The Service Survey Situation
“Bad customer service is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.”
So Mark Twain never said. (Then again, he had to issue a denial that he was dead. The lesson, as always: Keep moving.) But my blog post of last week, detailing the waking nightmare of dealing with incompetent and/or apathetic customer service at a couple of drugstore chains, resulted in a great many online and offline comments, many revolving around similar horror stories.
A few of these offered constructive solutions – dumping chains altogether in favor of local independents, contacting the CEO to see what he’d say – but most took a “You think that’s bad? Listen to this…” approach.
While entertaining, the experience got me to wondering about just how a dissatisfied customer can make his voice heard. (We’re talking about everyday annoyances here, by the way, not a planeload of disgruntled passengers filing class-action suits over sitting on a tarmac since last April.)
There are of course plenty of blogs and online forums out there -- try Googling “CVS sucks” and see how many hits you get -- but chances are you can Google just about any product with “sucks” appended and find somebody out there who’s less than gruntled.
Some of us might track down a manager to complain, write a letter or make a phone call, but I wonder if the odd complaint here and there really makes much of an impression upon the powers that be – beyond just how “odd” they think some of their customers are.
Which brings me to the customer survey. This can be a notoriously unreliable way of measuring the customer experience – hands up, everyone who filled out a customer-satisfaction card as “Joe King” back when they were in high school – but it does have the added benefit of being an actual solicitation from the company itself. Presumably, somebody’s going to look at the responses they receive, and with any luck will bring a wave of ill will to the attention of the appropriate executive before the “Your company sucks” Web sites start proliferating.
How many times do you take the opportunity to fill out a customer survey? Unless you’ve received exceptionally good or poor service, probably not very often.
But I still think the survey can be a valuable tool. (And apparently so do a lot of companies, given how many of them are out there.) I was once interviewing for an editorial job at a generally well-respected magazine, and when I asked if they conducted reader surveys, the reply was, “No, we don’t. Our readers look to us to tell them what they need to know.”
I was, as my British friends would put it, gobsmacked at that response. Of course a publication’s loyal readers count on that publication to keep them informed, but to utterly ignore the chance to get to know what its readers are thinking?
No one’s ever going to get a 100% response rate from a survey. But if a company is willing to go through the exercise of offering a satisfaction survey – one that doesn’t take half the day to fill out – then I’m willing to give them my honest opinion. And I have a feeling that if more of us did the same, we just might start seeing some changes in how we’re being treated.
It may even result in companies taking another of the ever-quotable Mr. Twain’s aphorisms to heart:
"Always do right. That will gratify some of the people, and astonish the rest."
Kevin,
It does happen in some cases. My previous employer, a large UK telco, uses customer satisfaction surveys rigorously across all its customer-facing activities.
My personal view, with a degree of hindsight, was that, whilst this was the right thing to do, the 'industry' created around it - and the large number of measures - tended to obscure the really important data that would drive significant shifts in satisfaction.
The complexity also meant that it was difficult to agree whether a change initiative had delivered an improvement in satisfaction or not.
Thanks Nick. I agree that surveys need to offer simplicity and efficiency, and especially like your "survey front-line staff" and "How do you feel, rather than How satisfied are you" points. It would be great to hear from someone at a company who's doing something with their surveys' results...
I agree that surveys are a useful tool - and I always take the opportunity to fill one in if I have a positive or negative experience.
By definition organisations that are serious about improving service should take all forms of feedback seriously and act on it where necessary.
I do however think there are pitfalls when customer surveys becomes over-complex. In such cases you can find organisations focusing on detailed points and losing the big picture along the way. I have been blogging on this topic lately at www.openchord.co.uk/blog and offer the following suggestions:
1) where possible, use hard measures (perhaps not so easy in the delicate matter of prescriptions) such as on-time-in-full to give an objective view of what will impact on satisfaction
2) survey front-line staff - as well as customers - for suggestions and evidence of good/bad service
3) ask how customers felt not how satisfied they were, since satisfaction varies widely from person to person.
To return to the original point I'm a great believer in voting with my feet to make a point about poor service, although habit and convenience will always mean that in practice I won't always apply the principle.