Using Survey Software To Gauge Customer Loyalty

Net Promoter research Blog

• Tarnished Silver

  A couple of weeks ago, I arrived at San Francisco Airport a few hours before my flight was scheduled to leave. Anxious to be home after a week of business travel, I noticed there was a flight leaving an hour earlier than my scheduled flight. I hurried over to the gate to find that I had made it just in time – boarding was underway! With a big smile I handed my boarding pass to the attendant at the desk and asked if there were seats available on the earlier flight. She said there certainly were – check. Then she asked if I had only carry-on luggage. Yes – check. Do you have status with this airline? “Yes,” I said proudly! She tapped at the keyboard, narrowed her eyes, and declared that since I was “just at the Silver level,” there would be a significant charge for the flight change. Deciding that the extra charge wasn’t worth it, I walked away. My smile was gone – and so was my feeling that I was a special customer. I had been a Premier-level flier for over 10 years, but benefit levels had recently changed. Yet even with the realization that the benefit plan had shifted, it was her characterization of me as “just a Silver” that caused me to believe this airline no longer appreciated my business. But researchers at Purdue University and Wichita State University have been studying Airline Quality Ratings for 22 years – and their results say that ratings are at an all-time high. I have been a frequent flyer for about the same amount of time, so when I heard that Airline Quality Ratings were the BEST EVER in 22 years, I did a double take. Really? My interactions with airlines over the past year – and, specifically, the most recent one – would never had led me to the conclusion that 2011 had been an exceptional year for airline passengers. And I’m not alone. Even though airlines lost fewer passenger bags and bumped them off flights less often last year, people still found plenty to complain about. Figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation say that complaints against domestic and foreign airlines surged 5% in 2011, rising to 11,545 instances. So, if air travel quality ratings are improving but customer complaints are still rising we have to ask “WTG?” (Why The Gap?) One explanation for the gap is that the quality metrics of a product and/or service can actually go up while customer satisfaction goes down. Satisfaction is the outcome of an interaction, but quality refers to the mechanics of the interaction. As Mike Clarkin revealed in the “Five Myths of Customer Satisfaction,” giving the customer an answer quickly – and exactly according to policy – doesn’t always lead to customer satisfaction. More important attributes have to do with the manner in which the issue was resolved and whether the employee was empowered to get the right solution for the customer. In the call center, First Call Resolution (FCR) can be a valuable metric. But a high FCR may not indicate high levels of customer satisfaction. There are many components of successful customer resolution. Managers should continue to coach team members on soft skills while also reviewing processes to assure that staff members are empowered to solve issues. Employees cannot always provide the answer a customer wants, but they can deliver it in a way that preserves – and even builds – the relationship. So while airline quality metrics measure on-time arrivals, number of overbookings, and mishandled luggage percentages, that is only part of the picture. Customer service, frequent flyer benefits, and communication are vital components in understanding the level of customer satisfaction. As for the interaction at the San Francisco airport, I suspect that the agent didn’t give it a second thought once I declined her offer and walked away from the counter. The entire interaction took less than a minute and corporate policy was followed to the letter. But the impact is more serious: they created a less loyal customer – which is probably acceptable since I was “just a Silver” anyway.Tweet  - 3 days ago

• A “Journey Moment”

  By: Sean Mahoney, Manager, Sales Engineering, Vovici As my wife will attest, I just love the “Journey moment” commercial State Farm has been running for a little while now. If you haven’t seen it, a customer and his insurance agent are bantering back and forth and find themselves using lyrics from a song by the rock band Journey. One says “we just had ourselves a little Journey moment there.” Seriously – I crack up every time! But that’s just the kind of relationship-sync we are all striving for as customer experience professionals. When done right, using feedback as part of measuring and managing the relationship between our customers and our organizations reinforces this relationship and even bolsters it. That means making a simple, yet important determination at the onset of any feedback initiative. Are you going to send a “relationship” – type survey or a “transactional” – type survey? A Relationship Survey will cover topics related to the entire relationship between you and your customer. So the survey will be medium to long in length and sent rather infrequently, maybe at a particular point in the customer lifecycle or at the end of the year. A Transactional Survey will mainly be about a recent transaction, such as a purchase, renewal or service request. So this type of survey will be shorter and is usually sent more frequently. Making a determination between these two types of surveys up front is significant and drives the entire direction of your feedback project. So, seems simple enough – two different types of feedback projects, delivered at two different points in time. But, one mistake I see all the time is survey designers adding questions to the transactional survey that have nothing to do with the matter at hand! Truly, just because one member of the team wants, or believes they need, some specific information and ask for it to be included in the transactional survey is not justification that several additional questions get included. In fact, this usually leads to at least two problems. First, you are asking a skewed sample (those who had a recent transaction), which will not be representative of the overall customer base. Second, you are lengthening a survey that your customers might not want to spend a lot of time on in the first place. They think they are just answering a few questions on a recent transaction only to find out there is a whole other section of questions. And you thought survey fatigue was already having an impact on your response rates and data validity! Resist the urge to add extraneous questions to a transactional survey. Consider creating a one-time, special-purpose survey if you have immediate needs for information from customers. If the questions this team member has are about the overall attitude of the customer toward different aspects of your business, suggest adding those questions to the relationship survey. On the relationship survey side of things, one common mistake is not making it too long, but making it too short! I was recently asked to complete a one-question satisfaction survey for my gym. One question! If they had only asked just one more question (an “anything else to add?” comment field would have sufficed) it would have been better. I had some very specific feedback about the locker room and the recent renovations, and it would have made me feel the management team was serious about using my feedback. If a product or service is important to us, we are usually willing to take time with a survey and even ‘expect’ to share more information about the relationship. Your customers may be disappointed not to be given the opportunity to do so. The moral to this story is to decide up front for each particular research effort whether a transactional or relationship survey will best provide the answers you're looking for and create your survey accordingly. As with most things, a little planning and consideration at the start can make a world of difference to the finished product and in the results you get – “all night, every night”, as the boys from Journey might put it.Tweet  - 13 days ago

• Yes, Even Your Parents are in a Customer Segment

  Are you ready for a flashback? You are on the phone with your mom or dad, providing technical support to get them up and running on a new technology. It could be Skype so they can video chat with the grandkids, it could be that new iPad you got Dad for his birthday (big mistake), or it could be Facebook or some other form of social media. I have undertaken such efforts for my parents hundreds of times, and it recently got me thinking about the different segments of customers that businesses get to wrestle with every day. When it comes to interacting with a business, customers choose the channels with which they are most comfortable – and which provide them with the best customer experience. My mom and dad order products online thanks to all that training I provided on “the Internet,” but when it comes to engaging customer service they use the phone or write a letter (yes, my Dad who is 80 still hand writes the CEO). While I get completely frustrated when I can’t reach a company via a digital channel, my parents go inside their bank and interact with a teller. I haven’t seen the inside of a bank in at least five years. We are different... and so are your customers. Knowing the different types of customers you have is an important part of creating a successful customer experience program. Did you think customer segmentation was only for marketing departments as they build campaigns to attract new customers? As it turns out, understanding the different types of customers already served by an organization is important for many reasons. Customers engage with us through their preferred medium. It could be on the phone, via answering a survey, tweeting questions, or engaging in online chat sessions. As such, if you are serious about looking at customer experience from the customer’s viewpoint, the more you know about them the better. By understanding the motivations and needs of each customer group, effective customer programs and customer retention strategies can be developed – resulting in a personalized experience for each segment. Customer segmentation begins with scrutinizing CRM data and defining clusters of customers who have similar behaviors. Groups can be defined in a number of ways, including geographic (country, state, type of neighborhood), behavioral (product purchased, frequency of purchase), demographic (age, gender, income, occupation), or psychographic (lifestyle, lifecycle, activities, interests). Once the groups have been defined by the data, you can confirm effective segmentation by performing surveys, monitoring social media, mining call center interactions using speech analytics, and evaluating mounds of unstructured data using text analysis. You will accomplish two things by taking a small random sample of each customer group and asking them about preferences and behavior. First, you will confirm that the characteristics are different among the groups you have defined (which confirms that you have defined the groups correctly). Second, you will start learning about the behavior of how each group interacts with your organization. Looking at CRM data will tell you what they do – evaluating customer interactions will tell you who they are. By performing customer segmentation, you can begin to learn about the motivations and needs of each customer group... and, more importantly, you get to know your customers.Tweet  - 2 weeks ago