You get what you ask for - maybe

Posted on February 16, 2009 
Filed Under Managing Client Relations, Managing Projects

Who hasn’t heard that tough questions are hard to ask? But it’s not really the questions is it? “Do you love me?” isn’t a tough question if you know the answer is “yes”.

Designing customer satisfaction surveys that are meaningful, is not for the faint of heart. Developing questions that bring back answers that we can use to transform our services and products for the better takes courage and faith. Faith that a relationship with the community(s) we serve based on honesty is better for the sustainability of our organizations, than a relationship based on a belief that just because of who we are, what we do is good and necessary.

Seth Godin has Five tips for better online surveys and while I understand his point about making surveys more interesting for our users, I’m not sure that more interesting necessarily means shaking up the format or entertaining them. Surveys are worth our customer’s effort only if we act on those surveys. Within a reasonable amount of time after a survey, we should be able to say “we heard from you….” and “we are going to…”.

His most intriguing tip is,

Every question you ask changes the way your users think. If you ask, “which did you hate more…” then you’ve planted a seed.

There is a danger in taking this tip and thinking that it would be smart to plant a positive seed with “which did you love best…”. That still doesn’t tell us enough about developing our customer relationships. It’s like the guy asking “Do you love me best for my sparkling wit or my great cooking?”. And she answers with a charming “both are equally appealing, but I suppose if I have to chose, I’ll pick the wit.” The truth is, at least his imitation of a four year old with his shoes on the wrong feet didn’t nearly kill her like his fusion Greek/Japanese cooking (lamb sushi?) and since she’s leaving anyway it doesn’t really matter.

I have also been wondering about Likert scales . These are common and are often mistakenly used with the belief that they are more “scientific” or less corruptible than open ended questions. I had several in a survey the other day at the dentist in which they kept switching the values for the 1-5. For some questions the number 1 stood in for “excellent”, for others it was “poor”, and then there was an odd question in which it expressed “I don’t know”. Perhaps it was an attempt to make the survey interesting, or maybe they were measuring my alertness rather than their service. I really wasn’t that alert and I’m now pretty certain that I handed in a corrupt survey (I tried to explain my mistakes, but the nice woman at the desk said “it really didn’t matter”).

Likert scales remind me of multiple choice tests. I suspect that they often (but not always) measure, and ensure, the continuity of mediocrity when they set out to measure “customer satisfaction”. My fabulous colleague Navee brought to my attention Fred Reichheld and the concept of measuring customer loyalty rather than satisfaction. Here’s an excerpt from his promotional website about measuring your Net Promoter Score (be careful - that’s trademarked!)

Net Promoter Score is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories. “Promoters” are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do the same. “Passives” are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And “detractors” are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship.

Did you get that? A satisfied customer isn’t that great.

The Net Promoter Community is an interesting place to kick around in for awhile if only for comments such as this from Bruce Temkin in My Closing Thoughts on Net Promoter:

The excitement and exuberance of a single measure for customer loyalty is giving way to some second guessing and rethinking. Companies are learning that it’s not as easy as just using NPS, it takes hard work to figure out how to best use NPS to improve customer experience.

Hey ho, looks like any method of measurement requires hard work, assessment of the tool (not just the outcomes), and then perhaps some adjusting of the tool.

I’ll close with one of those educational spots. Consider it a how-to for adjusting units or scales of measure.

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