Four Ways to Damage Your Customer Satisfaction

The majority of support organizations are using customer satisfaction as a metric. According to the HDI 2013 Practices & Salary Report, 80% of them have a formal method for measuring customer satisfaction. While measuring customer satisfaction is important, it's not the only part to the equation.

Customer satisfaction isn't just a metric, it's a key performance indicator (KPI), and should be closely tied to strategy and organization goals. Support organizations tend to look at customer satisfaction as just-a-number or a score on their metrics chart. But customer satisfaction is fluid, which makes it difficult to measure accurately. It's easy to get caught up in the measurement process, without taking a closer look at what exactly they should be measuring and why. When this happens, it can affect the long-term success of the support organization, and also damage customer satisfaction scores. Here are four things you may be doing in the measuring that are damaging your customer satisfaction ratings:

Your practices are too intrusive.
Customers want to know that they are being heard, but they don't always want to be singled out for it. Requiring customer contact information on a survey can make them feel targeted - which in turn discourages them from being completely honest or from replying to the survey at all.

One of the main goals for customer satisfaction is to make sure that you are getting enough of a percentage of your customers to respond, and that those responses are representative of the different parts of your support organization. Therefore, it is more prudent to implement practices based on what most of your customers will do. Ask yourself, "Are there more people who want to remain anonymous or not?"

Another practice I hear complaints about is sending survey reminders. While some people may appreciate the reminder, the percentage of customers who do is few. Studies show  more often than not, sending multiple survey reminders sends the wrong message.

You don't provide methods for opting out of surveys.

One of the biggest reason you've started customer satisfaction surveys is to form an image or "snapshot" of the attitude and experiences of your customers about your company. This image doesn't have to encompass ALL of your customers, just most of them. You want to make sure you get enough feedback from your customer base to identify trends or drivers behind your customers satisfaction.

I've seen organizations make the mistake of forcing their customers to respond to surveys in a variety of ways. Survey reminders that are sent out too frequent, phone calls made by support staff, and no opt-out method are just a few. When this happens, it can potentially create more ill-will rather than bolster it. Research shows that most customer satisfaction surveys are responded to within 24-48 hours of the survey being received; those customers who do want to provide feedback have already done so.

Instead of focusing on getting EVERYONE to respond, make sure that your response rate is adequate, and that you are collecting quality feedback you can measure. Click here for tips on how to increase your survey feedback.

You are too focused on the answer you want to receive.

Another mistake made by organizations measuring customer satisfaction is ask the wrong questions. The most common question I get in my line of work is, "Do you have samples of surveys I can look at?" While it's great to look at sample questions and design, this is the wrong place to start. The collection and measurement of your customers satisfaction should always start with....the CUSTOMER. 

First, determine the reason for your surveying. Is it short-term? Long-term? Are there specific topics you want to cover? Are you soliciting feedback to improve your processes and support? If so, what are your support goals? What are the expectations of your customers? Are you meeting those customers expectations? The tailor the questions to those goals, expectations, and processes. This method should be easy to change, as you need the flexibility to measure other issues as they come along.

Giving your customers the ability to provide additional feedback, rather than just answer questions, is also helpful. This feedback can frequently touch on other aspects of your customer service or support you didn't think to measure or report on, and gives you the ability to start digging deeper into the pain points of your customers.

You don't take the right action.

This is where most organizations drop the ball. You may have your goals and expectations lined out, the service processes in place, a method for collecting feedback, and the technology to monitor and analyze it, but then what happens to the data you are collecting?

If what you are measuring isn't being turned into actionable data for change and improvement, you're losing out on your investment of time and money. Don't just report on your monthly scores, or customer service agent performance. Take a hard took at those scores over a period of time, and try to determine trends and drivers behind those scores. Go back to that additional feedback and review the comments on a consistent and frequent basis, looking for commonalities or themes in the responses you get. This is you meat & potatoes, where you'll get the most value.

And don't let follow-up become automated. When you are made aware of a negative customer service experience (and set it up so that you are made aware right away!), have someone reach out to those customers to smooth things over. Since feedback is given within one to two days, don't let a customer go more than three days without a phone call, a personal email, or a resolution.

Putting these into practice is important in closing the loop between you and your customers, as well as ultimately increasing your customers satisfaction and the attitude they have toward you and your organization.

Are You Measuring Customer Experience?

One of my LinkedIn group members recently got me thinking about a very interesting topic - the difference between measuring customer satisfaction and customer experience. Customer satisfaction is commonly measured on a per incident basis, with a survey being sent after an incident has closed. Measuring it this way allows you to collect the satisfaction levels and feedback from a customer based on the experience they had at the time with your support center. However, just measuring customer satisfaction isn't always enough.

Take this for example. Example Company A uses the HDI Customer Satisfaction Index Service to measure customer satisfaction in five areas. These areas are: Courtesy, Knowledge, Timeliness, Quality, and Overall. These five categories are heavily influenced by the analyst or technician who handled the incident through a certain channel. While the last category can also be heavily influenced by the analyst or technician, a question of this nature can frequently be influenced by other factors.

Example Company A maintains an overall customer satisfaction rating of 96% over 90 days. This percentage is determined by averaging the five categories they are measuring customer satisfaction for. Example Company A also collects additional feedback from their customers on the surveys they send, which allows them to look for other issues or challenges they may need to address.

Example Company B is similar, in that they use the HDI CSI Service, measure the same five categories, and also collect additional feedback from their customers. However, they have added one additional question to their survey, which states, "The experience I had with your company will contribute to my decision to become a return customer." While they also have high overall customer satisfaction ratings, the ratings from this question turn out to be 86%. What happened here?

Approaching the measurement of customer satisfaction from the customer’s perspective is useful in determining the gaps. How long were they on hold? How many times were they transferred or escalated to a different support level? Did they attempt to contact support through more than one channel and speak to more than one person? These are the types of questions that should arise from collecting this data.

Once you have the data, you can start turning it into actionable data to effect change. A customer’s perception of your company is everything. Managing that perception is quite a task if you are not measuring your customer’s experience, or worse, not measuring customer satisfaction at all.

Are you measuring customer experience?

Consistency Counts in Moments

Have you ever wondered why it's so easy to forget a password for a website you frequent? Do you chalk it up to poor memory, distraction, or getting older? There's a simple explanation for why these types of brain lapses occur, and it has to do with consistency.

Consistency helps keep us in line. Humans are creatures of habit. Most of our daily comfort comes from consistency. It's key in brainstorming, designing, delivering, and solving. Consistency in ITSM leads to positive customer experiences. Let me elaborate:

One of the questions I'm most frequently asked from my clients is, "How can we improve customer satisfaction?" While their thinking is going in the right direction, they are asking the wrong question. Most organizations look at their customers satisfaction as a static number, a percentage of their customer base that can tell them that 4 out of 5 times they are getting it right.

Unfortunately, customer satisfaction isn't a static number, and it's not easily measured, if you want to do it right. The question they should be asking is, "What can we do to improve the customer experience?" Looking for the impediments, inconveniences, and process breaks that affect your customers is a good place to start. But while you're there, you might as well go one step further....and try to make it as easy for your customers as you can. Consistency is a great way to do this.

In IT Service Management moments count. Depending on the industry; whether it's government, higher education, or healthcare, moments don't just count, but they can make an enormous impact on quality. Things move very quickly in the IT world, and much more so for those who are in IT support roles. Therefore, the experience your customer, or internal customer, receives when an issue occurs is critical. From the ability to reach you quickly  through their preferred contact channel, to the messaging they hear from each support level, and the processes each level has for issue resolution, it must be consistent.

When things go wrong, service levels are impacted, and the ability to recover quickly so that your customers experience isn't diminished, is key. Consistent incident and problem management processes, escalations, and follow-up will help you do this.

Doing things over and over the same way doesn't just help the customer, it helps you. Being consistent will help improve your internal workings, making them smoother and more efficient, and ultimately allow you to focus more on what matters....your customer.