Recently, I had a problem with a pair of golf shoes. So I contacted the customer service department of the global brand in question and asked if they could help. They did help, so I’m happy. But not that happy because it was an awful experience.
I ended up sending them eleven emails when two should have been sufficient. Each one was answered by a different person and sometimes I was asked the same question several times. By the end of the saga, part of my elation at the positive outcome was a consequence of the obstacle course I’d navigated to reach it.
And then I get the customer experience survey question: on a five point scale, how satisfied am I with the customer service I’ve received? As someone who thinks about questions and answers quite carefully (a consequence of studying psychoanalysis) I don’t have a clue how to answer this in any meaningful way.
Do I provide a response that I know would be biased by misattribution? Or do I criticise a customer service department that were, ultimately, more generous than I ever expected them to be?
Misattribution is a problem in all research, but it’s particularly significant in situations like this. The human tendency to unconsciously connect a feeling that is triggered by something else in the environment to the focus of our attention can mislead organisations into believing things are fine when they’re not. In one study, patient satisfaction with hospitals was found to correlate closely with the levels of pain relief people had received. It turns out that if you want people to say they like your hospital you just need to give them more morphine!
And keep in mind that context is always important. In the case of customer service surveys, people’s prior expectations may create a contextual frame. Yes, the experience was lousy, but they might have such a low opinion of the company initially that it was in line with their expectations.
As a consumer insight consultancy, we are in the business of exploring all sorts of issues with consumers. And there is a place for researching customer service experiences. But there are often much better ways than jumping to interrogative research and we would always advise prospective clients to think about the following steps first.
1. ‘Observe’ a random sample of customer service interactions
Whether this is listening to calls, looking at email exchanges, reviewing a web chat or watching people interact at a desk, you will almost certainly learn much more from covertly evaluating what actually takes place than you will from asking people what they thought about that experience.
2. Leverage behavioural metrics
Irrespective of what someone says, what matters is what they do. Do people who have had cause to use your customer services department buy from you again? Do they buy from you more frequently than people who haven’t? How does the way that you’ve responded impact on what they do next?
If you are annoying your customers with follow-up surveys, do the responses you get correlate with how customers subsequently behave? (And if you can track the latter, why are you bugging them with the survey?)
3. Learn through experimentation
Ultimately, the best way to learn what impact you’re having is through experimentation. It might be that there are natural experiments, for instance when call volumes are so high that people can’t make contact: what happens? If you change a phone script, or alter the discretion that the customer service representative has to solve a problem, do more customers buy again (or do you see fewer leave)?
4. Recognise that designing a great service experience is a creative challenge
Understanding how your customer service is currently perceived is important. But if it is going to improve, an organisation needs to understand that the process is a creative one. Service design is an art, and you will progress best if you find a good artist to work with. You will flounder if you outsource that creativity to a bunch of your customers. This is the customer service equivalent of asking a prospective romantic partner what would really impress them, doing it and being surprised that they aren’t that impressed.
5. Remember that what constitutes good service is constantly changing
What counts as good today will not be good tomorrow. It only takes one competitor to transform their customer service and what seemed perfectly adequate before no longer feels good enough.
Very few businesses can prosper without good customer service. Sometimes poor service can lead regulators to intervene (which is not usually a good thing for the company concerned). But, in your desire to deliver good service, please don’t make the mistake of starting by asking consumers what they think. If you do need to get deeper inside customers’ minds, we have techniques that can help, but you will get the most from that process if you know which customer service behaviours matter most to your organisation’s success. The steps outlined above should get you to that point.