop trying to delight your customers” was published by the Harvard Business Review.  The authors have investigated what keeps a customer and have discovered that making it easy for customers builds more loyalty than delighting them.  This resonated with me and probably anyone else who walks up to their “usual” coffee shop knowing that the guy or gal behind the counter knows your order and has already started making it.

In particular the authors identified two critical findings in their paper:

“delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort-the work they must do to get their problem solved-does.”

“acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.”

The other key item for me was:

“Twenty percent of the “satisfied” customers in our study said they intended to leave the company in question; 28% of the “dissatisfied” customers intended to stay.

To paraphrase that: Customer Satisfaction <> Customer Loyalty.  We’ve heard this before but it bears repeating.

Dixon et al. go on to present some good point solutions to typical company problems and suggest a new metric: Customer Effort Score.   It was here, however, that my preferences diverged from the authors.  Transactional Net Promoter Score seems, to me, to be the best approach to implementing “make it easy” in an ongoing process applicable to all businesses.

Transactional Net Promoter Score executes the NPS question (see our free “Introduction to Net Promoter Score” for more information) at key customer touch points.  Performed in this way it is an excellent diagnostic for the customer service experience and particularly “making it easy” for customers.

To use Transactional NPS in this situation you would:

  1. Execute an NPS Survey: execute an NPS survey after each transaction at a significant customer touch point.  The survey can be performed via email or outbound call but email is much lower cost.
  2. Implement Service Recovery: where a customer scores the organisation low on the “would recommend” question, provide the customer with the option to have someone call them back to initiate service recovery.
  3. Collate and review the qualitative data: The second question in the NPS survey should be something like: “What is the most important reason for giving us that score”.  This is where you will find the key issues that customers are facing.
  4. Root cause analysis: Root cause analysis using the qualitative data from the second question as the starting point will help you find the places in your organisation where you are making it hard for customers. One of your goals should be to categorise this qualitative data into themes.  That will make it easier to rank the issues and perform the root cause analysis.  You can wait until you have enough survey data to create your themes.  Or use the techniques suggested in this post “Determining what might be important to a customer”.
  5. Make changes: Once you understand the root causes you should look to make changes in your organisation to eliminate problems and make it easy for customers.

This process can be data and reporting intensive but there are some ways to automate it, see Automating Transaction Net Promoter Score Data Collection.

In this case a specialist NPS application with the ability to link to your customer systems is a good approach.  These systems provide much of the reporting and analysis functionality straight out of the box, streamlining implementation.

So trying to delight the customer is a nice goal but making it easy for them is more likely to deliver serious improvements in customer value.  If you agree with the authors on that, then Transactional NPS may be a good way to collect the data that you need to make changes in your business.

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process, Customer Loyalty Management, General, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: , ,

Is this the wrong way to use social media as a service channel?

July 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It is clear that leading brands are using Twitter and other social media channels to deliver reactive service to their customers.

Probably the best known of these is BestBuy with their @twelpforce Twitter account.  Staff at the computer chain use their Twitter accounts to answer questions from customers all over the country.

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/case_bestbuy

Less well known, outside Australia, is the use that Telstra are also making of Twitter to “reach out” to customers who voice concerns or issues with Telstra products via their personal Twitter accounts.

But are the hotels featured in this Wall Street Journal article (‘I Hate My Room,’ The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade!) taking things one step too far?  In summary, the story discusses how hotel chains are listening on Twitter to pick up service issues that their customer are having.  Then they are diving in to help resolve the customer’s problem.  Nothing wrong here.

It’s the next step that I start to wonder about.  It seems that the number of followers a person has on Twitter may be determining the sort of response that the hotel provides.  If you have a lot of followers then you seem more likely to get room upgrades and free cocktails.

This leaves me questioning two things:

Why are you training your most visible customers to complain?

Don’t get me wrong having an open ear to customer complaints is a great way to hear what is going wrong in your organisation and fix it.  However, if you start to train your customers that for every negative Tweet that they send they receive a positive reward then you’re going to breed an army of people complaining long and hard about every little thing, real and imagined.

And you know that the high volume “road warriors” are going to learn this faster than anyone.  It won’t be long before you’re spending all of your time running around giving everybody on Twitter, a room upgrade.  Which brings me to my second question:

Is this a zero sum game?

This seems to me like the start of a new zero sum game, similar to the one the airlines embarked on when they invented the Frequent Flyer program.  If you give everyone who complains a room upgrade, then pretty soon everyone is complaining and you have to give everyone a room upgrade, and so do all of your competitors.

Then you’re back to where you started because someone still has to get the room by the air conditioner.

I don’t think that the solution to this issue is to ignore the new service channel.  Using Twitter as a service input and customer resolution channel is a great idea and has worked really well for organisations that have embraced it.

Perhaps the issue is that organisations are focusing too much on surprise and delight in an effort to drive customer loyalty rather than the basics of just solving customer problems.  This new Harvard Business Review article (Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers) has a good take on the issue.  It shows new research that customer loyalty is driven more by solving customer problems quickly and accurately, rather than spending time trying to surprise and delight customers.

Of course, social media can be used in very productive ways to improve customer loyalty and generate real company value.  This social media training course provides a starting point for just that.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Social Media Tagged With: ,

Do you implement all 7 enablers of good customer service?

May 2, 2010 By 2 Comments

Delivering good customer service has gone from a nice to have to a core deliverable in the past 10 years.  Making sure that your organisation can deliver excellent customers service requires a good alignment of all the key customer service enablers.

1. Measure your customer service performance

The old maxim that “what gets measured get done” is true here as it is everywhere else.  Make sure that you are measuring your level of customer service.  While “Customer Satisfaction” has been around for a long time there are more effective tools now such as Net Promoter Score.  Investigate them and use them in your business.

While you’re at it don’t just measure outcomes, also measure customer service drivers: what are the service attributes that customers care the most about.  Then you can design your service process to target those key areas more effectively.

2. Staff must know how to deliver good service

Delivering good customer service is a skill that can be learned just like any other and you should not expect your staff to “just know” how to do it.  Make sure that you invest in service skills training for your staff.  They need to know, for example:

  • What good customer service is;
  • How to listen to and question customers appropriately;
  • How to handle difficult customer situations;
  • Appropriate ways to build customer rapport;

You wouldn’t expect your staff to know how to use a new computer system without training; why should you expect them to know how to deliver good customer service without training.

3. Staff know the organisation’s service goals

Having been trained in delivering good customer service, staff need to know the customer service goals of the organisations.  This can include the hard measures that you might have in your contact center but it should also include the softer and more general service goals for your organisation.

Often these goals will be an outcome of the organisation’s strategic plan and will be embodied at a high level in the balanced scorecard or other strategic document.

Without knowing the goals of organisation staff will be in the dark on the day to day actions that they should be taking to move the company along that journey.

4. Staff understand customer expectations

Delivering just beyond customer expectations is a critical element of delivering good customer service but the trick is in knowing your customer’s expectations.  Those expectations have often been set by other parts of your organisation so understanding those expectations is critical.

In a complex service business those expectations can be set in a range of ways:

  • Sales staff promises
  • Service contract wording
  • Service level agreements
  • etc

You need to provide your service staff with details of those expectations so that they can deliver beyond them.

If you deal in a customisable service offerings (professional services, computer support, etc) you need to standardise those offerings as much as possible and then provide a way for service staff to easily access the difference by customer.

5. The company supports service goals with appropriate resources

Even with the best will in the world you cannot deliver good service without appropriate resources.

Staffing

This is a simple: do you have enough staff to deliver what you have promised to deliver.  If you do not have an appropriate number of staff you will forever be behind the eight ball.

As a corollary to this point you also need a robust way to determine if you have enough staff.  Tools and processes to determine your staff loading are key to understanding if you have the correct number of staff.

Tools

It is true that you can run an entire service operations on 4×6 index cards but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.

Make sure that your staff have the service process tools such as help desk or CRM software to deliver the required services.

However, also make sure that they have the right business tools: analysis software, testing tools, etc to get the job done.

Processes

Service delivery needs to have a process just like any other manufacturing process.  It needs to be formalised, defined and documented.  Without good processes you leave your organisation open to all sorts of issues including:

  • Staff wasting time through inefficient service delivery
  • Loss of corporate memory when a key staff member leaves
  • Dropping the ball during a service hand-off.

6. Positive company culture

Your staff have to want to provide good service and management has to support them in that goal.  It is true that most staff want to do the right thing by the company and the customer.  So make sure that you don’t get in their way.  Generate a positive service culture for the company by making a good example of people in the organisation who provide excellent customer service.

7. Staff are empowered to make changes to support service goals

Lastly, if you think you know it all about delivering the best customer service you’re wrong.  No-one knows everything, has had every interaction or is constantly in touch with all of the key customers.  Plus, decades of IT system implementation has automated the predictable in many organisations, making the unforeseen and unexpected service requirement the most likely to confront your people. Make sure that your staff know and understand that they are empowered to drive change in your service delivery operations.

Customer needs and expectations are constantly evolving and the only way that you can deliver great customer service in the long term is to continually evolve with those expectations.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Experience Management, Customer Strategy Tagged With: