The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Conversations
Thursday - October 27, 2005 02:25 PM in
I'm just back at my desk from several days at the Nuance (Scansoft) annual "Conversations" conclave for Nuance clients and vendors. I was continually pleased that in every seminar with a focus on quality self service customer care that the speaker emphasized the need to test the applications for ease of use and caller satisfaction. That is a considerable change from the recent past when usability testing was seen as an afterthought or at best a necessary evil.
I was particularly pleased by a presentation of best practices given by representatives of AOL and Aetna Insurance which went a needed step further because they hit on a seldom addressed issue surrounding satisfaction testing. Specifically, that some tests are better than others. Now while that may seem obvious, and I am hard pressed not to be supportive of any testing that can result in improving the quality of the caller experience; there is a great deal of poor methodology out there that can and does result in faulty conclusions about how customers are actually being served.
Consumer survey is both an art and a science that few realize can be tough to get right. Who you ask, when you ask, who does the asking and even the wording you use can dramatically impact the quality of information received. In particular, there is a strong and often unrealized tendency to flavor a survey toward a predetermined conclusion that serves no one except perhaps the manager wanting to impress the executives.
I would like to say that test administrator bias is a minor issue, but we see too many instances of obvious flavoring of the questions to call the problem inconsequential. "Would you buy our product again, or would you like to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick?" is not as uncommon a style of question as you might expect. Perhaps I exaggerate to make my point, but if the manager is likely to be awarded as a result of a positive set of results, is it wise to have that same manager in charge of the study? This lack of rigorous objectivity is one of the reasons people distrust statistics, and you owe it to yourself and your company to make sure that any study you accept as a way to gauge consumer opinion is objective and most probably requires the services of a professional to get right.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Consumer survey is both an art and a science that few realize can be tough to get right. Who you ask, when you ask, who does the asking and even the wording you use can dramatically impact the quality of information received. In particular, there is a strong and often unrealized tendency to flavor a survey toward a predetermined conclusion that serves no one except perhaps the manager wanting to impress the executives.
I would like to say that test administrator bias is a minor issue, but we see too many instances of obvious flavoring of the questions to call the problem inconsequential. "Would you buy our product again, or would you like to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick?" is not as uncommon a style of question as you might expect. Perhaps I exaggerate to make my point, but if the manager is likely to be awarded as a result of a positive set of results, is it wise to have that same manager in charge of the study? This lack of rigorous objectivity is one of the reasons people distrust statistics, and you owe it to yourself and your company to make sure that any study you accept as a way to gauge consumer opinion is objective and most probably requires the services of a professional to get right.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Posted at 02:25 PM by | | | |