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Articles & White Papers written by Great BrookArranged by topic
Survey Project ManagementSurvey Research PracticesPolitical pollsters have a lot at stake in their polling predictions -- their reputations. Many of their challenges are the same ones we confront in surveying our customers or employees or members. Recent newspaper articles discuss some of the challenges pollsters are confronting, and we confront similar changes. This articles presents some of these challenges to survey design and administration.
"Delight, don't just satisfy” has been the mantra in customer service circles for many years. Satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal was the underlying assumption. Now a research project by the Customer Contact Council of the Corporate Executive Board argues that exceeding expectations has minimal marginal benefit over just meeting expectations. In essence the authors argue that satisfaction drives loyalty more than the mysterious delight factors. This article examines the argument, and specifically looks at its shortcomings in how they establish the loyalty link.
NPS® raises a lot of discussion. This article summarizes a discussion of the Customer Loyalty Forum on the NPS, covering a breadth and wealth of topics.
A long understood, but seldom followed, truism of organization design that reporting for operational control and management control should not be mixed. Tools designed to provide front-line managers information about operational performance will become compromised when used for performance measurement. This is true for surveys used for operational control. Reichheld's Net Promotor Score® was intended to be an operational control tool, but when used for performance measurement, we can see the deleterious effects.
Research studies, such as surveys, are meant to enlighten some decision making process. However, if the research is poorly conceived and executed, incorrect data may be generated. Decision making is then made under delusions of knowledge.
"Customer surveying for small business -- why bother?"
Common wisdom is that only large companies need customer-research programs. After all, small companies have their feet on the ground and know what customers are thinking, right? On the surface, that seems a reasonable attitude for small-business managers to take. But ask yourself if there is some percentage of customers defecting to competitors each year for part or all of their purchases. Also printed in the July 26, 2002 print edition of the Boston Business Journal.
"Customer Satisfaction Surveys: The Heart of a Great Loyalty Program"
This article outlines key elements of a customer satisfaction survey and its role in a customer loyalty program. Originally published in the September 1999 issue of Customer Support Management.
Survey Project ManagementTransactional surveys are a vital cog for operational improvement and in customer retention. The HomeAway customer experience transactional survey doesn't generate actionable data, including identifying customers in need of a service recovery event. This article reviews the shortcomings of this customer support transactional survey.
Survey projects are not done with the presentation of results. You should take action on the findings AND communicate the actions to the group you're engaging with the survey program. This article discusses how this will further engage the group you have surveyed for further feedback.
Surveys, especially transactional surveys, identify customers in need of a service recovery act. The worst thing you can do is ignore screams for help. Better to just forget doing the survey. This article discusses this most important communication element in a survey program.
Survey projects are frequently treated without the due diligence required to ensure success. They seem deceptively simple. Why the need to plan? That, as any project manager knows, is a recipe for failure. Some level of resource commitment is needed from an organization to provide a firm foundation for a successful survey project. This article examines those requirements from both monetary and personnel resource perspectives.
A successful survey program starts with a firm foundation. Without a clearly articulated Statement of Research Objectives the survey project is likely to meander with disagreements among the players during the project especially about the questions to create for the survey instrument. Failure is more likely. This article outlines the critical elements that should be part of this first step in a survey project and how to reverse engineer the research statement from a currently used survey questionnaire.
Large, sophisticated companies, like Sears, can make devastating mistakes in their survey program design, creating customer disloyalty. Read this review of Sears IVR customer satisfaction survey for its multiple mistakes. You'll come to understand why Sears has earned its reputation for poor customer service.
Hotel surveys are typically transactional or event surveys, used for customer satisfaction measurement and improvement. A key challenge is how to increase response rates to generate actionable data through better survey design. Stephen Hardenburg of the Hilton Family of hotels discusses the challenges he faces managing Hilton's customer satisfaction research programs.
To create a survey program for any IT support center can be a challenge, but throw in the limitations faced by a university help desk and the issues can be daunting. Joyce Sandusky of Clayton State University led an effort to design a customer loyalty program for their help desk. She learned many hard lessons, even though she went into the project with her eyes wide open. We interviewed her for this article to get some insights and lessons for others who are undertaking the challenge of creating a help desk survey, especially for a university setting.
Frederick Reichheld's Harvard Business Review article, "The One Number You Need to Grow," may lead readers to believe that a one-question survey design that measures "net promoter score®" will provide all the data needed to grow a business. However, digging deep into the article we find that a meaningful customer feedback program also has to identify the root causes for a customer's unwillingness to recommend a product or service. This article highlights those points and shows that more than one number is needed to grow a business.
This article outlines the 7 key elements that are essential to success in a survey project.
Questionnaire DesignQuestionnaire Design Practices
What can the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 - also known as Stimulus 1 -- teach us about surveying practices? You may think nothing, but you'd be wrong. We can see the need for thinking through the logic of the data collection form and the introduction for a form that is all about demographic data.
Charming, posh hotels may not have charming surveys if they have been designed by those lacking significant survey questionnaire design experience. This article reviews the an event survey for a hotel stay at a hotel that is part of the Relais & Châteaux Association. We see many shortcomings in the survey design, some due to translation issues. This survey article is a collaboration with OmniTouch International's CEO, Daniel Ord, who personally experienced this survey.
A survey invitation may make the first impression of a survey program for those in your respondent pool. A good impression is critical to getting a good survey response rate, but the invitation may present other critical information to the potential respondent. Most importantly, the invitation should be honest. The elements of a good survey invitation are presented in this article in the context of reviewing a poor invitation from HomeAway.com.
Survey designers ignore their respondents at their peril. The author recounts lessons from an ardent survey taker about how the design affected her respondent burden.
Surveys are supposed to collect information from customers, but some surveys are so poorly designed that they just tick off the respondents. This Yahoo Merchant Survey is perhaps the most insulting survey we have ever encountered in how they waste the respondents' time and use disparaging language.
Questionnaire Design -- Types of Surveys
The goal of a survey project should be to generate data that will be used to monitor or improve some business process. Generating actionable data from a survey is not a simple task. This article outlines some ways to get more useful data from a research program that includes surveys.
Home Depot requests its customers to take a "brief survey about your store visit," which is a classic example of an event-based survey. Perhaps you've taken it. However, this is not just an event survey. The survey design shifts into a relationship survey mode, which lengthens the survey greatly. Plus, the survey displays some questionable design practices. Read this critique.
Summary of lessons learned from the Home Depot customer satisfaction survey about the proper use of event surveys.
Questionnaire Design -- Question Types & Scale Design
Survey questionnaire design has a critical impact on the value of the data generated by the survey program. The survey scale design in particular can skew the responses generated to create almost perfect "top box scores." This article examines the Ritz Carlton survey, a transactional survey, and shows how the scale design impacts the value of the findings.
The choice of question type on a survey questionnaire is critical. Why? Because survey question types generate different types of data, the data type constrains the type of analysis that can (legitimately) be done to the data. This article presents the five data types generated by the five major types of survey questions. It illustrates a typical error in data analysis when ordinal data is treated as interval data and how the resulting analysis can mislead decision makers.
"Scale Design in Surveys: The Impact on Performance Measurement Systems -- and the Value of Dispersion"
This article examines the design of the scale chosen for the survey and its impact upon setting performance goals. Scale choices and question design will affect the way people respond. The article also discusses why high scores are not necessarily good -- if your goal is to use the survey results for continuous improvement projects, requiring Pareto Analysis.
"The Importance of Measuring Importance -- Correctly -- on Customer Surveys."
Frequently, when business surveys try to measure importance of various factors the survey generates useless data. Everything gets rated as important, so nothing is important. This article covers methods of measuring importance showing the advantages and disadvantages of each. The key is getting the respondent to think about the trade-offs across the factors.
In my Survey Workshops, I discuss the need to localize survey instruments if they will be delivered internationally. Well, during an exercise where students build a scale, a Texan created a scale regionalized to Texas. Have your own localized contribution?
Survey AdministrationSurvey Administration Methods
"An Old Dog's New Tricks: Postal Mail Surveys"
Everyone wants to do surveys on the web as the new thing, but perhaps the old techniques still have some life. This article outlines the experiences of one of my students who performed a postal mail survey -- and got a response rate over 60%!
"Automated Phone Surveys: IVR Survey Administration Method"
IVR surveys are a relatively new method for survey administration, best used for transactional surveys. In this article, we define IVR surveys and examine their strengths and weaknesses.
Sample Generation
"Survey Sample Selection: The Need to Consider Your Whole Research Program"
A counterintuitive result of a survey project is that a survey's results are likely to pose as many new questions as it answers. An email to me recently posed a dilemma that can result from a particular approach to a survey program. The company had conducted a survey and now they wanted to ask some follow-up questions based upon the learning from the first survey. The question is: whom should they invite to take the survey?
Sample size
Perhaps the topic most inquired in the field of surveys, especially customer satisfaction surveys, is response rates. What's a good response rate? What's the statistical accuracy with a certain response rate? But what is sometimes missed is that the response rate should not be the only concern. Bias in the response group should be an equally important concern. Lots of responses will give a good statistical accuracy, but it's a false sense of security if there's a sample bias. In particular, we'll discuss survey fatigue and non-response bias.
"Statistical Confidence in a Survey: How Many is Enough?"
Response rates and statistical confidence are always concerns for those tasked with a survey project. This article outlines the factors that determine the number of responses needed for a level of accuracy and shows how to determine the statistical confidence that can be placed in survey results.
Survey software tools
Online survey software tools can make it easy for novices to create a survey -- or a bad survey! This article reviews the benefits from using web survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang, including strong concerns about blind reliance upon Internet survey tools, which can result in invalid survey questionnaires and delusions of knowledge.
This article reviews important features of online survey tools and the decision process for selecting a web survey tool, such as SurveyMonkey, Perseus, QuestionPro, or Zoomerang.
Survey Data Analysis"Setting Goals from Survey Data: The Conundrum of Statistics"
Reporting the results of a customer survey is a critical step, and different statistical approaches can be applied to survey data. This article discusses the implications of reporting means versus "top box" cumulative distribution scores, especially as it relates to setting performance goals.
Customer Experience Management & Customer Feedback ManagementAre customers always right? A Wall Street Journal article raises the question of whether the customer or the service agent was the disagreeable party.
The most important impressions to a customer are the first impression. One company, Constant Contact, goes beyond the automated messages that lack all sincerity, and really focuses on the onboarding process. This article describes their onboarding process as a critical first step in customer experience management.
"Customer Experience Design - Do our designs bring out the best or the worst in our customers?"
Customer Experience Design requires that we show respect for our customers. Lean Six Sigma systems bring out the best in their employees by applying a sociotechnical systems thinking perspective. When applied to service operations we must remember that customers are part of the production system. Incidents like the encounter between Steven Slater, Jet Blue flight attendant, and the passenger beg the question whether our service systems bring out the best or the worst in our customers.
"Everyone in the Pool! Good for Parties But a Muddied Customer Service Design for United Airlines and Comcast"
"Everyone in the pool" may make for a good summer party, but it's a lousy design for customer service organizations. Customer service at companies such as United Airlines and Comcast used the pooled approach to answer customer email inquiries. While the approach lends the impression of greater efficiency, this approach leads to more rounds of email exchanges, customer aggravation, and wasted effort on the part of the company. The failure lies in the performance metrics used to measure the organization.
Customer appreciation is one of those terms that is bandied about so much that it has lost its meaning. As a consultant in customer service and customer feedback management, I'm pretty cynical about these attempts at such marketing hype, so imagine my pleasant surprise when I actually felt appreciated as a customer, not from some major retailer with a fancy promotion or some high tech firm who had hired marketing wizards, but from my local restaurant, a pub in Hudson, Mass. Their secret sauce: genuineness.
What's more important when the economy goes in a downturn, capturing profit today or maintaining customer loyalty? Read about the Indian Lakes Conference Center focus on short-term profits and the resulting attrition to its customer base.
Performance measurements help guide organizations to achieve their goals. Service organizations have conflicting objectives. They strive to be both efficient in resource use and effective in the quality of service as perceived by customers. But how to measure service effectiveness? This article presents a framework for service measurement -- from call monitoring and mystery shopping to customer surveys, focus groups and complaint solicitation. The key finding is that a portfolio of approaches is needed to provide comprehensive and balanced measures of service effectiveness.
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a catch phrase for business processes that focus on delivering customer experiences that enhance the perceived value of a company's products and services. Superior CEM requires good process design and solid execution - and a supportive organizational culture. This article presents examples of Good, Bad, and Ugly CEM examples, concluding with key lessons.
We usually think that our most valuable customers are ones that buy a lot from us -- and that's true! -- but to learn about your business practices your best customers may be the ones that walk away from you. Of course, this value is only recognized -- if you capture their feedback! Also published in the November 8, 2002 edition of the Boston Business Journal.
How could buying paint provide lessons on capturing customer feedback? See how. "Viewpoint" article, November 1998 ServiceNews.
Service Recovery"Complaint Identification: A Key Outcome of World Class CRM Surveys"
Arguably the most important part of a customer satisfaction survey is not part of the survey process but rather what you do after the survey with the survey data. Companies, such as Sears and Home Depot, frequently miss the golden opportunity to identify customers at risk and engage in Service Recovery.
The essence of service recovery is fairness. A customer with a problem wants the company to treat him fairly. An intelligent company recognizes long term benefits of effective complaint handling and tries to deliver a fair resolution in all its dimensions. This article presents the three dimensions of fairness, and shows how Subaru of America missed the mark badly on one dimension - thanks to the lawyers - turning sour an otherwise good service recovery, negating the benefits delivered on the other dimensions.
Effective service recovery requires that robust complaint solicitation and complaint handling systems be built and executed consistently. Part of that "system" is a pervasive corporate culture that supports service recovery. This article reviews the author's experiences at two hotels, a high-end Marriott and Ritz Carlton, both extremely well known for service and service recovery, and how they bungled customer service issues. The lessons from these experiences are pertinent for most any business.
Service recovery is more than just complaint handling. It is recovering a customer's positive feelings about a company after a bad experience and taking action to resolve the root cause of the problem. This article looks at service recovery as practiced by the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Seattle SuperSonics and how they create Fan Delight and avoid Fan Outrage.
Design for Supportability PracticesDuring new product development, R&D engineers need to consider a wide range of often-conflicting requirements, including product features, cost, quality and manufacturability. Therefore, it is not surprising that support requirements are often neglected. However, support is an essential factor for achieving customer satisfaction in many industries, and so ensuring that products are easy and economical to support is a priority. Customer support managers know this but often have problems in convincing their R&D colleagues. This article looks at the issues involved in achieving Design for Supportability-the full evaluation of support requirements at the design stage.
"Agathas in Our Midst (Can Lead to Better Products)."
Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, presents a world in which homicides are prevented before they happen. Three precognitives' visions of near future events allow the Department of Precrime to capture these intended killers. Neat idea. If only we in the business world could spot product quality `crimes' before they occur -- rather than reacting to problems once customers use our products. Product designers and product managers are tasked with projecting the future, but is there an organizational equivalent for Agatha, the precog who sometimes saw the future differently from her mates, Arthur and Dashiell? Also published in the April 28 2003 edition of the Boston Business Journal.
A synopsis of Dr. Fred Van Bennekom's research in this area.
Strategic Role of Service & SupportLean production principles can lead to great efficiency improvements through waste (muda) elimination coupled with competitive advantages in lead times and quality. But a too lean service operation with no buffers for uncertainty can lead to disasters like Jet Blue's Valentine's Day Massacre. This article examines the uncertainties inherent in a service operation like airlines and explores the logical extent of lean application.
MathWorks recognized one of customer support's strategic roles for a company: providing a training ground for new, entry-level employees. By delivering support, the employees learn the products quickly -- and they learn customer sensitivity. Read how they make this program work for the employees, the company, tech support, and the customer.
Is the legislation contemplated by Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota really needed to correct bad support practices? Should this be a wake-up call for the support industry?
Many organizations call themselves Customer Care. But do the organizations truly care about their customers? This article relates a personal example of deep customer care in the most trying of circumstances.
This article chronicles the similar evolution of the role of relief pitchers in baseball with the role of support organizations. Really. Baseball and strategic customer support. Plus, an ode to Dick Radatz
"Challenging the Support Paradigm: Problem Rectification or Problem Prevention."
"Viewpoint" article, February 1997 ServiceNews.
MiscellaneousAre pay-to-play laws meant to protect us against kickbacks in government contracts, but are they an unwarranted attack on First Amendment freedom of speech?
"How Broad, How Deep: Lessons from a CRM Implementation"
When a company chooses to implement a CRM system, several critical questions must be addressed. This article outlines a case study where the initial approach was to isolate certain sales and marketing functions as the target for the CRM implementation. Midway through the project, the company recognized that all aspects of the customer order, fulfillment, and support processes needed to be considered even if not all would be re-engineered in the initial stages of the CRM project. They also recognized that certain front-office processes were more logical candidates for the initial re-engineering.
You may recall the game show by the name of this article. A panel of celebrities would try to guess someone's profession by asking yes or no questions. Imagine if one of your customer service employees were on the show. Would you be able to guess their profession? It likely depends upon how narrowly or broadly their jobs have been defined. This article shows the impact of the two extremes, narrow and broad job definitions.
Finding good venues for small meetings or workshops is a challenge. Here's my list of good meeting venues for workshops. Please contribute!
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