If you're getting good feedback from your customers, congratulations. You've solved the first third of the problem of building an effective program.

The next piece is reporting. I'm amazed at how many customer feedback programs are still doing their reporting through Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables. Modern tools can make the feedback far more effective by delivering the right data at the right time.

To be effective, survey reports need to be:

• Timely: The faster you deliver data to people who can use it, the more effective it will be. Ideally, front-line managers should have feedback from transactions which happened the same day.
• Directed: Different report recipients need to have different views of the data. An executive may need a high-level summary aggregated across the organization, while a superisor needs to see lots of detail about the twenty people she manages.
• Interactive: Most people will just need to see "the number", but everyone should have the option of taking a deeper dive. Some of the best insights come people on the front lines trying to understand why customers are responding the way they are.

For most customer feedback programs we set up two "tiers" of reporting. The first tier is preconfigured reports, pushed to recipients on a regular schedule. For example, individual customer service reps get an immediate report of each survey, or an executive gets a weekly high level summary. For a given client, there may be hundreds of different preconfigured reports, each tailored and filtered for the particular audience.

The second tier is interactive reporting through a web-based reporting engine. Someone can start with the preconfigured report (or start from scratch), and filter the data, look at different metrics, compare sub-groups, or browse individual survey records. They key is to make this platform simple enough that most users can get what they want without having to spend a lot of time learning how to use the system.

Combining these two types of reporting in a single package maximizes the impact of the customer feedback, giving people the knowledge and insight they need to figure out how to best meet the customer's needs.

Writing in Forbes recently, David Yarnold asks once again the perennial question: Why Does Customer Service Suck?

He makes the same argument many others have, that an excessive focus on short-term cost savings leads many companies to make bad decisions which hurt them in the long run. He also points out (which I don't see often enough) that it isn't technology per se which is the problem, but the way technology is used. Technology can enhance customer service, or get in the way.

To which I would add, cost isn't necessarily related to the quality of customer service either. There are many situations where customers prefer self-service provided that the self-service meets the customer's needs, is implemented well, and it's the customer's choice as to whether to self-serve or talk to a person.

If you hang around user interface designers long enough, eventually you will hear the phrase "Simple is hard."

Designing an intuitive, easy to use system is surprisingly difficult. Under the surface, today's technology is overwhelmingly complex. The only reason mere humans can use something like, say, an iPhone, is because almost all the complexity is hidden by the user interface.

To make this appear simple, the user interface designer has to figure out how to communicate all the functions to the user (or at least the important ones) in a way which seems obvious, but without overwhelming the user with all the unimportant stuff. It's a tough challenge, not least because most UI designers (many of whom are, after all, programmers) don't think like users.

The same thing is true for customer service. In many ways a company is like a very complicated machine, and customers are like the users. A company's web site and contact centers are the interfaces through which the customer tries to accomplish something, entirely analogous to the touchscreen on an iPhone.

We want the customer to feel that the company is easy to do business with. Customers should not need to learn how a company's internal processes work, or spend time coordinating different parts of the organization.

This is hard to accomplish. It means designing customer service processes to hide all the internal complexity of a company, clearly communicate how to do those things customers probably want to do, and making sure that a customer's needs are properly coordinated inside the company.

But it can be done.

Issue 57 of Vocalabs' Newsletter, Quality Times, has just been published. This month's issue talks about Pretty Good Practices, and some of the considerations when using leveraging customer feedback and advanced analytics for targeted surveys.

In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency. Federal Aviation Regulations, Part 91.3(b)

Airplane pilots are given broad discretion to break the rules if needed to meet an unexpected situation. This isn't a free pass: part 91.3(c) says that the FAA can demand a written explanation after the fact. But it does mean that the pilot has the explicit authority to (for example) land in the Hudson River no matter how many rules that breaks, if that's the best way to handle an emergency.

Compare this to the recent incident in Florida where a school nurse allowed a student to pass out during an asthma attack because the school's rules prohibited giving him his inhaler without a parent's signature. The school apparently believes that adherence to the parental signature rule is so important that it's better to have an ambulance and paramedics show up, or even risk serious injury or death to the student, than override the rule and give the student a puff from his own inhaler.

Wouldn't this situation have been so much better if the school had its own version of FAR 91.3(b): "In an in-school emergency requiring immediate action, school staff may deviate from any part of these rules to the extent required to meet that emergency."

Most contact centers don't deal with life-or-death situations like these. Nevertheless, a lot of customer service nightmares are caused by a similar blind adherence to policy. Policy is important, but policies are meant to handle ordinary situations and the expected problems.

The problem is that there will always be some crazy situation not envisioned by the policy, and employees need to be empowered to bend the rules when the rules don't apply. It could be a series of mistakes on the company's part, a customer who dies at an inconvenient moment, or a tornado which destroys company-owned equipment.

In those cases the company employees shouldn't feel tied to rules which make no sense. Imagine if every employee handbook began with the following policy:

Employee Discretion: In an extraordinary situation requiring prompt resolution, employees may deviate from any part of these policies to the extent required to meet the customer's immediate need.

It's nice to highlight the positive stories, and here's one from Consumerist about Chris, a guy whose pizza order got messed up:

After the local store manager insisted that the error was Chris's fault, he fired off a quick complaint on the website. And that's when corporate solicitousness and free pizzas rained down upon him. Not literally. That would be kind of scary.

So Chris got twenty bucks or so worth of free pizzas, and Papa John's got a nice bit of free national publicity. Not a bad trade, I reckon.

Papa John's Really, Really Cares That They Gave Me Wrong Pizza Crust

As I like to tell our clients, "statistics prove, but stories persuade." We naturally respond more to one customer's story than to a dry statistical representation of the typical customer experience.

And who better to tell the customer's story than the customer herself?

That's why I recommend taking some time to listen to a few customer surveys. We make a full-length recording of every interview available to our clients, and this has proven a valuable way to understand what's going on behind the statistics and driving change.

Some of our clients use this as a regular training tool: every contact center agent or in-store salesperson listens to their own interviews to help understand why the customer was satisfied or dissatisfied. This helps foster empathy and a better understanding of what customers are looking for.

This is also a powerful way to present results to executives. In addition to the facts and figures, a short recording of the customer explaining what happened really drives the point home.

So make it a point to listen to a few of your customer interviews. I can guarantee you won't regret it.

A few weeks ago I purchased a very expensive piece of software from a company I'll call Baked Mud Software. As part of the purchase I am entitled to get a free upgrade to the next major version, which was released just last week. Here are the steps I've gone through so far (more or less):

1. Look on the company's website for upgrade information. Fail to find it.
2. Use Google to find a web page buried deep inside Baked Mud's site with upgrade instructions. So far so good.
3. Fill out a web form, including a copy of my scanned receipt. Click "Submit." This is the point where I descend into Customer Service Hell.
4. Get the page: "We're sorry, we encountered an error processing your request."
5. Click the "Broken link? Send us an E-mail" link.
6. Get the generic top-level "Contact Baked Mud" web page.
7. Click the "Contact Service and Support" link. This goes to a generic web page about how to search the help files and access the online forums. In other words, useless.
8. The other link on the "Contact Baked Mud" page is labeled "Visit Product Help and Support Centers." This link goes to another generic web page about searching help files and accessing forums. Also useless.
9. Try going back to the web form from step 3. Now the form itself is unavailable and gives the same error message.
10. At some point, a popup window appears inviting me to take a survey. I give Baked Mud a "1" on all 20+ questions. I also provide my e-mail address and a long description of the problem I'm having in the comment box.
11. Nothing happens in response to the survey in step 10 (it's been over a day).
12. Several hours later I go back to the form in step 3. The form is available again, but still gives an error when trying to submit it. Then the form becomes unavailable again.
13. Oh look, there's a box in the window offering online chat support.
14. It also says that all chat agents are unavailable and won't let me click it.
15. Try steps 3-14 a few more times over the course of two days.
16. Finally give up on the website. After clicking around a while, I finally find a phone number for customer service.
17. The first message I hear when dialing customer service instructs me that if I'm trying to get my upgrade, I should go to a particular web page. This is the same web page which has been broken for two days.
18. Spend about five minutes navigating the phone menus.
19. Spend about ten minutes on hold.
20. Finally reach a person. He's nice and his English skills are good, but he clearly isn't a native speaker. I spend five mintues spelling my e-mail address before he gets it right.
21. After explaining my problem, the response I get is "our systems are really busy, I can't submit this request for you, try the web page again in a week." To his credit, the customer service representative is very patient and doesn't try to rush me as he does absolutely nothing to help.
22. Give up. For the time being.

I understand when a big company has a major product release things can get crazy. But some companies manage events like this with a whole lot more grace.

The irony is that Baked Mud recently won an award from a very expensive consulting company for its "Voice of the Customer" program. I'm not sure what they did to earn that award, but it's pretty clear from where I sit that there's still considerable room for improvement.

In our business office, we've used Comcast's business-grade cable modem service for Internet access since 2007. In general we've been satisfied: the service is much faster than the DSL connection we had before, and the price was reasonable and exactly what we had agreed to in the contract nearly five years ago.

Over the past year, however, we've noticed the quality of our cable modem connection declining a little. Where it used to always be wicked-fast, we now see occasional slowdowns and overnight outages.

Then this month, a surprise: a new $7 fee in our bill for "equipment rental." $84/year is not going to make or break us, but as a general rule you should only pay bills for money you actually owe. Companies which break this rule tend not to stay in business.

So I dutifully called Comcast customer service to try to get to the bottom of this. It seemed a little strange that our five-year-old cable modem was suddenly worthy of a monthly fee when it hadn't been for so many years before. Here's more or less what happened:

1. I called the phone number printed on the bill. It might be reasonable to expect that someone calling the phone number printed on the bill might have a billing question, but I had to spend about five minutes navigating the menu to find the option for billing problems.
2. I then waited on hold for fifteen minutes. Normally one might expect that business customers calling with billing disputes are both high value and upset, but Comcast apparently feels the time of their customer service representative is more valuable than mine.
3. Once I got to speak to someone, the representative told me the new charge was because of a "policy change" which had been disclosed in a prior bill. I dug up the old bill. There was one sentence in 8-point type on the back page of a bill from six months ago (I am not exaggerating this in the slightest). That's not disclosure, that's active concealment.
4. The Comcast representative said he couldn't do anything about the charge, but he could transfer me to a "retention specialist" who might be able to do something. Keep in mind that by this point I had been on the phone for nearly half an hour.
5. When I told the retention specialist I wasn't happy about having new fees randomly added to my bill, he first tried to argue that Comcast had the right to add the fees because of a contract on Comcast's website. Leaving aside the legal question of what makes a binding contract, getting into a "Yes I can/No you can't" argument with a longtime customer over less than a hundred bucks a year is not going to win any loyalty.
6. Finally, after telling the retention specialist that I was absolutely not going to argue with him about whether Comcast's website constitutes a legally binding contract, and I just wanted the fee removed, he said he couldn't take the fee off. Instead, he could offer me a $10/month credit for 12 months.

In general I don't have a problem if Comcast wants to push through a modest price increase. They have never raised their price to us in almost five years, and on the whole they've provided good value. But if they want to raise their price, they should do it the right way: send us a prominent notice or an insert in our bill announcing the change. Trying to sneak in a new fee like this is just, well, sneaky. Instead of looking like a legitimate price increase it looks like a mistake, which I had to spend a fair amount of time tracking down. Then when it wasn't a mistake it just looked sleazy.

As it happens, there's a new carrier pulling fiber to our office building this summer. A week ago I wasn't really interested in switching from Comcast. Today I am.

Many companies like to collect customer feedback on a regular schedule: monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. This is a good idea, but it's an even better idea to spread that survey out over the entire period.

For example, if you plan to measure your customer service performance through 450 customer surveys once per quarter, you should not do all the surveys at once. Instead do 150 surveys per month, or about five per day, each day of the quarter.

The cost should be about the same, but spreading it out like this has several advantages:

1. Continuous surveying can uncover problems as they are developing, rather than at the end of the reporting period. You can catch things when they're small and nip them in the bud.
2. An intermittent customer survey is more disruptive to the organization. The quarterly or yearly customer survey is a project which everyone has to make room for, but an ongoing survey is simply another business process which goes on day to day.
3. Everyone tends to be on their best behavior during "survey week." Even if there's no direct compensation for getting good scores, people still want to do well.

Free response questions (aka open-ended questions, aka verbatims) are a powerful tool for finding out what's top-of-mind with customers. The traditional method for dealing with them is to have an intern perform the mind-numbing task of reading each comment and categorizing it, in order to do some statistical analysis. This is what we did for the recent NCSS report on customer complaints, though I and one of my managers played the roles of interns.

In the past I've played around with some text analysis software to try to reduce some of the burden of this chore, and found that it didn't help much for the size of data set we're working with (usually under 10,000 free responses). It took a little too much time and effort to train the software to give good results. On the other hand, if we had hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of comments I could definitely see the value.

For surveys in an interview format it makes sense to have the inteviewer provide a preliminary categorization of the customer's comment. The interviewer won't know as much about the company's internal business processes as an insider, but will probably get it right 90% of the time. The interviewer can also flag ambiguous cases for further review.

There's also a limit to what you can get from a free response question. When you ask for comments, most customers will give you just the one thing most important to them at that moment. So this is not a very good way to track the actual incidence of specific problems, since you miss customers who may have experienced the issue but didn't happen to mention it.

So when something interesting develops in the comments, it's a good idea to start asking about it specifically in the survey. You will get a much better read on whether there's a problem with (for example) language skills or the IVR if you ask every customer whether they experienced that issue or not. If it turns out you don't have a problem then the question can be removed.

Issue #56 of Vocalabs' newsletter, Quality Times, has been published. This issue has some more discussion of the just-published NCSS Cross Industry Report on Customer Complaints.

As always I hope this is interesting and informative, and if you like what you see please feel free to subscribe to the newsletter via e-mail.

One graph we did not include in the recent NCSS report is the complaints about how hard it was to find the phone number to call customer service (at right).

In our research we found a lot of these complaints, and it wasn't surprising. Companies have been "hiding the ball" for years, and it's rare to find a company's phone number on the homepage of its website. Customers also frequently complained that they couldn't find a number to call on their statements or bills.

The differences between companies in these complaints was statistically very significant, with Verizon, Chase, and AT&T posting particularly large numbers, and this was clearly a source of great frustration for some customers.

As much as I like this data, I cut it from the final report because we recruit NCSS survey participants by advertising on Google. That means there is likely a bias towards customers who had a hard time finding a way to reach customer service. The recruitment process for each company is identical, so I think the comparisons between companies are valid. Nevertheless, I can't prove that. So, regretfully, I felt I had to cut one of the more interesting comparisons from the published report.

We have just published our most recent National Customer Service Survey report. This quarter we're doing something a little different: we've done an analysis of all the customer complaints from the past 15 months (since the beginning of 2011) in all the companies we follow, and our Executive Summary shows what kinds of complaints are most common at each company.

You can download the Executive Summary, and contact us for more information about how to subscribe to the underlying data.

In business we talk a lot about "best practices." The general idea, which is a good one, is that industries can develop and standardize certain ways of operating which are demonstrably better than the alternatives.

I have some problems with how this works in the real world. Ideas promoted as "best practices" are rarely backed up by the kind of rigorous research the phrase implies. Too often, a "best practice" works well for some companies in some circumstances, but doesn't work elsewhere. At worst, "best practices" are sometimes nothing more than interesting ideas from consultants looking to drum up business. Perhaps my biggest complaint, though, is that the phrase "best practice" implies that the "best practice" can't be improved and that no alternative approach would be better.

I think most businesspeople understand this, and know that every situation (especially in the customer service world) is unique. What most companies are looking for from "best practices" are ideas which have worked elsewhere and might be adopted (or adapted) in their own operation where it makes sense.

So I no longer talk about "best practices" with my clients. Instead, being from Minnesota, I tell my clients about "pretty good practices."

"Pretty good practices" are ideas which work in some companies and make sense to consider for other companies. Pretty good practices are not set in stone, so they can be refined to fit the unique culture and situation of each organization. Pretty good practices are things I consider pretty good, but I'll keep my mind open in case a better idea comes along.

Most importantly, though, where prescribing a "best practice" tends to end the discussion (whether the practice is really the "best" or not), taking about "pretty good practices" is the beginning of a conversation about how to improve.

On average the ATM machines in the town of Timisoara, Romania are installed at exactly the right height for customers to use.

The problem is that one of the machines is six feet above the sidewalk and only usable if you bring a stepladder. The other ATM is at about the right level for a toddler.

But on average, they are perfect.

(From Austrian Times, via BoingBoing)

Consumerist today has a story of a car buyer who was told he had to give the dealer top marks on the customer survey or else the employee could be fired and the customer might not be allowed to bring his car back for service.

Clearly this dealer's behavior will not lead to increased customer satisfaction, nor is Ford getting a realistic measure of how well the dealer is performing.

This story may be unusually extreme, but this behavior seems to be endemic  in the auto industry. Anecdotally, I haven't talked to any recent car buyer who hasn't been subjected to some sort of blatant attempt to manipulate the customer satisfaction survey.

Over the years what started as an honest effort to measure and improve customer satisfaction seems to have morphed into a hollow exercise which penalizes employees who don't cheat. But the process is so baked in that change is extraordinarily difficult.

Change is necessary, though. The existing customer satisfaction surveys are not only ineffective, they actually encourage bad behavior. Here's how I would fix a badly broken process like this:

1. Immediately stop doing customer surveys. If the customer satisfaction process is this badly broken, it's not only a waste of money, it is actually making customers less satisfied and encouraging bad behavior. Ending the program will send a clear message that things must change, and force the organization to overcome its inertia.
2. Reconsider the ultimate goals of the customer feedback program. The goal is (probably) not to get good survey scores for the sake of good survey scores. The goal is to provide excellent customer experiences. In the case of auto manufacturers, the goal is to make every customer as satisfied as possible with the purchase and service experience, and strengthen the relationship the car owner has with the brand.
3. Develop a new feedback process from the ground up around the new goals. To develop that deep satisfaction and relationship with the customer, you don't just want to ask if they were satisfied and punish the dealer if they weren't. Instead, rebuild the customer feedback process as an opportunity to identify and correct mistakes the dealer might have made. Don't just ask how satisfied the customer was, ask what the customer needs to resolve the problem, and then have the dealer correct the issue. Give the dealer incentives to fix things, and make the goal "eventual customer satisfaction" not "zero problems ever."
4. Make it a two-way street. The people being evaluated should buy in to the process--which means listening to dealer's concerns, being fair and open about how they are measured, and also giving them a way to contest unfair feedback. No process is perfect, and there are customers who threaten bad feedback if they think they can blackmail the dealer. Have a review process for the dealer to demonstrate that they did everything possible to satisfy the customer.
5. Don't tolerate cheating. Even the best customer feedback process will be manipulated if someone thinks that's easier than providing good customer service. Customer feedback programs need to be actively managed, and anyone caught trying to cheat must be punished.

Conventional wisdom--and a moderate amount of academic research--holds that better customer service leads to increased customer loyalty.

The effect takes some time, however. If customers immediately abandoned a company after a single bad service experience, no company would dare skimp on service.

Instead, a less-than-satisfying customer experience gives customers a reason to explore taking their business elsewhere. If the alternatives look better, then they may leave. The effect is an increase in customer defections over time.

In some research we did for one of our clients we tracked customer defections for several months after a customer service call. We found that after six months the defection rate among customers who were "Very Satisfied" with that original call was one quarter the rate among customers who were "Somewhat Satsified" or less.

That's a striking difference, but it took months for the gap to fully open. That one less-than-fully-satisfying service experience probably was not the only thing which led the customer to leave. More likely it was part of a chain of disappointment. Had the company broken the chain they could have kept the customer.

Fortunately this client now has the data to quantify what disappointing customer service is costing. They can choose to make the investment to improve servie and retain those customers--and they know exactly what it's worth.

Issue 55 of Vocalabs' newsletter, Quality Times, has been published. E-mail subscribers should have a copy by now.

This issue contains a pair of essays on the theme of performing deep vs. wide surveys and how to construct a hybrid program which combines the best of both worlds.

As always I hope this is interesting and informative to my readers. You can get each issue e-mailed to you as soon as it is published by signing up on the newsletter page, or you can read it in your favorite newsreader with the RSS feed.

T-Mobile is in the news today for announcing that it plans to reduce its customer service operation by 1,900 people over the next several months.

This is a company which, several years ago, was near the top of our customer service survey rankings. Over the past year our National Customer Service Survey data shows T-Mobile getting considerably worse, while the company has faced the misfire of its AT&T merger, a declining subscriber base, and the continued lack of the iPhone.

Unfortunately, T-Mobile seems to be stuck. It needs to invest heavily across the board in order to be competitive with the other three national carriers. But the resources to do that just aren't there.

I've heard some speculation in the industry that perhaps another foreign carrier could buy T-Mobile as a way to enter the U.S. market. Since T-Mobile USA is already owned by Deutsche Telecom, this would not be a case of an American company being bought by a foreign company. Nevertheless, it doesn't take much to imagine the political problems with, say, China Telecom trying to acquire a major U.S. phone company.

So it's hard to see where T-Mobile goes from here. The current vicious cycle of declining customer base and reduced service levels will not end well.

Advanced analytics tools have made it easier than ever to identify patterns of customer behavior. It's now much easier to learn things like how often customers call on the phone after visiting your website, or whether certain customers consistently try and fail to use self-service options. This often uncovers some obvious places where you're leaking money through excessive support costs and repeated customer problems

Understanding why these patterns exist is harder. You can guess, but it's much better to ask the customer directly.

Customer surveys designed for this kind of in-depth insight are a little different than a routine customer service tracking survey:

• Sample: This is not the place to use a random sample. Instead, target just the people in the group you're trying to understand. So if you're trying to figure out why some customers bypass your IVR and try to go directly to an agent, those are the customers to survey.
• Method: It's important to get to the customer as quickly as possible after the experience, while the memory of what happened and why is still fresh (but not during the same phone call please!). Have a human being call the customer within an hour. The quick response and the rapport between the customer and interviewer yields the most detail and specifics about what happened and why.
• Questions: Even though this survey isn't intended to track your top-level metrics, you still want to include those satisfaction or loyalty questions in order to compare against your entire customer base. In addition, ask detailed "what happened" and "why" questions with an emphasis on open-ended questions.
• Size: For these purposes, several hundred completed interviews is a good starting size. 500 interviews will give you a broad cross-section of the customers you're interested in and some meaningful statistics about the different root causes and their prevalence (while keeping the budget manageable). Going up to a few thousand interviews gives more granularity and better statistics on particular root causes.

The challenge today is often trying to take too much data and generate insights and understanding. Modern analytics tools are a powerful start. Targeting a detailed customer survey to a specific pattern of behavior is often the quickest and most effective way to understand what's really going on. 

In customer service surveys it's fairly common to find customers who need more attention from the company. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction during an interview, or indicates that they have an unsolved problem, we strongly recommend giving the customer the option to have a supervisor call the customer back and try to resolve the issue.

Not all customers will take this offer, but when they do there needs to be a service recovery process to make sure the customer is taken care of:

1. Notification: As soon as the customer asks for the follow-up, someone at the company should be notified. There may be a dedicated service recovery group, or these may be assigned to a regular manager or supervisor, but there needs to be someone who has clear responsibility for investigating each case and reaching out to the customer. Most customers will expect to be contacted within a day or two,  and the responsible supervisor should get the notification within a few hours.
2. Follow-Up: Be flexible in how you are willing to resolve customers' problems, because the range of issues which turn up can include just about anything. The responsible supervisor should be empowered to go outside the company's normal policies and processes if necessary, because problems which land here may have been caused by those policies and processes. If the customer has a genuine issue, standing behind "this is our policy" is about the most infuriating thing the company can do.
3. Accountability: Many employees find they have more enjoyable things to do than trying to placate upset customers. There needs to be a process to track when customers have been contacted, what resolution was offered, and what the ultimate outcome was. Otherwise, service recovery may take a back seat to other routine tasks and customers can slip through the cracks. If you can't reach someone on the first try, there should be a clear expectation of how many times to try to contact a customer before giving up.
4. Approval: Every customer's case should be reviewed to make sure the follow-up was adequate. A random sample of customers should be contacted again to confirm that the resolution met their expectations. This serves as an important cross-check to make sure you really are delivering the service you think you are.
5. Tracking: The issues which appear in the service recovery process often represent the worst service failures in an organization, so this can be a goldmine of information about how to improve overall service levels. Tracking the root cause of customer complaints shows you ways to both make your customers happier and often save money at the same time.

An effective service recovery process benefits both the customer and the company. This isn't something that will happen by itself, however. With the right process and accountability, you can be assured that customer complaints are not being ignored.

I'll be in San Francisco next week for Mobile Voice 2012. If you're at the event be sure to say Hi, and maybe even stop in on my panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon. I'll be talking about designing a customer feedback process to improve self service applications.

Key to encouraging survey participation is making the customer feel that you are taking the survey seriously.

Among other things, that means asking only relevant questions and taking the time to make sure the survey communicates the right message to participants.

And don't do this: (click the image for a full-size, easier to read version)

While I'm sure that some companies really want the "None" service, after some deep introspection I decided that "None" was Unimportant to my organization.

Coincidentally, "Unimportant" also seems to describe how seriously this company took its customer survey.

We just published Issue 54 of our newsletter, Quality Times. In this issue we discuss things companies can do to improve the effectiveness of a customer service survey, and also why "Call Containment" needs to be banished from the customer service dictionary.

If you find the newsletter useful, please feel free to subscribe to receive it by e-mail.