Can't get no satisfaction

It might be presumptuous of me, but I assume that if you’re reading this you must believe that research works – that what we do can help improve the customer’s lot. And surely this link between research and improving outcomes for customers must be at its closest when applied to customer satisfaction surveys.

In theory, it’s all very easy: you ask your customers what you’re getting right, what you’re getting wrong and how you can improve. And then you go about putting what you’ve got wrong right.

Year in year out, businesses around the world spend more than an investment banker’s bonus on finding out what their customers think of them. They use five-point scales, eleven-point scales and all points in between. Importance is measured using linear statistics. Some track mean scores, others report the top two boxes. Still more believe that if you subtract the bottom seven boxes from the top two, the meaning of life will be revealed to you. Then companies take all these numbers and apply action standards, impose supplier KPIs and put customers at the heart of their corporate mission statements to make sure everything is part of one big continuous improvement process.

Research works, right, so what’s the problem? Well the last time I looked, not all customers were deliriously happy. Just try a little experiment and you’ll see what I mean. Talk to a few friends, log onto Mumsnet or ask a Facebook group if they’ve had a problem recently with their bank, say, or with their utility service, or when getting their car serviced. Make sure you’ve got plenty of time free when you do this because within a second you’ll be overwhelmed by outraged customers.

Why is this? How can we be getting it so wrong? Is it because we raise expectations to a level it’s impossible to meet? Do we sell the sizzle so well that no sausage can possibly taste that good? I’m sure that’s part of it. But I also think it’s because in the huge industry that is customer satisfaction we’ve allowed ourselves to lose sight of one important ingredient – the customer. Far too often customer satisfaction surveys are designed to meet management’s need for metrics to monitor performance across a range of departments and contracts.

This is what leads to so many long and tedious questionnaires that have precious little to do with keeping the customer happy. We’ve seen a car manufacturer’s service customers being asked about the quality of the coffee at the dealership. We’ve seen passengers on long-haul flights being asked about the freshness of the fruit with their meal. What we haven’t seen is any evidence that beverage quality and satsuma freshness are key drivers of automobile or airline choice.

Unless things have shifted so far that we no longer believe research has a part to play in improving the customer’s lot, we need to have a serious rethink about how we approach customer satisfaction. Collectively, our role as researchers should be to put the customer back into the customer satisfaction process. It’s high time for us all to stop complying with requests to bombard customers with meaningless questions in order to fulfil this need for internal metrics.

At the risk of preaching to the converted, here are eight golden rules that we would all do well to follow if customer satisfaction research is to make the slightest bit of difference to customers.

1. Focus on the customer, not the brand
Our first and most important rule when designing customer satisfaction surveys is to remember that if you want to keep your customers happy, finding out what they want to tell you is far more important than finding out what you want to know. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you don’t like being asked to rate dozens of attributes without being given the chance to nail the one thing that’s bugging you, then why should they? Get this wrong and you’ll end up with research that does more harm than good. Let the interview be customer-driven – find out exactly how you measure up across a few broad areas then dig deep to find out why. If the quality of the coffee really is a concern then they’ll tell you about it.

2. Avoid data greed
We’ve all had the request. “As we’re talking to such a big sample of customers can we just ask them a few extra questions on…” It’s hard to resist at the best of times, even harder when money’s tight. Try rephrasing the question: “As we’re talking to a lot of the people on whose repeat custom our business depends, why don’t we really bore the pants off them?” That way the message should get through.

3. Use statistics wisely
So many studies track trends in mean scores or some other measure of the average. I’d argue that this is one of the least informative measures. My first priority would always be the customers who are unhappy. Detractors are the people who can and will hurt your business and, with the advent of the digital age, a disgruntled customer can now do a huge amount of damage to a brand with just a single tweet. So you need to know why they’re unhappy and what, if anything, you can do about it.

4. Beware of subjective measures
Remember that expectations and needs vary dramatically from one customer to another. Some customers want to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible, others like a chat at the cheese counter. So you really do need to take care in interpreting subjective measures such as standard of dress – if a hardcore biker is unhappy with your sales staff’s standard of dress they’re probably looking for well-worn leathers not well-cut suits.

5. Honour the rules of engagement
Remember that, while you may spend much of your life thinking about your brand, you’re lucky if your customers spend a moment of theirs. So they’re unlikely to make the distinctions that you do between attributes such as quality, reliability and durability. And they can quickly get annoyed with having to repeat themselves. In these instances just pick one – your customers will thank you for it.

6. Beware of foul play
Linking staff rewards to customer satisfaction scores is a real minefield. Get it wrong and you run the risk of encouraging behaviour that distorts the whole process while making the customer less, not more, satisfied. We’ve encountered numerous sales reps who coach their customers on what scores to give on a customer satisfaction survey and we’ve even found a car dealer (a very big one) handing out leaflets on the subject. If measuring customer satisfaction is to achieve its ultimate goal of improving the customer experience we urgently need to make clients appreciate the danger of inadvertently triggering behaviour that damages their business.

7. Tell the right people what they need to know – and what they need to do
Research that doesn’t get to the people who need to know about it is a wasted exercise. Results from customer satisfaction studies belong with frontline staff as much as they belong in the boardroom. After all, changing behaviour in order to improve the overall customer experience is the ultimate goal and unless you can tell the people on the ground what they need to know and, more importantly, what they need to do then measuring customer satisfaction will never be more than an academic exercise.

8. Round up the lost sheep
Don’t forget to include lost and lapsed customers in your customer satisfaction surveys. You really do need to keep track of how many are deserting you and why. It may sound counter-intuitive, but failing companies often find their customer satisfaction scores rising as a small rump of customers remain loyal while all others abandon ship.

Making a difference
The aim of customer satisfaction research should be bringing about positive change for your customer. But in spite of all the millions that get spent on customer satisfaction research, I’m not convinced that customers are significantly more satisfied than they were.

I’m not suggesting that customer satisfaction studies are a waste of time, but if we believe that customer satisfaction research should have an impact on the actual customer experience we need to alter our approach.

I suspect that many researchers will be with me on this. The challenge we have will be making stakeholders understand that any customer satisfaction study is in itself a brand touchpoint. Only then will we succeed in ridding ourselves of the notion that measuring customer satisfaction should be an external measurement process and recognise that its sole function should be to listen to what customers have to say.

Tom Simpson established Simpson Carpenter in 1998. He works in the automotive, technology and retail sectors, focusing on branding and customer satisfaction. Previously he was chairman and CEO of the Harris Research Centre, the UK arm of the Sofres Group