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Can Surveying Customers Drive Them Away?
A European colleague has asked me whether it isn’t possible to drive customers away by simply asking them to complete a survey about customer satisfaction. That is, can the act of soliciting for a survey actually be a turn-off for customers all by itself?
My instinct is yes, because I personally have encountered many instances of companies trying to take too much of my time, as their customer, to answer questions for their own benefit. I know this sounds terrible, for someone as concerned with customer service as I am, but I rarely elect to participate in comprehensive satisfaction surveys myself, unless I feel I have an unusual perspective, or I have an interest in the company’s success, possibly because I’m already a very loyal customer, or there’s some monetary or other benefit in it for me. Are you that way, too?
One of the reasons I like the Net Promoter Score is the fact that it seems so easy for a customer to participate. NPS doesn’t “use up” a lot of customer patience or attention span. But some academics have significant problems with NPS and it’s clearly not a panacea. (To review a comprehensive discussion of NPS’s advantages and weaknesses, read my "NPS - Valid or Not?" blog entry and readers' responses to it.)
The problem is, I don’t know of any hard data in this area. Does anyone have hard data? Has this been measured by anyone?
Don - this is a very good concern, but I don't understand the NPS solution you propose. First, overall satisfaction can be queried just as easily and second, either is only a barometer and without drilling down to the attributes that drive it you have no actionability. Also – aren’t loyal customers supposed to want to give good feedback so you can further improve and evolve your services and products.
I do intuitively like NPS better than percent satisfied or 'top box' – as movement in NPS has a heuristic feel of correlating to customer value (even though it adds a larger margin of error by taking the difference of two estimates ).
But I do not prefer it to using a full scale – as I think much information is lost. One of the academics you might be referring to, Neil Morgan at Indiana, has done a nice job of quantifying the relationship between loyalty measures and business performance (of which NPS and overall customer satisfaction are two). In this, he shows that overall satisfaction is the best predictor across several business performance metrics ( although your ROC is not among them – as I don’t think he had access to that type of calculations of all the firms he studied ). I believe he used several data soureces across several companies and segments, inclucing data from the ACSI (ie Claes Fornell at the U of Michigan )
Here is a link I just found referencing the work:
http://www.customersat.com/Resources/Newsletter/Q4_2006/Morgan.htm
And I have also found similar results with my internal studies at Wachovia (and I am not an academic – as Martha will attest! ). On thing we found is that greater customer value can be obtained by movement in the lower end of the customer sat range – which would be completely missed and ignored with NPS. And this was across both short term value and our internal CLV household measurements. Also – this relationship changes quite a bit across segments and product types. So if NPS is used, it would have to be heavily calibrated for each application. Why not just use the full scale ?
Okay – off to catch a flight. And to let you know that I am a big fan of Customer Equity, that is the basis for my talk in Marketing Mix that I am presenting in Madrid on Wed and Thursday, along with Dominque Hanssens of UCLA and MSI!
This is a question that market researchers wrestle with on a regular basis. How do we get "valid" data without scaring off our loyal customers, or worse yet those new customers that have yet to solidfy their loyalty?
Lars Bergkvist and John Rossiter, in the May 2007 issue of Journal of Marketing Research, put forth a reasonable argument for a single-item measure versus a multiple-item scale. Reducing the number of questions asked is one method of showing how a company values its customers time.
I am not ready to throw in the towel on survey research, particularly in the satisfaction area as many companies have bonus compensation tied to these scores. However, we should minimize the time constraints we put on our consumers wherever possible.
That's a classic problem I've actually experienced, as well. I think many companies think that surveys are something that have no real down side. If they don't work - well, there's no real cost. But there IS a cost, isn't there? It's the "used up" customer good will, and it will have an impact on the future revenue you get from a customer.
I was on a customer service call that went very well, and was asked to take a survey after the call. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my satisfaction about the agent. But I got IVR instructions that went in circles, followed by a few minutes of silence, followed by a dial tone. It was a very bad experience that reflected poorly on the entire company. If they ever ask me again, I certainly will not participate.