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.

Use Knowledge Management to Increase Customer Satisfaction

I recently moved to a new home, and transferred my internet and TV services. I had bundled services with one of the major providers in my area, providing a home VOIP phone for business use, cable internet, and cable TV with DVR service. I was enjoying my service and had pretty good equipment. A month into my move to the new home, my equipment began to act up and I had trouble with my DVR. Being the technically savvy person I was, I logged on to their website and checked my account to see if there were any current outages or reported issues. While the website was easy to navigate, it took way too long for me to find out what my issue was. Here were my steps:

1. I first clicked on their support page to find something related to current known issues. There were no pages or notices, or any place for adding these types of notices, available on the support pages. This type of support is pretty proactive, though it is becoming more the standard nowadays. I wasn't too terribly inconvenienced to not find this here, but I was disappointed.
2. I then checked their list of top articles for FAQs, frequently used articles, and their top 10 common issues, which did not address any of my issues at all. I had to click through each link and then through a set of more links, until I got frustrated and went directly back to the support page. I credit myself for being patient, so I decided to try another tactic.
3. I typed a search into their online knowledge base. I started general with terms such as “issue,” “common issue,” common problem,” “outages,” and “equipment failure.” The search returned no usable results, and no pages that listed common issues or current known issues reported by users.
4. I then refined my search to include more specific terms (“DVR problem,” “recording skipped,” “X1 equipment issues”) and it finally returned pages that had some promising results. These pages, however, were forum posts created by the company’s customers, not the company representatives themselves. This was concerning to me.
5. I started reading a few of the forum posts. Firstly, there were multiple posts for similar issues. Secondly, these posts were way too long. The first post I started reading through was 10 pages, and near the end a company representative posted a link directing customers to read a different thread.
6. I followed the link to the new thread, which was created by a company representative (this post didn't come up on my search list….wonder why?) a full day after the initial post I read. This thread asked customers to post their issues specific to the XI equipment to assist them with troubleshooting. This thread was well over 50 pages. 50 PAGES. Of customers reporting issues. I skipped around a bit, and found throughout the first 10-15 pages, different company representatives were responding to complaints being left in this thread by customers. Each of the responses was different (shame, shame, shame! Click here for why) but there was a common theme….all customers with the new X1 equipment were experiencing problems due to a software patch previously rolled out, and they were working on the issue but didn't know when it would be fixed.

Now I’d like to point out a few things.  The amount of time it took me to find related information to my issue was completely unacceptable. When I did find what I was looking for, the messaging was not consistent, it was not located in a highly visible area, and there was no statements addressing a time frame for when the issue would be resolved. For those of you familiar with knowledge management, you can clearly see how far they missed the mark. For those of you not familiar with knowledge management, it is a methodology for capturing, optimizing, delivering and maintaining a collection of knowledge that is of value to an organization. Below are a couple of illustrations associated with knowledge management.

What should have happened:

What really happened:

Notice the large gap on the first graphic between when the information is published and when the issue peaks out? More customers experiencing the issue are able to take advantage of that knowledge. The most important concept to understand when looking at these gaps is that they are directly tied to cost. The more time representatives spend on an issue, the more it costs. Simple as that.

Now add in additional channels that a customer can contact a company, such as phone, email, and chat; each with their own inconsistent messaging, and each with representatives communicating with customers and sending issues to the help desk for diagnosis. Talk about driving up cost!

The point I’m trying to make is simply this…the more time a customer has to spend looking for an answer to their issue, the less profitable support becomes and the lower customer satisfaction drops.

3 Simple Ways To Get Survey Feedback

I've recently been asked the question: “How do I get my customers to answer the satisfaction surveys I send to them?” This question sounds reasonable enough, as most organizations are turning towards using their customers’ experience to improve their products and services. If you already have a tool setup that consistent delivers customer satisfaction surveys, here are three simple ways to make sure you get the survey feedback you want.

1. Don’t Be Too Aggressive

Remember, the point is to get a solid portion of your customer base to give you feedback – not all of them. When organizations focus too much effort on trying to get feedback from every customer, they lose more than they gain. A good analogy would be attempting to hold a stream of water in your hands…trying to grab all of it results in losing all of it, while opening and cupping your hands allows the water to flow around and a portion to stay in your hands. Just enough is sometimes, just enough.

It may seem backwards to back off at first, but you will see good results long-term.

2. Make Sure You Have a Process for Follow-up

This one sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at what some organizations consider a “process.” Having an efficient method for following up with your customers on the feedback they provide is key. Social psychological studies have proven that most people need, and are even motivated by, the feeling of being heard. Following up with a customer about their feedback makes them feel validated.

Assigning the task to an individual or group to do on a weekly or monthly basis may not be enough, especially if those individuals already have other job responsibilities that take up most of their time. It’s imperative that you know immediately when your support department provided an unsatisfactory service experience, or if a customer has voiced concerns over a product or service. Once you know, the customer should be contacted while the experience or concern is fresh in their mind, and be reassured that the experience they may have received is not typical or that their concern will be addressed appropriately.

3. Do Something With It!

Once you've received feedback and followed up, you’ll need to actually use the data. This is where most organizations drop the ball – they want to care about what their customers are thinking, but don’t have the resources or support they need to do so. Customer satisfaction efforts have to be an organization-wide initiative and this initiative must start at the top. Without the full support of senior management and executives, the great feedback you may get initially can quickly fizzle into little or no valuable feedback.

This is especially true for organizations who are supporting their internal employees, as the company’s employees may already have misgivings about providing feedback. Keeping an open-door, no retaliation culture can go a long way towards getting the feedback you need, whether you are supporting customers internally or externally.

While it’s important to want to improve your customer satisfaction efforts, try not to become too focused on one specific area. Instead of just asking yourself how you can get feedback, also ask yourself if the feedback you’re getting is actionable.

Need a customer satisfaction measurement tool? Check out HDI's Buyers Guide for listings and reviews.