The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Don't Like the Survey Results? Blame the Rules.
Wednesday - May 10, 2006 03:31 PM in
We've had a couple of interesting calls lately from entities displeased with published VocaLabs rankings of certain companies in customer care.
One call was from a company complaining that we had not included them in our SectorPulse report on financial service companies. It took awhile to understand the caller wasn't interested in the accuracy of our methods or the criteria for inclusion; they just didn't like a competitor getting good press.
Another came yesterday. A company that WAS included in a SectorPulse study didn't like that their scores weren't as good as some of the competition. In preparation for the call, I did some research by reviewing the "free response" comments on this company, and found regular complaints of difficulty in reaching a live operator, lack of 24/7 customer service, IVR disconnects and a multitude of similar problems.
Did they want to discuss the findings and see where they might improve service? Yah, right. Instead they wanted us to alter how we calculate satisfaction scores in a way that would have made them look better. Didn't matter to them that our method showed truthfully that their competition was outperforming them by a statistically meaningful margin. I got the sense that their satisfaction tracking methods told company management they were doing as well as the competition and our press release said different. Faced with running the risk of management recognizing that their methodology is delivering less objective data, or writing off VocaLabs as an aberration, which do you think they did? Yes, that's what I think too.
As we've written in the past "managing to the numbers" rather than managing for service quality continues to be a reason customer care lags in so many businesses.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Another came yesterday. A company that WAS included in a SectorPulse study didn't like that their scores weren't as good as some of the competition. In preparation for the call, I did some research by reviewing the "free response" comments on this company, and found regular complaints of difficulty in reaching a live operator, lack of 24/7 customer service, IVR disconnects and a multitude of similar problems.
Did they want to discuss the findings and see where they might improve service? Yah, right. Instead they wanted us to alter how we calculate satisfaction scores in a way that would have made them look better. Didn't matter to them that our method showed truthfully that their competition was outperforming them by a statistically meaningful margin. I got the sense that their satisfaction tracking methods told company management they were doing as well as the competition and our press release said different. Faced with running the risk of management recognizing that their methodology is delivering less objective data, or writing off VocaLabs as an aberration, which do you think they did? Yes, that's what I think too.
As we've written in the past "managing to the numbers" rather than managing for service quality continues to be a reason customer care lags in so many businesses.
Posted by Rick Rappe
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