Editor’s note: Terry Vavra and Doug Pruden are partners at research firm Customer Experience Partners. Vavra is based in Allendale, N.J. Pruden is based in Darien, Conn.
We participated in the early development of customer satisfaction measurement. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, satisfaction surveys were an event, a rare chance for customers to tell a manufacturer/service provider how well they were doing. Because of their novelty, a good proportion of customers opted into such surveys, providing useful information and insights.
But the infrequency also told another story – management’s oversight or naïveté. At the time, it took considerable arguing to convince management teams that customer satisfaction measurement provided two distinct benefits: 1) the information would help improve services and products and 2) the very act of asking would assure customers the organization was “listening” and considered their input important.
Why it didn’t happen
Management’s reluctance to sponsor satisfaction surveys was born out of several concerns: the costs involved; the fear of being told exactly how well (or how poorly) they were performing; the uncertainty of how to respond to the information and; the unappreciated benefit of showing customers their feedback was desired.
Advances in technology during the last two decades have mitigated many of these concerns. First and foremost, data collection by the Internet has become commonplace, eliminating most of the costs of data collection. And, customers have become far more comfortable and experienced using computers to respond to surveys. Numerous software packages now exist for programming and disseminating surveys. An unfortunate consequence has been a trend toward do-it-yourself questionnaires – non-strategic and poorly constructed. Further, the enticing simplicity of the one-question, Net Promoter approach has unfortunately produced dumbed-down questionnaires that lack diagnostic information.
What goes wrong when it does happen
Concerns about how to respond to satisfaction information, while less widespread today than in the past, are still prevalent. However, some organizations have begun to incorporate action-planning programs into their satisfaction measurement processes. Other organizations still blindly field surveys without any idea or plan of how to act on the insights they gain. Without action-planning, the whole satisfaction survey process is, of course, nothing more than a sham. Management deludes itself into thinking it is actually acting properly (if not incompletely) and participating customers are duped because nothing will come of their honest opinions and suggestions.
Now, in the 2010s, the omnipresence of satisfaction surveys proffered by most companies has trivialized the process in most customers’ minds. One can’t help but be besieged with banners, counter-cards, register receipts, etc. – all asking for immediate feedback. And yet, customer satisfaction is anything but excellent! So how effective must the initiatives be?
Another aggravation (to participating customers) is the failure to ever hear any response from a company when feedback is offered and the re-encountering of the same annoyances in the next interaction with a company. Further proof that nobody, in fact, is listening!
And so, the ubiquity of satisfaction surveys these days doesn’t necessarily mean that the act has been perfected.