3 Customer Satisfaction models
I’m always amazed by the number of companies that don’t do customer satisfaction surveys. And yes, I consider independent consultants “companies”. There is only upside to satisfaction surveys and very little downside, in my opinion. Among a myriad of benefits, post-project customer satisfaction surveys:
- Are a source for great testimonial quotes. Put these on your website, in your brochures, on your resume. Nothing helps make your delivery claims real like a quote from a customer.
- Offer yet one more touchpoint for your sales and/or marketing folks to ask for referrals, cross-sell and up-sell, etc.
- Present a chance to capture honest, real-world feedback on your products and services – potentially identifying opportunities for improvement or growth.
I am very bullish on customer satisfaction surveys and strongly feel they should be a component of every company’s sales and marketing strategy. For those of you who feel differently, I’d love to hear your thoughts via comments. In this post, I’d like to share three very different customer satisfaction survey models I’ve seen over the years and where each might be used most effectively.
The “One Question Survey” Survey
I’ve written before on the Net Promoter Score that consulting firm Bain & Co. developed and trademarked. The execution of this survey couldn’t be simpler; you ask your customers one question:
How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
Customers rate that likelihood on a 0 to 10 scale with 10 being extremely likely they would recommend you. Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score. A score of 75% or above is considered quite high.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has several benefits. First, it’s simplicity and brevity may increase your survey response rate. Also, since the NPS results in a percentage metric, it can be quite useful in benchmarking exercises. Finally, I feel the NPS can be a powerful motivator for organizations focused on excellence. The metric is not without it’s detractors however, and the Wikipedia article linked above has a good overview of some of the criticisms.
I feel the NPS is a good choice for your customer satisfaction surveying when your customers have short attention spans (hence why I am considering using it with my entrepreneurs!) or you are focused on a benchmark for your pursuit of increasing delivery excellence. Given the controversy surrounding the metric and the effort it would take to explain it to prospects, this survey is probably best suited when you plan on keeping your survey results internal.
The “Are you satisfied?” Survey
This is the type of customer satisfaction survey I think most of us are used to seeing. The questions tend to be a mix of “How satisfied were you with our delivery” and “How likely are you to do business with us again?” type of questions. Typically, customers are asked to indicate their answers on some sort of scale, allowing for aggregation of responses into a numeric metric.
While this type of survey is probably the most practiced, and does create satisfaction metrics in a form that is easily published, this is probably my least favorite type of customer surveying. The main complaint I have with it is it’s prevalence. If your company goals are excellence and growth, to simply do “what everyone else is doing” does little to separate your organization from the rest of the pack. However, this doesn’t mean I don’t see any value in this type of survey. You have to start somewhere, and this is an easy place to start. Also, since many organizations do nothing, there is a good chance your competition, or some portion of your competition, doesn’t survey. Therefore, simply getting started with a basic survey could help with some differentiation.
Even though I’m framing this type of surveying as the most basic, don’t forget that you need to examine your operational processes to support the surveying process. Remember the last time you gave really bad marks on a survey and thought even less of the company when they didn’t followup? Don’t let that happen to you. Even worse as a missed opportunity, is not following up with customers that leave glowing remarks. So, make sure to look at customer surveying as a lifecycle process and make sure it becomes embedded in your current procedures in order to get the maximum value out of it.
My current employer has tweaked the basic survey in a very novel way that generates some extra value from the survey. Since we are an economic development non-profit, it is very important for our funders to understand the impact we are having regionally for the dollars they have given us. The popular public sector term for this is “leverage”. So our post-project customer satisfaction survey, in addition to the standard “how satisfied were you” questions, include a number of questions related to the economic impact our project had on our client. These impacts include cost savings, jobs saved or created, increase in sales, etc. This allows us, in real, customer-reported numbers, to compute a leverage number for our funders stating something to the effect of “for ever dollar given to us, we generate X dollars in economic impact”.
More importantly perhaps, it allows us to do the same for our clients. It can be very powerful to tell a client that for every project dollar spent with us, on average, our clients tell us they get X dollars back in tangible economic impact.
So while I don’t want to discourage you from “standard” customer satisfaction surveys, I would urge you to think how you can make the results relevant for your customers.
OTACE
Finally, I’d like to talk about the best customer satisfaction process I’ve personally been a part of: OTACE.
OTACE stood for On Time Above Client Expectations; so right out of the gate, the very name of the surveying process communicates a commitment to excellence. The way OTACE worked is:
- At the start of a project, the customer picked 3 – 5 project management characteristics that were important to her. These characteristics were things like quality of deliverables, cost, on time delivery, communication, etc.
- The customer then ranked the importance of each characteristic on a 1 – 5 scale, with 5 being very important.
- Once the project has completed (or during the project for longer engagements), the customer scores how you performed on each of the project management characteristics they selected.
- Now for each characteristic, multiply the score you received by the weighting factor from step #2.
- Finally, simply divide that total score by the total of all weighting factors for your final satisfaction score (with a 5 being perfect satisfaction).
That sounded confusing and it’s really not so let’s look at an example.
You’re getting ready to start a project with a new customer so you sit down with them to review your OTACE process. They really like the commitment to quality delivery this process sends and they select Communication, Quality of Deliverables and On Time Delivery as their project characteristics. They rank Communication a 4 in importance, Quality of Deliverables a 5 and On Time Delivery a 3.
After the project is over, you sit down with your client to review how you did. In this post-project process, they rank your delivery as follows: a 5 on Communication, a 4 on Quality of Deliverables and a 3 for On Time Delivery. So your raw score is 49 ( (5*4) + (4*5) + (3*3) ). Divide that 49 by 12 (the sum of their weighting factors) to get your final quality rating for this project of 4.1.
You can see this process is a bit more complicated, requires more customer involvement, and probably requires more education and training not only for your sales staff but potentially your customers. So why make the effort?
Unlike any customer satisfaction process I’ve seen in my career, OTACE not only demanded a commitment to quality and excellence, but in return offered explicit data you could show your customers as to how you were performing, as rated by their peers. Assuming you were performing well, what a great sales tool. Ah, but there’s the rub – you need to be willing to share your performance with your customers and not every organization is comfortable with that. Frankly, not every organization is ready for that either. This is an evaluation you will have to make for yourself and your own organization. Don’t think you have to be perfect though. You will undoubtedly have a project or two over time that a customer will rank very low for factors out of your control. What I found was that having a mechanism to not only transparently show those scores to our clients, but show them in context of all our other scores, help create a level of trust in the sales process at a stage where it rarely exists.
The other benefit to this process that I hope is self-evident is that your customer tells you what is most important to him on this project, before the project starts. How many of us would have loved to have know this information on bad projects of the past? So while it’s no panacea for constant communication and involvement, it can definitely help give you a head start on understanding your customer’s motivations.
So what do you think?
What customer satisfaction approaches have you seen or been impressed by? Do you currently survey your customers? If so, how (and if not, why not)?
UPDATE (12/09) – I just noticed an article posted on Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends blog entitled 10 Customer Service Trends for 2010 by columnist Barry Moltz. Some interesting stuff and more food for thought, like how about “firing” your worst customers?
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