The Customer Service Survey
Simple Surveys
Mon - July 10, 2006 02:27 PM in
Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about the increasing popularity of a particular kind of customer satisfaction survey (the link should work for one week after this blog entry; after that the Journal wants money). This survey focuses on one particular question--"How willing are you to recommend us to your friends and associates?" (or variations thereof). The entire survey might be just a couple questions, plus some free response.
Answers to this survey question are used to calculate a "net promoter" score, which is basically the number of customers willing to promote a company to their friends minus the number of customers who will badmouth the company.
This survey question supposedly has amazing powers: better products and services, more satisfied customers, and more repeat business.
But the real innovation is not the survey question (we've been asking a variant of this question for a couple years ago, and it basically gets the same answers as more traditional satisfaction questions). The innovation is that--get this--companies are actually using the results of the survey to improve their operations. Whoa! What a novel idea!
Sadly, too many satisfaction surveys just sit on a shelf somewhere, and are never used to generate action items for service improvement. Part of this is the fault of the surveys--if the survey has no credibility, then nobody will do anything with the results, and there are a lot of bad surveys out there. Part of this is also the fault of misplaced management priorities, or lack of executive backing for service measurement and improvement.
The other genuine innovation here is using a short survey instead of the more typical ten or twenty question survey. Shorter surveys have a lot of advantages, since they are typically less expensive to administer, and people are more willing to answer two questions than twenty so the response rate is higher. Many long surveys effectively ask the same question over and over (one survey I saw asked about twenty different variations on "How satisfied were you....") and the answers to each question were nearly identical to each other).
It can be exceptionally hard to get everyone to buy into a short survey, since lots of different interest groups come out of the woodwork when crafting a survey, and everyone wants their favorite question. Realistically, though, nearly everything people want to ask on a satisfaction survey can usually be condensed into one or two "how'd it go" questions plus a few "why'd you call" variations, a "any suggestions" question, and an optional "do you want someone to call you back."
Posted by Peter Leppik
This survey question supposedly has amazing powers: better products and services, more satisfied customers, and more repeat business.
But the real innovation is not the survey question (we've been asking a variant of this question for a couple years ago, and it basically gets the same answers as more traditional satisfaction questions). The innovation is that--get this--companies are actually using the results of the survey to improve their operations. Whoa! What a novel idea!
Sadly, too many satisfaction surveys just sit on a shelf somewhere, and are never used to generate action items for service improvement. Part of this is the fault of the surveys--if the survey has no credibility, then nobody will do anything with the results, and there are a lot of bad surveys out there. Part of this is also the fault of misplaced management priorities, or lack of executive backing for service measurement and improvement.
The other genuine innovation here is using a short survey instead of the more typical ten or twenty question survey. Shorter surveys have a lot of advantages, since they are typically less expensive to administer, and people are more willing to answer two questions than twenty so the response rate is higher. Many long surveys effectively ask the same question over and over (one survey I saw asked about twenty different variations on "How satisfied were you....") and the answers to each question were nearly identical to each other).
It can be exceptionally hard to get everyone to buy into a short survey, since lots of different interest groups come out of the woodwork when crafting a survey, and everyone wants their favorite question. Realistically, though, nearly everything people want to ask on a satisfaction survey can usually be condensed into one or two "how'd it go" questions plus a few "why'd you call" variations, a "any suggestions" question, and an optional "do you want someone to call you back."
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:27 PM | | | | |