CX Simplicity

Survey Design: Part 1

cxsimplicityFebruary 23, 2016Leave a Reply

Here are some quick, simple tips to use when evaluating your customer satisfaction survey design. This is Part 1 of 3 that covers ideas on What to Ask and How to Ask It.

WHAT TO ASK

You should seek information that you can act on. Think about what you will do with the information you receive, and then frame the question to get you that information. Try to avoid asking questions that make you say “that would be really interesting to know but I’m not sure what we’d do with it.” Your customers are busy so show them that you value their time by only asking what you plan to act on.

Make sure you’re only asking about one thing at a time. Your question shouldn’t tackle two issues at once. Be clear and concise, and only ask about one specific thing in a question. For example, if you ask “Was the representative knowledgeable and courteous?” you are really asking two questions: “Was the representative knowledgeable” and “Was the representative courteous?” They are different so decide which you want to measure.

Make sure there is only one interpretation of what you are asking. You don’t want one customer thinking you mean something totally different than another. Ask people around your office for their interpretation of your question if you think it might be too vague. Too many different answers mean you should consider rephrasing and testing again (unless it’s an open-ended question, of course).

Don’t ask anything you should be measuring internally through operational KPI’s. I see this on surveys time and time again. If there is something that you can specifically measure through your operational metrics, consider not asking the customer to provide you with that information. For example, “Did our service person arrive on time?” If you have the technology to measure that, then measure it! And hold your teams accountable to the standard. You should be able to match up your survey data to your operational data and check whether there is a correlation between being on time and customer satisfaction. However, the reality is that not everyone has the reporting capabilities and resources to do so. If that’s true for you, try to minimize the number of things you ask that you should already have access to.

HOW TO ASK IT

Walk the customer through the experience in an order that makes sense. Think about the experience that you’re evaluating with the survey. Try to recreate the experience in the customer’s mind with your questions. In other words, don’t ask about various aspects of the experience out of sequence.

Don’t ask leading questions. Make sure your questions are not directing customers to a particular answer. You are seeking honest, unbiased feedback, right?

Use appropriate lingo. This one is tough sometimes. When you’re an expert on how a process works internally, it’s hard to differentiate internal jargon from layman’s terms. You want to avoid using internal terms and abbreviations that won’t make sense to the customer.The best test here is to grab a friend from outside your department or company to proof-read the survey. See if it makes sense to her. Now, sometimes it makes sense to use industry lingo. For example, if you’re surveying someone about a technical process, the recipient could be an engineer and he might think it’s silly for you to be using non-technical terminology. Ultimately, evaluate your recipients and make sure they’ll understand the words you use.

Next up in Survey Design Part 2: Standard Questions, Question Scale, and Survey Length

Breaking the Negative Feedback News

cxsimplicityFebruary 19, 2016Leave a Reply

Breaking the news of negative feedback to the responsible party can put you in an awkward position. You need to share the information to remedy the root cause, but the way you approach it might put some people on the defensive. What works?

Start with one-on-one discussions.

People tend to react better to bad customer experience news when they’re not called out in front of a large audience. Try approaching the manager of the team in which the problem lies and let him know about the feedback you received. Explain the situation from the customers perspective and ask if he can help you research it and come up with a game plan for resolution. This is best done over the phone or in person. The tone of emails can sometimes be misconstrued and result in denial and deflection. If you are responsible for providing read-outs on feedback to a larger audience, make sure you work with the manager to have an action plan ahead of time. That way when the negative feedback news comes up in the review, you can speak to the resolution that’s in the works. You also gain the manager’s trust by presenting yourself as part of the solution and not someone that just wants to point a finger.

Share a report on the relevant KPI.

If the manager isn’t quite convinced that the bit of negative feedback is accurate, then you can figure out a way to report on a KPI that reflects the feedback provided. Use that report in a follow-up discussion with the manager to show where they have an opportunity for improvement based on cold hard data.

Communicate the things you’re doing with other departments.

When you start to hear excuses as to why the customer responded with negative feedback (such as, “it’s someone else’s fault, not mine”), be sure to communicate with the manager that you’re also working with other departments to resolve the same issue. Talk through how each team impacts the process and outcome, and get his feedback on what he thinks the other teams could improve on. By engaging him in a discussion on how other teams can help the process (and ultimately help him), you can start to move into how he can reciprocate by helping the other teams as well. Seeing other colleagues involved in fixing the same issue can help provide some motivation.

Overall, being respectful about negative feedback goes a long way. Sometimes calling someone out is the only way to get a reaction, but I recommend that as a last resort. You want to build trust with your teams, collaborate, and ultimately, have a positive impact on the business. Think more along the lines of “Let’s talk about this and investigate the scenario” instead of “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!” when sharing negative feedback. Try to remind everyone that fixing a source of negative feedback has exponential benefits.

Anticipate Dissatisfaction

cxsimplicityFebruary 18, 20161 Reply

Some things that make customers dissatisfied are intuitive, obvious things. If you ship them the wrong item or don’t show up on time to a service call, the customer is going to be unhappy. But there are other things you might not be aware of which is where your feedback process comes in handy. You can gain insight into the obvious and not so obvious drivers of customer frustration. Once you’re able to tune in to the current customer experience and compare that to customer needs and expectations, you can start anticipating areas of potential dissatisfaction. And once you can anticipate an event that causes dissatisfaction, you can start to set up internal alerts to get ahead of the process failure before it impacts your customer.

All areas of potential dissatisfaction are worth your focus and effort, but to get started, I suggest picking a problem for which you feel it would be relatively easy to set up an alert. Ultimately, you either want to focus on the problem that occurs with the highest frequency (allowing you to impact the most customers) or the problem that makes the customers most mad (biggest pain point). But to get your feet wet with a proactive approach to dissatisfaction, try one of your ‘low hanging fruit’ items. This way you can figure out the approach that fits best with your operations and culture.

What I mean by an alert is that you want to create some type of indicator with-in your process that triggers a notification to a person that will intervene when something is about to go wrong…BEFORE it goes wrong. Proactive quality control allows you to save the customer from experiencing the failure that will cause them to be dissatisfied.

Here’s an example. Say you have a business that schedules service appointments on a customer premise. Your organization has a process to notify customers of the details of their appointment because customers get frustrated when that information is not effectively communicated. You could set up an alert that is triggered to a customer service team if the appointment is 24 hours out and no notification has been sent. Then, your customer service team can take proactive action on notifying the customer before it’s too late. Another scenario: the service person assigned to help the customer is going to be late to the appointment. Can you anticipate that and take corrective action by sending someone else? Whatever the process may be, think about how you can (a) trigger the alert and (b) take corrective action.

Also, instead of reporting on the number of failures after the fact, you can report on the number of alerts that were triggered before a customer impacting error occurred. Both reports would show the same information and both would allow you to coach to the proper process, but proactive method does not allow the customer to become dissatisfied.

It may not always be feasible to correct a process so that the errors never occur, but with a proactive approach you can stand between your errors and the customer ensuring they have the best possible experience.

Customer Experience Recipe

cxsimplicityFebruary 17, 20161 Reply

If you know there’s something that you want to accomplish that will really impact the customer experience, but you’re stuck on how to get it done, here’s a different approach. Plan out a CX objective by designing it like it’s a recipe.

Start with the beautiful picture of your finished product that will entice you to go the distance. Create an image that embodies the experience you want to achieve in vivid detail. Make sure you add the feelings the customer will have after this experience.

Next, list out the ingredients. What resources are you going to need to accomplish your goal? For example, list the departments that need to be involved, the capital resources, development hours, etc.

Lastly, write the specific steps that will need to happen to get it done in order of when they need to happen. This will leave you with a great framework to take action. You’ll have small, incremental steps to guide you as a result of this exercise and the goal won’t appear so insurmountable anymore.

Show Off Your Skills

cxsimplicityFebruary 16, 2016Leave a Reply

The inspiration for this post comes from a trip to the pediatrician’s office with my 6 month old daughter. I swear she is capable of faking an illness, Ferris Bueller style, just so that I will bust her out of daycare to go on a field trip, but that’s neither here nor there. She is quite the social butterfly wherever we go, smiling at everyone that glances in her direction, even when she’s “sick.”

When we get there, I free her from the confines of her car seat and sit her on the exam table while we wait for the doctor to enter. As soon as Dr. Kim comes in, my daughter brings her A game, and I don’t mean that she turns the (fake) illness on. The exact opposite, in fact. She starts demonstrating every trick that she’s learned since the last visit: putting her feet in her mouth, rolling over and pushing her chest up as high as it will go, talking, blowing raspberries, and the list goes on. She’s showing off! Any chance she gets, she wants to show the world all this cool stuff she can do because she’s put in the time to learn those things. It’s hard work being 6 months old, and you better believe she’s sharing her accomplishments with her audience.

We should all be doing the same thing with our customers, showing off our company’s skills. Make it obvious and known what your organization is good at. And remind customers to be impressed. I don’t mean arrogance, but genuine excitement about the value you provide, whether it relates to a product or a process. Demonstrate your skills and call them out. When other customers brag about your skills, share that too! Be proud of the things your company does well so your customers can be proud to do business with you.

Or in the words of Stewart, say “Look what I can do!”