From customer satisfaction to customer response: A new feedback model | Articles

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Robert Walker

CEO and Founder, Surveys & Forecasts LLC

If you work in marketing management or marketing research you are no doubt familiar with customer satisfaction (CS) programs. Some CS programs, created in the hope of helping businesses become more customer-centric, fail to deliver against this noble objective.

As a result, the concept of customer satisfaction has reached an inflection point. As an industry, we must move away from rote “report card” thinking to nimble feedback systems that support real-time response and intervention. Some companies have already pivoted to this new reality; most have not and risk being left behind. Let’s recast our approach to one of rapid response based on a customer response system or CRS.

Below are 10 areas to consider before building a customer response system. If you already have a customer satisfaction program in place, consider these ideas to compare and improve the effectiveness of your company’s program.

1. Management buy-in

CRS programs that have the endorsement of senior management have the greatest chances of success. A company must be invested in a never-ending journey to improve its products and services to the benefit of the end-customer. Management must truly believe that feedback, collected in a rigorous way, is no less important than sales or profits. Do not start a CRS program for the purpose of sloganeering, being self-congratulatory or for reprimanding departments or teams. Customer responsiveness must be based on continuous improvement principles and pushed deeply into a company’s culture to feed growth and innovation.

2. Key touchpoints

A comprehensive assessment of all possible customer touchpoints needs to be made across the organization. Decisions must then be made about what characteristics need to be evaluated. As the number of discrete touchpoints increases, fewer questions should be asked per point. The customer will be asked for feedback at multiple points in the delivery chain; we do not want to create an excessive burden.

3. Link measures to processes

Broad measures are generally unusable for decision-making because they fail to provide the linkage between a problem and the process that created it. Your CRS program’s goal should be to provide granular feedback to help improve the overall system. In every case, we should be asking, “How will we use data from this question?” Make your question wording, attribute lists and rating scales precise to avoid misinterpretation (i.e., strive for validity and reliability).

4. Minimize feedback time lag

Strive for immediate feedback whenever possible after every transaction or consumer touchpoint. In psychological experiments, memory decay occurs in minutes yet many customer satisfaction programs assume that the customer carries around a fresh recollection of the experience days or weeks later. Humans have notoriously foggy memories, especially in categories that have little emotional involvement.

5. Strike a balance

Every company must find the optimal balance between respondent burden and actionability. Single measures are generally insufficient to provide the guidance needed. A person’s “willingness to recommend” is an abstraction and inappropriate in most categories. Rather, consider measures that focus on areas for improvement. A scale such as “Needs no improvement” to “Needs significant improvement” helps management prioritize areas in need of attention. Be willing to experiment in your category.

6. Link touchpoint measures

Look longitudinally and link data points together using a customer’s unique ID. Multiple touchpoints exist: browsing an online store, the ordering or selection process, filling a shopping cart, checking out and (assuming it is shipped) receipt of an item. The customer also needs time to fully experience the product. Feedback must be obtained at multiple touchpoints, yet by minimizing the number of questions per interaction, we have a higher probability of obtaining high-quality data and less nonresponse bias.

7. Append transactional data

Do not ask customers questions that you already have on file in a data warehouse. CRS programs should append descriptive and longitudinal data to the customer record. This adds an enormous amount of power to your analysis. Also, consider reverse-populating your data warehouse or CRM system with survey information to determine, at the individual respondent level, whether satisfaction is improving over time. This helps avoid the variance inherent in multiple time periods and independent samples.

8. Issue immediate alerts and promote recontact

Whether you are using a DIY survey tool or an enterprise-wide platform, use alerts and triggers to rectify problems. If, for example, you run a food supply company and obtain low ratings on lettuce, create an alert to notify the produce manager. Alerts give you an opportunity to pick up the phone and call the customer – and in so doing, forge even stronger bonds with customers. Alerts also support the customer service function, which typically handles complaints.

9. Emphasize light users and new customers

Pay special attention to light buyers and new customers when analyzing CRS data. Most measures are affected more by changes in penetration (new or lighter buyers) than by loyal customers. It’s a numbers game: Successful brands with higher share have broader appeal and a larger customer base. Attracting new customers to your brand is also likely to be more cost-effective than investing in strategies focused on increasing loyalty.

10. Reporting

CRS data is different from measures such as sales, brand awareness or attributes. While many visualization and dashboard tools abound, their appropriateness for CRS data must be thought through. You will typically be interviewing only your customers. As such, you are only seeing a single slice of your market. Aggregate-level reporting may lull a company into a false sense of security by masking outliers. Very large exceptions are needed to trigger company-level alerts when using tools such as control charts. Consider reporting the number of alerts by discrete category for both accuracy and impact.

Summary

Programs that assess customer satisfaction are giving way to nimble customer response systems that go beyond high-level report cards and abstract measures. These systems capture feedback on specific characteristics linked to discrete processes and generate immediate alerts to appropriate team members to foster near-instant intervention. Consider these concepts as you build an effective CRS at your own company.