We’ve probably all heard them–stories of sub-optimal customer service encounters.

Here’s one from a friend that happened today.

My friend needed to have a prescription filled. The doctor’s office asked where she wanted the script sent and my friend said CVS. National brand; convenient location; should be good service, right? She had not used CVS before and thus was not in their system.

When she arrived several hours later to pick up the script, she waited in line, and presented her both her health insurance and credit card. The clerk checked the script and told my friend that the paperwork needed to be redone because they now had the insurance information. The clerk asked my friend to wait while this was done.

My friend heard her name called and she presented herself at the counter. Now, what would any customer expect at this point? To finish the transaction, of course. Run the credit card and leave. Instead, my friend told that she would have to return to the end of the line and wait again for service. She protested mildly (didn’t I already wait in line; isn’t it customary to serve me now since I had already waited?), but the clerk insisted. That’s the way we do it here!

Several retorts present themselves: Oh, sorry Comrade. I thought we were in the United States, not the Soviet Union. Or turning to the waiting line and announcing, “I am a mystery shopper for CVS and this store just flunked!” Or (my favorite), “No thanks, I’ll go somewhere that wants my business.”

As market researchers, we must ask ourselves whether our customer satisfaction measurement system is capturing such incidents. I postulate that many do not. The perfunctory ratings on courtesy, friendliness, professionalism, and the like, an overall satisfaction rating and done.

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CVS kissed a potential customer goodbye. Poof! Just like that. With some dozen or more pharmacies within walking distance of one another there is no reason for anyone to tolerate poor quality service.

Will they know it? More saliently, would they learn of such incidents through market research?

More to follow.

Comments welcome!

Dr. Bob

Okay, time for a little rant!

As a market researcher, I believe in and have seen demonstrated empirically over and over the power of market research in providing critical input to management issues. And I have participated in the development and deployment of customer satisfaction research and analysis for a number of years now.

But sometimes market research is misused as a proxy for common sense.

How’s that, Dr. Bob, you ask?

Well, over the weekend, I had reason to call the insurer of my cell phone to file a claim. My beloved Droid simply died.

I had been to the insurer’s website, filed a claim, only to be told that I was not covered.

I then looked at my cell carrier’s bills to make certain that, yes indeed, I was paying a monthly fee for insurance coverage with said insurance carrier. I was.

So I called the cell service provider. Yes, they assured me, I was covered and helpfully gave me the toll-free number to call.

I did.

And I waited, on hold. I don’t know how long. Now, sitting on hold is annoying enough, especially when the information provided on the website (I was not covered) was patently false.

Then………………..the zinger.

On hold, I am treated to the repetition of two messages, every 30 seconds (you have the time and awareness to measure such items while you’re on hold).

Message number one: Don’t want to wait on hold? Visit our website for prompt and fast service.

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? Well, I’m calling because of a problem with the website. As Homer would say, “Do’oh!

Message number two: We are experiencing a heavy call volume. We value your time and thank you for your patience.

Customer service management, here’s a news flash. Telling customers waiting on hold that you value their time while you are patently demonstrating to them with every passing message, repeated ad nauseum, you do NOT value their time, royally pisses off customers.

You are increasing customer dissatisfaction with every passing minute. Then you have the hutzpa to tell me how much concern you have that you are wasting my time.

At least have the decency to be honest: play a clip from a very old Saturday Night Live commercial that spoofed AT&T ads before the bohemoth had any competition: “We don’t care; We don’t have to.”

How do you think I responded to their customer satisfaction survey I encountered at the end of my call? Gee, I wonder.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

P.S. Actually, the customer satisfaction survey only asked about the agent’s performance once I reached them. Yet another demonstration of totally missing the mark. And how many agents are receiving bad marks because customers are really upset about sitting on hold interminably but have no way to register or vent their anger except by giving the agent a poor mark? Hmmmmmmmmm……………………………………..

As researchers, we tend to talk statistics. Even if we are cautious in our use of statistical jargon, we certainly tend to rely on statistics to draw our conclusions.

While every b-school grad, and many managers, has been schooled in stats, stats are not the common language of business, especially not the   c-suite. Those who truly run the business, those who make the decisions, speak the language of the bottom line, the financial bottom line that is.

Researchers, and marketers in general, are more comfortable with the lingo of marketing and statistics. Unfortunately, I have observed, and early in my career was frequently guilty of myself, that market researchers can easily assume that it is enough to present the statistics a market research study had generated. Certainly, management would get it. After all, they were………management. I made the connections of how the research results related to the customers, to the business. Surely, they did as well.

Take a customer satisfaction tracking study.

I would present the scores, the Top Two Box, the Bottom Two, I would show the trend over time, I would show the regression co-efficients and the weights of the factors associated with overall satisfaction, willingness to recommend, willingness to re-buy and the like. I would even go so far as to suggest areas of the business that needed improvement, from a customer perspective.

As often as not (and truthfully more so), management would politely listen, ask a few questions, and not be seen or heard from again until it was time for the next quarterly review of the findings.

Frustrating? You bet!

It was not until I learned to speak in the language of the bottom line that polite listening began to turn be replaced by more and more action and implementation.

More to follow.

Comments welcome!

Dr. Bob

So how can companies get real value out of customer satisfaction surveys? Value that demonstrably leads to increased revenue?

The key is to operationalize the results.

Transactional surveys, as we discussed in the prior two posts, can be valuable—IF they are keyed to measure attributes of which performance improvement can be demonstrated to have a positive impact on revenue (or other bottom line financial metrics).

However, transactional surveys are one of the last elements to implement in a customer satisfaction process.

The first is a solid qualitative understanding of the attributes of your products and/or services that drive customer behavior. This can only be accomplished by talking with customers and observing customer behavior.

Once the attributes are developed, a periodic quantitative survey then measures customer perceptions of performance on those attributes by your organization and competitors that customers identify as using or considering.

At this juncture, the results need to be operationalized. Otherwise, all an organization has is a fancy and expensive survey process.

How, exactly, do you drive change that results in bottom line impact?

You need a process that translates the voice of the customer into the voice of business process.

First is a hard examination of internal metrics on customer-critical processes. Is your organization measuring what is important to your customers? Of course, you are measuring what’s important to the business. Equally important is to measure what customers tell you is important to them and what is driving revenue.

Second, voice of the customer attributes must be mapped to business processes.

How do these two points work in practice?

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

What do I really learn from hit-and-run surveys, how-am-I-doing customer satisfaction questions? I cannot compare performance against competitors; I haven’t asked. I do not know whether I am strengthening or degrading my brand; I haven’t asked. In other words, I have no ability to analyze the data in any context, other than a point in time. Even then, I know very little—only that results are moving up, down, or remaining stable.

Maybe these organizations are taking the more challenging (and much more information and insight-rich) approach of truly robust customer satisfaction research and modeling, with the critical component of a competitive comparison in addition to these vacuous surveys. My experience as a market research consultant suggests that many organizations are not.

Meanwhile, the market research industry is burning out respondents with nuisance surveys (back to Bill Maher!).

In today’s market research environment in which surveys are ubiquitous and response rates are dropping, market researchers must carefully consider the value of every single question that pose to increasingly stressed and over-surveyed respondents.

Customer satisfaction surveys must work much harder at providing actionable information to clients and providing a legitimate feedback tool for respondents. The days of collecting data simply to stroke management egos with meaningless statistics about how well they are doing are (or need to be) over.

Furthermore, customer satisfaction results must be operationalized. That is, a process needs to be developed that translates the findings from the language of the customer into the language of business process (such as engineering) so that real changes can be realized. Otherwise, what is the point of customer satisfaction measurement?

One final story: a fellow researcher told me of a friend of his who purchased a very expensive sports car, a car that requires equally expensive maintenance. At the time, an oil change for this model ran $300 a pop.

Handing the new owner his keys, the salesperson dropped this little tidbit: you’re going to receive a survey in the mail about how this sales process went for you; the manufacturer is evaluating our dealership. If you bring the survey to us without filling it out, we’ll give you an oil change for free!

What do you suppose the customer did?

Designed and executed properly and robustly, customer satisfaction market research can provide critical guidance for companies that are looking to increase revenue.

Is it time to upgrade your customer satisfaction research effort?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Love or loathe his politics, Bill Maher produces some of the funniest jabs about modern life.

Recently, he aimed his barbed arrows at customer satisfaction surveys in one of his New Rules on his HBO show, Real Time. You can listen to his brief commentary here.

When an aspect of society or business crosses the radar scope of prominent humorists, it’s usually an observation that a segment of the population resonates with. Bill struck a chord with me on this one, basically saying stop with the customer satisfaction surveys—at least of the kind that robotically ask “how are we doing?”

On my desk I have a pile of receipts from recent shopping excursions awaiting input into QuickBooks. Now, I’m not a big-time shopper, so my pile consists of drug store, grocery store, gas station, coffee shops and restaurants and a few big-box retailers. Conservatively, half of the receipts have an invitation to participate in a customer satisfaction/experience survey online or by calling a toll-free number.

I was recently in a deli that had a phone hotline to a customer satisfaction survey next to the cash register. Take our survey and receive a warm delicious cookie for participating!

We log onto websites and survey invitations pop up; we’re implored to take a quick survey after talking with a customer service rep on the phone. They come in the mail, in e-mail, on the phone, on receipts.

Now, as a market researcher I believe it is crucial for companies to monitor customer satisfaction. And while these surveys may be well-meaning and well-intended, I also postulate that they are wrong-headed. What does an organization really learn from such surveys? Hey, I’m doing great! The customers love us!

But do they?

Offer a cookie lover a free cookie (which I’d have to pay a dollar for if I bought it) and sure, I’ll suffer through your survey, and probably love you! I want a cookie! And just how likely to participate are those who are not lured by a free cookie? What do they think? Where are they in the survey results?

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Sometimes our personal experiences lead to profound insights into developing market research surveys that work.

Such is the case explored in a recent blog post by Theresa Bradley-Banta on her bigfishTopDogs.com site. In an post titled “Don’t Ask Your Customers These Questions!” , Theresa describes a customer service encounter with GoDaddy and their subsequent customer satisfaction questionnaire GoDaddy asked her to complete.

It provides a strong lesson on conducting customer satisfaction research on customers’ terms rather than on management’s needs.

Briefly, Theresa experienced a less than satisfactory encounter with customer service at GoDaddy. Receiving a survey request on her experience almost immediately, Theresa notes the self-serving nature of the questions (both of them!).  And, most saliently, the missed opportunity for GoDaddy to receive some solid feedback on how to improve and the potential damage to their brand by their perhaps unwitting failure to consider the survey process from a customer/respondent perspective.

Many have pointed out, including Theresa, that customer satisfaction surveys serve a dual purpose: to acquire feedback for process improvement and as an additional opportunity to let a customer know they are valued as a customer and their needs are being considered by the surveying company.

Folks, put very simply, doing appropriate customer satisfaction surveying is first and foremost a brand issue.

We suggest that all customer satisfaction surveys be considered from both a perspective of what management needs for process measurement and improvement and of the impression such surveys leave with customers. Such consideration might help you avoid the GoDaddy error and, put more positively, use customer satisfaction surveying more rigorously.

GoDaddy, are you listening?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Market Research Optimized added an article on upgrading customer satisfaction in the Internet Age under the “Articles” menu tag. The article discusses aspects of how customer satisfaction have been impacted by the mega-sized soapbox that the web affords disgruntled customers and how customer satisfaction might be impacted.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

I read the article that follows on the Taipan Publishing Group website. While this blog usually focuses solely on market research news and issues, I found this article thought-provoking, especially given its focus on the linkage between quality customer service and macro financial performance. So, with permission of the publisher, the article is presented in its entirety. I hope you enjoy.

Comments welcome as always.

Dr. Bob

Companies That Ignore Quality Customer Service Are in Trouble

Todd M. Schoenberger, Managing Editor, Taipan’s Tipping Point Alert
Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Perfect customer service used to be the norm for American companies. Many can remember a time when full-service gas stations had a crew checking the oil, washing the windows and filling the tank – all without extra fees, excuses and pushback.

Or, companies recognized more for improving customer loyalty in hopes of receiving additional business in the future. You rarely hear stories about cultivating relationships with customers, and more tales about one-dimensional transaction-based interactions.

It’s discouraging, and many companies are overlooking the one true asset they can offer that costs virtually nothing: Excellent customer service.

During these tough times, consumers are more likely to remember how they are treated now and will reward those businesses when the economy fully improves. But it goes even further than this.

Have you noticed the companies with a reputation for great customer service are also the companies that have seen better performance out of their stocks during these difficult fiscal times? Think of Southwest Airlines (LUV:NYSE) and Apple (AAPL:NASDAQ) – companies known for going above and beyond for their customers all the while their stocks have appreciated 65% and 86%, respectively, over the past year.

Then, you look at hard-nosed companies like Comcast Cable (CMCSA:NASDAQ), Home Depot (HD:NYSE) and Bank of America (BAC:NYSE), companies that have barely beaten or lag the S&P 500 over the past year. Consumers have choices and are not stupid, yet these companies continue to disrespect the one group that helps keep the lights on in the building.

I’m sure there are countless examples of what you have personally experienced over the past two years that will probably have you returning – or ignoring – those places of business. It’s about how the company treats its customers that will set the tone for future revenues and higher equity valuations.

If you have a company you have had the pleasure, or displeasure, of dealing with, feel free to post a comment and let us know. We appreciate your thoughts.

Sometimes management is insistent on working to turn around very dissatisfied customers as an organizational imperative.

“Well,” I have heard, “they are satisfied and they are staying as customers. Why spend money to make them more satisfied?”

Good question.

Here is why: companies need to build positive satisfaction bank accounts, so to speak, with customers. With a positive account, a customer will be more likely to forgive (but not forget) the next time they encounter a curt customer service rep, or have to wait twenty minutes to talk to one (while listening to a recording telling me there is heavy call volume and they really value my business [wouldn’t valuing my business really translate into putting more resource into answering my call more rapidly?]).

Here’s a personal story to this effect. I was a customer of one of the satellite television providers. I was reasonably satisfied with them. If they had ever asked, I would have given them a four on the one to five scale.

But, their standing with me was constantly based on the next encounter. They had flunked the installation test at the beginning of our relationship by both failing to show up as promised (they did not show at all) and then I had to call them to complain and reschedule.

The service had been okay. The few times I had technical problems, their reps were helpful.

Then I received a flyer from them in the mail, pitching me an introductory offer to start service (I am already a customer!) at less than half the price I was paying after being subscribed for more than five years. That certainly made me feel warm and fuzzy toward them. Moreover, they would not make the same offer to the existing customers.

My conclusion: they valued a new customer more than they valued me, a long-standing customer. My satisfaction is decreasing……………………………..

The kicker came when I was moving. I called to transfer the service from myself to my significant other who did not have an account and was not on my account.

So I made a phone call to their customer service center. The rep I spoke with confrontational, rude, and insistent that I would have to pay to cancel my contract (which had expired after two years of service; I was on month to month).

What did I do? I called their competitor and established service with them. They were more than happy to help, as you might imagine (and are continuing to provide good service three months later—right now, I would say they are a five).

The first provider had no reservoir of good will with me.  And I left when the opportunity (and timing) presented itself.

What could they have done? In the case of the final straw, probably nothing short of free service for the grief they gave me. I am a realist: that was not (and did not) happen.

But if their management was less focused on shoveling new customers into the pipeline and more focused on retaining customers who had proved their value, the distasteful encounters I had with them might not have happened and I would still be their customer.

More to follow.

Comments welcome!

Dr. Bob