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: , ,

What is the role of Customer Feedback in the ITIL Framework?

March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

itil frameworkRecently a colleague of mine had an interesting conversation with the service delivery manager for a well known IT company. The discussion turned to customer experience management and the service deliver managers noted that his only “measurements” of the customer experience were, essentially, the ITIL service delivery process.

If you’ve never heard of ITIL you probably don’t need to worry about it. It is a framework of concepts and process for IT systems development and management. If you’re keen to know more have a look on Wikipedia ITIL.

On the other hand, if you use the ITIL Framework in your business the questions you should be asking yourself are;

  1. How do you measure the customer experience and effectiveness of your ITIL processes;
  2. How do you know that system driven call management metrics tell the whole story.
  3. Is the list comprehensive; and
  4. Are you tracking the experience elements that are important to customers or just the ones that are easy to measure?

I’ve talked before on this blog about the need to know not just how you perform in a range of customer experience attributes but also how important a service attribute is to the customer. So the question becomes; if you are using the ITIL Framework how do you determine the right customer experience measurements to use?

The answer to this question is difficult because there is no universal, independent set of customer experience metrics. Each company has a slightly different strategy and so a slightly different set of customer experience metrics come into play. Unfortunately that means you can’t rely on a standard set of metrics.

ITIL v3 is the most recent version of the framework.  It defines;

  1. Incident: the occurrence of a symptom, e.g. an application crash or a network communication link failure;
  2. Problem: the underlying root cause of the symptom. e.g. an application software bug or a product defect or hardware failure; and
  3. Service Request: used to request new or altered services and can included requests for information or change.

Common call management metrics include (by Severity Level):

  • Incident/Problem Response time
  • Incident/Problem Restoration/Resolution time
  • Service Request Resolution time
  • Number of Incidents raised and closed per period
  • Number of Problems raised and closed per period
  • Availability of Systems and/or components per period

While these are a good and interesting set of metrics they do not include some of key customer experience drivers of customer loyalty in the IT industry that we have uncovered over the years.

For instance, while Problem Resolution Time is important we have often identified that “closing the loop” with customers after problem resolution is at least as important and often more important for customers. While it may seem odd that solving the problem may actually be less important to customers than knowing what happened, it is true.

Also, delivering against customer needs, as scored by the customer, is also an important driver of customer loyalty. While incident response time and number of problems per period may be important, those values will be overshadowed if you are not delivering against customer needs.

So from a practical perspective how do you determine whether meeting the technical elements of your SLA equates to delivering a good customer experience? Well you have to ask your customers. No amount of internal review and bottom up analysis, regardless of how logical it is, can substitute for obtaining feedback directly from customers.

Determining what is important to customers is not straightforward but there are a few different techniques that you can use.

Once you have uncovered these key elements you need to embed them in your ITIL framework.  Including the key customer service drivers in Service Level Agreements is the simplest and most direct way to ensure that you are continually focusing on delivering the right customer experience to drive customer loyalty.

To see where you stand, start by reviewing your existing service level agreements to identify how each component explicitly links back to important customer experience elements. Then ask yourself how you know that element to be important to your customers.

If you can’t answer this second question then I suggest that you need to consider collecting information from your customers directly. Properly written and executed customer surveys are the most reliable way of collecting that data.

So in summary:

  • Just because you measure something doesn’t mean it’s important to your customers;
  • If you assume your perception of an issue is the same as your customers, you’re probably wrong; and
  • The best way to resolve the issue is to ask your customers.

Looking to develop your own customer feedback process. Download our free whitepaper; How to implement an effective customer feedback system. It provides a step by step process to guarantee success.

This post was co-written by John Greenwood and reviewed by Vincent Cleary. Thanks for your help John and Vincent.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Experience Management, Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Transactional Net Promoter Score: Which is the best way to collect data?

February 7, 2011 By 6 Comments

With the expanding use of Transactional Net Promoter Score by a range of organisations, there is a growing need to collect large volumes of survey responses with a smaller amount of feedback in each survey.

This is because the standard Transactional NPS (TNPS) survey is just two questions long:

a.     How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?

b.    What is the main reason that you gave that score?

(For more information download our Introduction to Net Promoter Score)

There are currently four main approaches used to survey customers for TNPS:

1. Outbound telephone calls: Using call centre agents to call each (or a selected set of) customer(s) and perform the survey.

2. Inbound, agent diverted calls: At the end of a call the customer is asked if they mind answering a couple of questions on the transaction.  If they agree they are immediately transferred to a contact centre agent to take their feedback.

3. Inbound IVR: Inbound callers are directed to an IVR based survey engine at the end of the call.  The caller answers using the key pad and the system records their qualitative comments.

4. Email/Web surveys: A survey system sends an email to each customer with a link to a web based survey.  The respondent then clicks on the link and fills out the survey on line.

Each has their advantages but which is the best?

Before we can answer that we need to look at the key requirements for a successful Transactional NPS survey process:

1.     Timely: An effective TNPS process is one where the customer is contacted very soon after the service or transactional interaction.  This ensures that the interaction is fresh in the respondent’s mind.

2.     Efficiently gather qualitative feedback: The second of the two standard TNPS questions is qualitative in nature.  It’s role is key as it helps the organisation to understand how to make changes to improve their business.

3.     Drive closed loop action: More so than relationship NPS, transactional NPS is focused on closing the loop to immediate action.  The cycle time for this process should be measured in hours not days or weeks.

4.     Support live data analysis: As TNPS is an on-going survey process the organisation must have access to an on-going data analysis approach that allows it to understand and action the data received in a timely manner.

5.     Deliver high volumes: TNPS is typified by a high volume of customer contacts each and every day.  It is this high volume of customer contact that provides a constant stream of feedback to all employees.

So how does our list of requirements mesh with the different survey approaches?

1. Outbound telephone calls

While they can be timely, the ability to connect with a high volume of customers comes at a high cost to the organisation.  To efficiently contact enough customers also requires relatively advanced contact centre technology and skills.

However, the agent is able to ask customers about their experience and gather a good volume and quality of qualitative feedback.

But, having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.

Outbound calls also suffer from a unique issue in that that respondents may not feel comfortable providing honest feedback to another person from that company, particularly negative feedback about a specific person.

2. Inbound, agent diverted calls

In this approach the timeliness of the process is assured as the customer is connected immediately after the transaction has been performed.    However, of course, there must be an operator available to take the call and the relative cost is high versus the fully automated approaches below.

Forwarding a customer to a holding queue will drive down the score for the survey and reduce the conversion rate.  It is also a poor customer experience in it’s own right.

Also, using this method eliminates the ability to deal with a range of contact or transaction channels in an integrated manner.  It only really works for contact centre transactions.

The ability to “game” this approach is also high with agents able to push happy customers to do the survey, or more often, to neglect to inform unhappy customers about the survey.  This gives the operator the ability to affect their personal NPS.

Having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.

3. Inbound IVR

The ability to be timely is high as the diversion to the IVR is immediate and there is no need to worry about an agent being available.

One key drawback is that the qualitative data is collected as recorded audio information.  In order to turn that data into action it must first be listened to or transcribed.  Both of these data collection approaches are expensive and time consuming, reducing the speed of response and increasing overall cost.

This technique also suffers from the ability of operators to game the system, similar to that noted above.

Anecdotally the survey completion rate is also lower than average as customers don’t want to wait on the phone more than necessary.

Having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.

4. Email/Web surveys

This approach works well in all of the key requirements for a TNPS system.

The survey can be sent out the next day, or even sooner if required.  Customers are familiar with the email survey approach and so response rates are generally high (20-40%).

When gathering qualitative feedback, the customer can tag their comment with the area of the business to which it relates.  This greatly speeds up the analysis process and makes the whole approach much more action oriented.

It can also be rapidly scaled to very large volumes with little extra cost.

So long as the web survey engine has the right tools to rapidly analyse and report on the data in Net Promoter Score terms this can be a very effective approach.

Lastly, this approach can be used across all the channels in an organisation and is not limited to just contact centre transactions.

Summary

As you can see there is more than one way to approach the TPNS data collection question.  Do you have a favourite approach? Leave a comment and let me know why you prefer it.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

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 Feedback Surveys, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: ,

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: , ,
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