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  Esteban Kolsky 06:52:12 am on February 19, 2009 | 3 | # |
  Tags: CRM, culture, customer service, enterprise feedback management, Experience, experience management, feedback, global surveys, satisfaction, surveys, Voice of the Customer

  Writing Global Surveys for Success, Not Failure

  Interesting title, don’t you think?

  Most companies that take on writing global surveys have failed at it.  Some of them did it once and the never again.  Others are still doing it wrong but since the results they get are what they want, they won’t change for fear of actually finding what their customers think of them.

  This is a touchy topic since it is very easy to fall into stereotypes and make generalizations about entire countries or regions, and end up looking like a bigot.  Which, I am not.  Thus, I am not going to point to any specific country or region around the world and say “these people do this” or “those people don’t understand that”.  Instead I am going to point at the more general problems and trends, and we can later work together if you are interested in a specific country or region.

  Four key things to remember when doing global surveys:

  1. Some people are polite.  Some cultures are too polite to really tell you what you want to know.  The best you will get is a polite response saying things are fine, when they are not.  This means you will learn to write the questions in different ways for those groups, and you will use different scales.  I know of at least one case where a client of mine with a 90% satisfaction score had an attrition ration in excess of 26%!  How did we solve it?  We figured out what questions to ask and what were the best scales to find out what customers really meant.  Trial and error works great in these situations.

  2. Some people are brutal.  On the other hand, some people are brutal.  You ask for feedback? no problem, you stink and your product is so bad it hurts me to use it… just like everybody else and all their products!  The key in this situation is to put things in proper perspective.  Sure, the brutal criticism may, just may, be well warranted – but chances are that everybody is getting similar feedback.  So, take the time to put it into perspective.  Try to benchmark your performance against your competitors or even your partners.  Work with a local service provider that can help you understand how your ratings rank in comparison, and work to improve your processes and products, not your scores so much.

  3. Languages are all different, literal translations are bad.  Asking someone if they are satisfied with the bad behavior they received from the last interaction is not a good question to lead off a survey.  Alas, I have seen it.  When you construct questions in one language, literal translations sometimes change the meaning of the question in a different language.  The more diverse the languages and differing their grammars and syntax rules, the worse it is.  Do it right, craft new questions with similar meaning in different questions.  However, they don’t have to ranked or rated the same way, nor be the exact same question – why?  See point 4.

  4. Reporting should be detailed, not generalized. Here is the biggest thing about doing global surveys, which I hope you gather from what i said before: each survey should target specifics for each region or country, and as such should be reported separately.  So, even if you use the same questions and scales, do not mix the results of two different locales in the reporting.  Let me say it again – do not mix results.  You probably already knew that, or probably figured out from the earlier points I made – so I won’t preach it again.  OK, just one more time – don’t mix results from different places.  Why? two words: skewed results.

  Bottom Line: write your surveys for each region or country in the region or country, using local resources.  Don’t cross-tabulate as scores don’t mean the same in different parts of this world. And make sure you report for each region or country, not across all of them in a single, global score.

  Need more? Got something to add?  That is what comments are for… feel free to let me know what you think.

   

• Esteban Kolsky 01:48:28 am on August 13, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer experience management, customer satisfaction, customer service, feedback, loyalty, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  Mind The Gap, Would You?

  Continuing my one-man crusade to end the use of customer satisfaction as a metric in corporations, I want to bring attention today to one more problem: The Gap.

  What gap you ask?  Well, the gap that exists between customer satisfaction and customer churn – that gap.

  There are two  KPI (key performance indicators) for organizations dealing with customers.  One is customer satisfaction (are you satisfied, did we meet your expectations, etc.).  The other is customer churn – or the rate at which customers leave you and go to the competition.  Customer churn is trickier to measure (after all, a customer could have no need for your product or service, or they could be passive users and not interact for quite some time) but it is measured usually as a percentage of closed accounts.

  As the logic goes, an increase in customer satisfaction should mean a decrease in customer churn – and the other way around should be also true.  After all, a satisfied customer is not likely to leave – right?

  Well, this is the part where customer satisfaction (the metric) does not reflect reality. According to lots and lots of recent research – although customers say that customer service is their number one reason for changing providers, further analysis details that price is a more important driver than satisfaction.  Actually, satisfaction comes up between fifth and tenth in the different studies. I wrote a blog about this not too long ago, you can read it here.  If you insist in using customer satisfaction as a metric, fine – but please do it together with customer churn and… mind the gap.

  Let’s look at an example.  Let’s say your customer satisfaction is 80%, and your customer churn is 30% (that means you loose 30% of your customer base every year).  That leaves a ratio of 10 – 80% satisfaction, 70% of “satisfied” customers per the churn metric – deduct satisfaction from churn and you get the ratio.
  

  if you have a negative ratio it means your churn is greater than your dissatisfied customers and there are more people leaving you that telling you they are not happy.  Implement better feedback management tools, ensure that all complaints are handled effectively, and advertise (heavily) your commitment to customer care and to make customers happy.  Look at your prices, products, features and functions and make sure they are aligned with your competitors.  Advertise that as well. Find out, via surveys, why customers left recently and use that to improve your processes, offerings and services. If you are honest and good about it, you shall see more customers trusting you to solve their issues and wanting to stay – thus decreasing your churn and turning the ratio positive.

  If you have a positive ratio it means either you are doing things well, or you are not measuring properly.  The larger the ratio, the more likely one of your metrics is not accurate.  Ideally your churn and your dissatisfied number will be the same — but very unlikely.  You want them to be within one or two points to account for all errors in computing and measuring. So if you have a large positive ratio either your customer satisfaction metric is too high, or your customer churn too low.  You should revise the metrics, what they measure, how the data is captured and the methodology behind each.  You are more likely to find problems measuring customer churn than satisfaction – but both are possible.  Fix your measuring problems and then try again.

  What do you think?  Interesting enough to try? Let me know whaty you think… and please, mind the gap – would you.

   

• Esteban Kolsky 06:44:10 pm on July 24, 2008 | 17 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, LinkedIn, loyalty, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  First, apologies to Mel Brooks for partially stealing the line from his movie “Blazing Saddles“.

  That is the truth – organizations that focused on customer loyalty are taking the wrong path to customer retention.  Mea culpa, I was one of those people who saw Customer Loyalty as the end-all for customer service.  If you could just achieve high levels of loyalty, the idea goes, you won’t have to worry about customer retention.  I have since learned through work I have done with several clients, that loyalty carries no reward with it.  There is no higher wallet-share, there is no higher likelihood of repeat purchases — there is nothing that foretells that Customer Loyalty helps an organization, and plenty to show otherwise.

  Maria Palma wrote in her blog (Customers Are Always) a couple of days ago that Bargains and Deals may just trump customer loyalty.  I commented in that blog that loyalty only brings up your cost of customer maintenance, and it does not provide you with the benefits you expect.  Let me expand on that.  Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction are similar concepts: they rely on feelings that are not easy to manage or control, are expensive and cumbersome to measure appropriately, and they have not really shown any correlation between what they cost and the benefits they bring.  It is just another way to look at a customer feeling about a company, instead of a product or experience, that cannot be used to predict future behavior.

  In the movie “Nothing in Common” Jackie Gleason plays an older salesperson who prides himself in having the best relationships with his clients.  They all admire him, respect him, and have great loyalty towards him.  Early in the movie, a brash young new VP of sales calls him into his office to discuss his performance.  He is truly impressed by the relationship he has with his clients, but when he looks at the performance he is dismayed.  Abysmal sales numbers have been trickling in for the last few years.  Turns out all his clients are now buying from the competition because they have better shipping policies and cheaper prices.  So much for loyalty, and for Jackie’s job.
  

  I said it before, and I will say it again.  Don’t focus your metrics on your customer’s feelings.  Instead, focus on what matters. There are three things you can do to ignore customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and come out ahead:

  1.  Build a solid infrastructure (technologies and processes) to deliver great customer experiences across channels.

  2.  Extend it to include feedback, sales, marketing, operations, and to create end-to-end commendable customer experiences

  3.  Ensure that the delivery of your experiences meet customer expectations, and use expectations to improve your delivery

  Then, you won’t have to worry about loyalty, satisfaction, or anything like that.  Then you will be able to simply focus on doing the best possible job for your customers – and get rewarded for it.

  Are you focusing on the right metrics? Are you doing the right thing?
  

   

• Esteban Kolsky 02:37:46 pm on July 17, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Feedback Management, LinkedIn, metrics, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  Lots have been said about customer satisfaction see at the end of this entry for entries on this blog about customer satisfaction).  Organizations struggle to get their customer satisfaction scores under control, they “need” or want to get them to a certain number (for some reason, 76% seems to be the magical number most of them are trying to reach today, slightly lower than the 80% we saw couple of years ago).

  Tons of money, time, and resources are piled into these projects.  None of them realize the poor value of customer satisfaction as a stand-alone score.  I have been saying for quite some time that customer satisfaction does not rank very high in the list of metrics you should follow — yet, I get more and more requests everyday on how to calculate it and use it.  As a Public Service I am going to give you four secrets on how to score higher in customer satisfaction surveys:

  1. Know who to survey. what happens if you ask someone who is disgruntled or unhappy? there goes your customer satisfaction score down the drain. Know your customers, segment them, and pick the segment that is likely to return higher scores.  Survey them.  In any customer base there is always a 8-10% that would give you high scores regardless of what you do, another 10-15% or so will never like you no matter what.  There is also 20-30% that don’t like to give low scores in surveys.  Find out who the first and last group are and try to survey them and not the others.

  2. Select the words for your questions carefully. There are many books written on how to ask questions for surveys, comparing the different words you use and the results you get.  You see this being used in political surveys all the time: using support vs. agree, think vs. feel, and many more.  Truth is, how you write the question will bias the answer you get.  People react different when you use “think” instead of “feel”.  Psychologically, they feel that feelings are more private and their reaction is to guard their feelings by lowering scores so you don’t know how they feel.  They tend to give you higher scores when you ask for their thoughts.

  3. Change the scale for your metrics. Feedback “experts” will tell you that using smaller scales (e.g. from one through five)  will give you less granularity into your answers.  It will also give you higher scores.  Customers are not inherently out to give you poor scores, but the more choices they have the more likely they are to split hairs.  In smaller scales it is easier to get to an 80% of satisfaction, since that is only 2 out of 5 scores, than in a larger scale where it is 3 out of 10.  Using numbers instead of words (such as agree or disagree with their different variations) will give you higher scores; call it human nature, but we don’t like to agree.

  4. Coerce higher scores. If you offer a prize or a drawing as a result of the feedback your customers provide, you are bound to have higher scores.  Respondents have the feeling that if they are “nicer” to you they have a higher chance of winning.  They believe that if they give you lower scores you will throw away their entry and they won’t qualify for the contest or drawing.  This is mostly because they don’t understand the value of the feedback they provide, and the benefit for them of being honest: they are after the money.

  What is that? Manipulation?  Absolutely, no questions about it.  See why you should not use this metric? It is not going to improve your relationships with your customer, guide your customer service changes appropriately, or make you more liked by your customers.  Actually, if you rely on this metric to guide your operations you are likely to loose more customers this way.  Use with caution, good measure, and within a metrics program that looks at other metrics to make sure you don’t over-rely on it.

  Are you still using customer satisfaction as a metric? Did I convince you otherwise?

  Links to Customer Satisfaction Entries

  http://evergance.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/the-one-two-combo-to-end-customer-satisfaction/

  http://evergance.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/the-end-of-customer-satisfaction/

   

• Esteban Kolsky 06:57:02 am on July 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: automation, cost control, cost savings, CRM, Customer Experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, satisfaction, service

  Customer demand more – more features, more service, more representatives.  You look at what you can do within your budgeting constraints and probably want to start crying.  Not much more you can do, or afford to do; least of all, bring in more people.  Certainly, other corporations are doing better than you – right?

  Well, No. Everyone is asking the same question: how can we grow the number of customers without increasing the number of representatives or the cost for customer maintenance.  Alas, leading corporations began to realize in the last 12 months what it takes to achieve this difficult balance.  Hire more customer service representatives.  Lots more,,, like millions of them.

  That’s right.  You can get as many more customer service representatives as you want – for free.  Yes, FREE.  Impossible you say?  Unlikely you express? (OK, I ran out of synonyms without checking the thesaurus).  Nay.  Easier than you think.  The answer is simple: empower your customers to become customer service representatives.  There are three steps to get there:

  First, find the right interactions.  Comb your logs, ask your agents.  What is the largest number of interactions that your customers could solve on their own? Changing an address? Establishing new service? Getting a refund?  In the early days of web self-service, AT&T Wireless (the old one, not this one) leaped ahead of their competitors by offering the ability to claim credits for dropped calls automatically through a web interface.  The saved lots of time and money and (more important) lots of CSRs time to take on other tasks.  No interaction is too complex or too simple if you can figure out how to automate it.

  Which brings us to step two. Automate, entirely and completely, the chosen interactions.  That means there is no human check at the end of the process to ensure it is correct.  You write all the business rules and exceptions for processing, feed them into a rules server, test them.  Then flip the switch.  The computer will now handle those interactions for you – and kick out the exceptions you want or need.  Your only job is to monitor the results periodically and tighten the rules and exceptions as you go along.  Can you imagine the savings if you deflect all those interactions from the phone?

  Right about now your question is – will people use it?  Well, here is where it depends on you – our third step. Advertise, advertise, advertise.  “Force” customers to use the system (that means make it simple, available, and advertise it all over).  Make it a service differentiator.  Make it part of your brand.  Let them know the benefits, incentivize them to use it.  Make sure it performs flawlessly each time – and that necessary handling of exceptions is above average for speed and satisfaction (i.r. err on the side of the customer).

  Guess what?  You just hired millions of new CSRs towork for FREE.  What do you think?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 03:08:50 pm on June 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: contact center, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email, erms, satisfaction

  I would like to add some wood to the “email use in customer service” fire. If you have been following the blogs last week, we have a little of a controversy going on about whether email should be used for support – or sent to sleep with the fishes. Personally, I believe that email is an essential support tool in certain situations, and when done properly. For medium-complexity scenarios, with lots of data necessary to exchange hands, and where accuracy is paramount (like something you can cut and paste from a screen or log), email cannot be beat. The process of reading an error message via telephone is usually cumbersome at best. I know that organizations that implement email for support situations such as the above, when they answer promptly (read before 2 hours for 80% of emails, 4 hours for 100%) and they get good results.

  Of course, these “good results” don’t usually translate into easily quantifiable cost savings, or return-on-investment models. That would be too easy, now wouldn’t it? I have been working lately with some clients that are trying to come up with Justification models for their ERMS (email response management system) deployments, and we are struggling. I will be very honest, each case is different and we can only use tested-and-proven ROI models as a basis to start the discussion, then we deviate into the different variables that affect each business. At the end, we can always justify implementing an ERMS on financial terms — as long as we are willing to make certain assumptions about growth and support, very often the largest unknown components. Worse, when we create TCO models, over three years, it is hard to find cost savings over using the telephone, and little over a chat implementation. Most of the benefits come from two areas:

  Experience Management and Customer Loyalty

  Reduction in manual process when automation is implemented

  So – what should you use to justify your ERMS implementation? Glad you asked…

  This is where your Customer Experience Management, or a similar initiative, comes into place. Use your customer’s demands to justify your ERMS initiative. Yep, use them to service them… corny, huh? Let me explain.

  1) Prepare a survey for the purpose of understanding your customer’s needs and demands, if you have not already done it (even if you did it already, read on… chances are it was not the best survey you ever done). The survey should have just 3-4 questions related to your planning of customer service for the next 2-3 years, and what customers would like to see in it. Don’t sneak questions on satisfaction, loyalty, or anything like that in there. Simply planning questions.

  2) Ask the following : “We are considering implementing one more technology for service and support. Please rank from 1 through 5 your choice of the following technologies to submit service and support requests”. Then, it would feature three, four, or five technologies like chat, SMS, email, etc. Pick the ones you would seriously consider implementing.

  3) Your customers will then tell you, if they want email, that you should implement email for support. Depending on the ranking and your plans, you can justify your ERMS on Customer Experience Management reasons: customers want it, we will give it to them. You will find that the costs of implementing ERMS, or virtually any other technology you can imagine, will not drastically reduce the existing costs… but, customers want to have it.

  Would you willing to take the chance to have your customers say “no, please don’t implement that”? What would you do then? Let me know…

   

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