Close the customer feedback loop but don’t be a Blocker

June 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Closing the customer feedback loop by telling your customers what you heard and what is changing as a consequence, is a very important part of the process but you have to do it in a way that adds value.

I saw this on my local bus the other day.  In some ways it was great to see the bus company trying to close the customer feedback process.  However, they haven’t really nailed the idea yet.

The white text says:

These beasts block you from getting off. You flatten like a stamp to get past but then you have to say ‘excuse me’ to them.  You told us this really bugs you.

(As an aside what’s the harm in having to say ‘excuse me?’)

Okay so the bus company is feeding back to its customers about a customer satisfaction issue and that issue is mostly out of their control.  The problem is that it’s a “so what” piece of feedback.  It says they heard what the customers said but the response is just not useful.

I can see that in some sense they are trying to educate the “blockers” that their behaviour is not wanted but this doesn’t seem like an effective approach to do that, to me at least.

To maximise the value that you generate from your customer feedback process you should always close the loop with your customers.  That communications does not always have to be about how you’re correcting the problem but it does need to address the areas that are under your control or at least appear to be under your control.

There will be some feedback that you can action quickly, some that will take some time and some that you just can’t change: but you need to let your customers know that you’ve heard them.

An example of the last one: when performing customer research in the insurance industry you often receive a complaint that “if I don’t use my insurance in the year [i.e. claim] I should get a refund of the fee less an administration charge”.   Of course, this comment indicates a pretty deep misunderstanding of how insurance works. The response to this comment should not be to ignore it but can be to subtly educate your customers about how insurance works through your ongoing customer contact.

Closing the loop in this way confirms the tacit agreement you have with the person providing the feedback: I’ll tell you what I think if you try to fix it.  If you don’t abide by your side of the bargain, try to fix it, then customers are less and less likely to provide you the feedback you need to improve your business.

On the other hand if you do use the information to improve your business your customers will be more likely to help you improve in the future, and your business will go from strength to strength.  A win/win situation.

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

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process, Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Six issues that will cause your customer feedback process to fail long term

May 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You’re all fired up to implement a new customer feedback process, secure in the knowledge that it will be the best your company has ever seen.

However, it you want it to succeed long term you need to make sure that you overcome cover all six of these reasons that customer feedback processes fail long term.

Lack of Senior Management buy-in

Without senior management buy-in to the customer feedback process, not just the collection of data but the whole process, adoption will be limited and eventually fail.

When starting out on the customer feedback journey it’s okay to rely on a little faith based support from senior  management.  However, that support must actually exist.  If senior management are not sure or give the process lip service support then you will fail to gain long term traction.

Because hard ROI figures are so difficult to find in the early days of the program you should be ready with case studies of the impact that a good customer feedback process has had for other companies.

Not thinking through the organisational change

When implementing a customer feedback process, adoption and impact can be substantially improved through the implementation of best practice organisation structures.

Elements such as a well thought out Governance process, the existence of Steering committees, properly documented service recovery processes, etc. will increase the impact of implementing the process and generate a much better overall business benefit.

Not linking feedback to business success

Explicitly linking customer feedback process to business success demonstrates to senior management how the investment in data collection and action is driving up overall company value.  If this linkage is not created early in the process then budget for the implementation can quickly come under pressure.

Of course one of the better ways to create this linkage is to use Net Promoter Score as one of the core metrics for the process.  NPS has been shown to link to long term revenue growth.  What’s more there are some clear ways to link NPS to business value.  These become invaluable when you need to demonstrate the return on investment for your program.

Not aligning KPI Targets

As the old saying goes “what gets measured gets done”.  As you roll-out your new process you need to ensure that it is included in staff KPIs, as and where appropriate.

That is not to say that you just add the customer feedback KPI willy nilly to everyone’s objectives.  The roll-out needs to be done carefully to ensure that people trust the numbers and understand how to change them.

Siloed approach to implementation

Customer feedback action is not the responsibility of one department.  The best practice approach to customer feedback implementation is a cross functional management team where the roll of the customer feedback team is to facilitate and support the other departments.

The customer feedback team are the enablers of process within the organisation but they are not soley responsible for success.

Operational teams then use the data and analysis provided by the NPS team to drive change in their part of the organisation.

Thinking of it as a project not a process

Customer feedback is not a project to be completed but a due date; it is instead an approach to doing business.  Once the data collection systems have been created the organisation needs to utilise the customer feedback gathered long term to improve the business.

Want to learn more about how to implement an effective customer feedback system?  Download our free 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 Process, Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Customer Feedback: How not to ask a question

April 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

Here is another quick example of a problem that we often see in customer feedback surveys.

In this case the question has been worded in a way that may change the way the respondent will answer.

By prefacing the question (“Overall how satisfied…”) with the pejorative statement “… is continually striving to achieve 5-STAR customer satisfaction…” the company has subtly altered the respondents feeling towards their experience.

This could go either way:

1.       Increase expectations: some people will read the question and their expectations will rise, depressing the score they give: “well they were going for 5-star and that was only 3 star.”

2.       Increase the score: other people will subtly increase their score because they don’t want to disappoint the company by marking them down.

The problem is that you will never really know the overall affect.

The real pity is that you can just eliminate the first sentence and the question still makes sense – there is no need for that first sentence.

Have a look at your customer survey now.  Have you put in any extra wording that prejudices the feedback from your customers?

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Surveys for Customer Satisfaction: Do you make these mistakes?

April 11, 2011 By 3 Comments

Because I’m in the industry I, maybe like you, take all the customer feedback surveys that I can, to see what organisations are doing, what works and what we should avoid doing.

Rather than keep this information to myself I’ve decided to post the reviews here.  In this series I’ll review a survey that I’ve received and deconstruct it.

For the most part I’ll delete the company name.  I don’t see any need to “name and shame” organisations who are at least trying to collect customer feedback.  Most often it is their advisors (research providers and related companies) that are letting them down.  These are the organisations that are paid to know the best practices but depressingly often don’t.

Background

I contacted our web-hosting company a few days ago on a small issue.

The service was for the most part prompt (although I spent a little too much time on hold), accurate, and good natured.  All in all I was happy.

Survey Good Points

  1. The survey was delivered the next day:  Good transactional survey practice is to get feedback from people soon after an interaction so this was done just right.
  2. It was short: the survey itself was only four questions, plus a sevice recovery question.  That it was short was good, that the questions could have been better (see below) was not.

Could improve points

The survey invite was not personalised

Rather than have my name at the top of the survey there was a generic: “Thank you for contacting…”  They know my email address so a little first name personalisation would not be that hard.

The sign-off came from the very personal “Customer Service – Leadership Team”

Hey, we all know that these emails are automated but if you put a (real) person’s name at the bottom of the email then staff and customers will feel much more strongly that the feedback will be used, i.e. the buck stops with signatory.

Question “1.  As you interacted with us last month, how would you rate our Customer Service Support?”

Fine, but I would go with the Net Promoter Score question.

Question “2. How proficient was the consultant who assisted you?”: Well Above Standards to Well Below Standards

Hmmm… not really sure how to answer that.

Do you mean my standards or your standards?  Even the word “proficient” is difficult in this circumstance.

Questions “3. Purpose of your request?”

This is one of my pet peeves with surveys: don’t ask what the customer has a right to expect that you already know.

The company obviously has the ability to extract my email details from their systems.  Why couldn’t they also extract the reason code for the call, as entered by the agent?

Not only is this a negative for the customer survey experience but if they don’t ask this question they could ask a more important question and still keep the survey short.

Question “4  Please select one of the following to provide feedback on the highest priority area for us to improve our service delivery”

Customers have great difficulty in objectively determining what is important in the customer experience.  Asking them in a simple “select one” question is almost never reliable.  Plus you’ve used up another question spot that you could get more value from.

Question 5 “If you feel that your enquiry is unresolved with Company X, please provide us with your contact information, and one of our senior representatives will contact you to investigate and resolve.”

This is a good effort to start the service recovery process.

But again why are you asking me my name, phone, email (hey you just used that to contact me), etc ,etc.

I may be labouring the point but don’t ask what your customers have a right to expect you to know.  This is asking the customer to invest their time to do what you are too lazy to do.

What’s missing: any sort of qualitative feedback.

All of these quantitative questions are great and make for lots of cool charts.  They can tell you WHAT needs to change but they don’t help you to understand HOW to change.

Only qualitative questions (or lots of quantitative questions) can do that effectively.

My approach would be to replace questions 3 and 4 with “So tell us the most important reason that gave us that score.”  Then at least you would have some powerful statements in the customer’s own words to drive change in the organisation.

Have you seen a good or bad example of a survey recently?  Contact me via the comment box below and we can deconstruct it for everyone else to learn from.

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: , ,

New stats: Australian Marketers concerned most about process

April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Aprimo is currently touring Australia presenting to marketers far and wide about “The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution”.

I attended the 29 March 2011 event in Sydney (disclosure Genroe is an Aprimo Field Partner) at which Aprimo CMO Lisa Arthur presented the organisation’s “10 Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution”.  Overall a good presentation and interesting content.

Also interesting were the results from the impromptu polls that Lisa performed on the assembled marketers.  Using hand held response devices, Lisa asked questions and gathered live data for review by the audience.

So what did we learn from an audience of 80 or so Australian marketers, albeit with a few vendors and consultants thrown in?

Australian marketers are most concerned about process.

When asked “What do you think is your weakest area” the results were:

More than 50% considered that their weakest area was “process” dwarfing Technology and People.  Unfortunately Lisa did not gather additional feedback on exactly which aspect of process was of most concern.  I suspect that it was less about the marketing process in general and more about driving repeatability and automation from their technology solutions and business.

The response did leave me wondering what marketers were doing to actively drive process deeper into their day to day operating models.

Channel / Campaign integration competes with Data and Analytics and Process for marketing integration focus.

When asked about the key areas of marketing integration this year, those in the room called it a close race between Channel/Campaign, Data and Analytics and Process.

We see the process area raise its head but there are two other big issues in marketing integration.

With the proliferation of channels and the desire to create integrated campaigns I think marketers are having trouble converting technology capabilities into real world implementation.  The idea of integrated channels and campaigns is a good one.  The technology (like Aprimo) can support it.  The issue is that designing the strategy and implementing the strategy are difficult.

Data and Analytics suffers from similar issues.  The ability for the technology to capture and report on what is happening is outstripping the ability for most companies to interpret and act on the information.

Doing more with less is still a key marketing driver.

Yes, the perennial drive to reduce costs is still there but competing for equal second place are Accountability/Measurement and Driving Usable Insight.  I suggest that Driving Usable Instight is the same topic as Data and Analytics above – we have access to plenty of data but lack the skills and time to drive actionable insight from that data.

Potentially the need for Accountability/measurement is being driven from doing more with less.  Generally if you can prove a good ROI from a project (be it in Marketing, Operations or any other area of the business) then management will give you more budget to invest.

Marketing’s key metric is … Customer Satisfaction

Now this was a real surprise.  A good surprise but a surprise none the less.  Almost as shocking was the drop of Brand and Brand recall to third place behind Lead Related Metrics.

It is generally difficult for marketers to act directly on Customer Satisfaction becuase they are not, in general, a direct part of the supply chain.  This results implies a substantial shift in organisations to focus on customer satisfaction. This can only be a good thing if it is true.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Case Studies and Statisitics, Customer Feedback Surveys, Marketing Automation Tagged With: , ,
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