Service Untitled

Skype has an interesting way of gathering feedback. After every call, a little survey pops up. They ask you to rate the quality of your call (they use a 1-5 star system) and then they show a list of things that could have gone wrong (echos, etc.) and ask you to check boxes of anything that was applicable.

The survey is super simple and has gotten even simpler over time (it used to redirect you to a web site - now it seems to be built into the program). It’s very self explanatory and since it pops up after every call, you have the opportunity to rate your experience frequently.

The survey is optional, but I bet that Skype has really high response rates. Again, the simplicity is probably what would lead to high response rates. I’ve already talked about what a big hit one question surveys are and this just serves as an extension of that. Keep your surveys simple, keep the questions relevant, watch the results pile in.

I work with a small technology company that has a reputation for being a great customer service company. The company is growing fairly quickly, and as a result of that, they’re hiring more and more people. Their growth is great (their rate of growth is manageable, so they don’t really have many growing pains), but as they hire more people, it becomes harder for the company’s founders to watch the level of customer service. As the company grows, all the employees aren’t as knowledgeable as the first couple of employees and the founders.

To help see how they’re doing, the company decided to start surveying their customers. They started with a simple quarterly satisfaction (using Net Promoter) survey and are starting to do a ticket survey that is sent out after each ticket is marked as resolved in their help desk. The company managed to do it all for less than $250, too. Here is how they did it (with my help, but they could have done it themselves without any problems):

1) I already had a copy, but most people will need to buy The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld. It is a pretty good, 200 page book about measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction using the idea of Net Promoter. Total cost: $20

2) Purchased and installed the Lite Version of iSalient (survey software). The software is pretty user friendly - it only took me (a fairly non-technical person) about an hour to fully install and customize. Total cost: $197

The best part of this? It is only a one time cost. They can run this survey any number of times and can setup several other surveys to run as well. They already have the software and the knowledge. There is cheaper survey software (even free software) out there, but this company had already used and liked iSalient. A lot of the software is leasable or setup where you only have to pay by the number of respondents. This makes things pretty cost effective as well. $250 isn’t that much for any company with a couple of employees. Having a good idea about the level of service you’re providing and how happy your customers are is well worth the time and the financial investment involved with setting up some basic survey software and processes.

Take an hour, your credit card, and start measuring your customer satisfaction. You’ll learn a lot about your customer service, your customers, and your company.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Small Business, Surveys

I constantly preach about the importance of surveying customers constantly and consistently. Companies that don’t survey their customers often find themselves making the wrong decisions about what they should do next and what needs improvement. The executive’s perspective is very different than the customer’s perspective. This difference is the reason that companies should survey customers. A challenge that many companies run into is when and how frequently to survey customers.
There are different schools of thought about when and how frequently to survey customers. Some companies believe in doing a big survey once per quarter while others believe in doing little surveys at every single step of the customer experience. There has to be a balancing act because a survey once per quarter may not be enough whereas a survey once a day for every customer is probably overkill. If you have a ten step customer experience and send a survey for each step, customers will become overwhelmed and annoyed.

My personal preference is to send a brief (as in: no more than 2-3 question) survey after every customer service interaction (phone call, email, etc.). This way companies can get an accurate idea about the quality of the service they are providing across all mediums. If it is emailed to the customer immediately after the interaction, it should still be fairly fresh in their mind. Simple surveys with a Net Promoter question usually provide companies with a good idea of the quality of service they are providing.

Having surveys freely available to interested customers is always a good idea, too. If you own a retail store, make sure there are surveys at the counter, near the bathrooms, etc. Include them occasionally in shopping bags or a link to a survey at the bottom of a welcome email- that sort of thing. Make it easy for customers to provide their feedback and make it useful to your company. It is a terrible waste to have a customer fill out a survey that is useless to the company because it’s flawed or doesn’t address the important issues. Invest time and effort into ensuring the surveys you’re making available to customers are worthwhile.

Except for the random quarterly survey, try to keep surveys short (just a couple of questions). Make them as straight forward as possible and as always, make it easy. Surveys that are complicated, long, etc. don’t help your response rates and certainly don’t make your customers like the surveys (or by extension, your company) any more.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Data, Surveys

One of the people who attended my session asked a very interesting question that I had never really stepped back to think about: what defines success? They were curious about what metric should be used to actually define the success of their department, of their agents, and of the service they are providing. The question is really interesting because it isn’t one that people ask that often. Companies are always concerned about making their service better, but it is very rare that they actually step back to think about what will define the success of their service changes.

Don’t try to count everything.
One of my favorite quotes is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” The quote (which is falsely attributed to Albert Einstein) sums the idea up pretty well — there are both quantitive and qualitative aspects to most complex things in world, especially in customer service. It’s pretty ignorant to dismiss one and not the other. Keep in mind that there are things which you simply cannot measure objectively or consistently and there are things that can be measured that don’t really matter.

Concentrate on bottom-line numbers.
I consider a bottom-line number to be something like customer satisfaction. If customer satisfaction is high, the other numbers (call time, hold time, etc.) don’t really matter. The idea is that good numbers for the secondary numbers (things like call time, hold time, etc.) bring up the bottom-line numbers, but that isn’t always the case. For example, a company can have super high customer satisfaction scores and still have an average hold time around 10 minutes. What that data set suggests is that the hold time is worth it — customers are getting great service once they get connected. The data set also says the customer base is fairly patient and willing to wait extra time for better service. Other bottom-line numbers can be a mix of employee and customer satisfaction, Net Promoter (see this post), percentage of repeat purchases, etc. Which number you decide to use is a fairly individual decision based on your company, customers, and product / service.

Collect lots of data.
Statistics experts say 10% is the magic number and everything over that is basically unnecessary. That’s great for them and I am sure the theory is well supported, but I personally disagree. Even if you aren’t counting the data or agonizing over it, I think customers appreciate it when their opinion is asked and hopefully, considered. It shows the company is trying and is actively asking for feedback. Even if you don’t survey a sample that is more than 10% of your total customer base, collect data about satisfaction and success at every step (post-order, post-phone call, etc.).

Feel free to change.
Perhaps the most important part is not to feel restricted once you make a decision. You’re allowed to change your mind and measure your success on another metric that might be more representative of or more appropriate for your business. There is no one size fits all solution and that’s fine.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Data, Surveys

This week seems to be the week of surveys for me. Yesterday I wrote about Mailtrust’s One Question Survey and today I received another survey from a software company called TimeBridge. TimeBridge makes scheduling software and they have been pretty persistent at trying to get beta feedback from me.

Today’s email was an interesting one, though. Here is the text of it:

Dear -name-:

We’ve noticed you haven’t used TimeBridge a lot since you signed up.  We’d love to understand what is holding you back.

If you click on one of the links below it would help a lot.

    “Everything is fine, just haven’t had an occasion to use it yet.”   Yes, that’s it.

    “I’m having technical difficulties with TimeBridge.”    Yes, that’s it.

    “Don’t think I’ll be using this, as I don’t have a need for it.”    Yes, that’s it.

    “None of these apply.”     Let me tell you more.

You can always just reply to this email if you’d like.  Thanks for your feedback!

Regards,

John

________________________
John Stormer | VP Marketing

While I don’t think the email is the most eloquently worded one in the world, it gets the job done. Perhaps most interesting is when you click on one of the links (I’ve put the links’ locations in italics), it not only records that basic response, but has a comments box and another box saying you can put in your email if you’d like a response.

Having the box saying that responses are anonymous by default, but that you can put in your email and receive a response is pretty helpful. I replied to the survey saying I wrote a post about the company and just want to see if anyone replies to my email. Reading the survey results and acting on them accordingly is extremely important.

This survey doesn’t offer any incentive (possible prize, etc.) to filling it out, but once again, it is pretty quick and pretty easy. You can click on the links right from your email and everything else is optional. Surveys that are simple will get a lot higher response rate than those that are long.

I’m not quite sure how helpful the answers to these survey questions by themselves are, but the company knows better than I do about what they need. It is interesting to see how they included the links directly and took a step out of the equation.

Good job TimeBridge.

A company called Mailtrust (formerly Webmail.us) hosts a majority of my email. I’ve been using them for several months and have been quite happy. I found a recent survey they sent me fairly interesting and wanted to write about it for today.

On Monday, the company sent me an email with the subject “Mailtrust: 1-Question Survey”. The text of the email was pretty simple and straight forward:

Hi -name-,

We are currently asking our customers to take a one-question survey so that we can rate their level of satisfaction with our company. If you have a few seconds, we would appreciate it if you would answer our one-question survey found by clicking the link below:

https://admin.mailtrust.com/include/netpromoter/email-survey.asp?id=#####&email=email

Thank you for your continued support

Pat Matthews
CEO, Mailtrust, LLC.

This is really dead simple, but also very effective. It is classic Net Promoter, which is extremely popular among a lot of companies (for good reason).  I like how they included a box for any additional comments instead of choosing to do a longer survey. The actual survey, the one you saw once you clicked on the link, looked like the image below.

Like all surveys run by almost all companies, though, this survey has room for improvement:

1. Utilize the technology further. Mailtrust knows if I have HTML email or not and could easily do a form where I can do the rating right from the email. Making it more convenient will make customers happier and produce a higher response rate.

2. On the survey, show my email address. Customers may not feel like their comments are going into a blackhole (a common concern) if an email address was clearly shown under the comments box. I know the company has my email address because it is in the URL of the link I clicked on, but a lot of customers (especially non-technical ones) won’t notice this or put the two together.

3. Offer some sort of award (or possibility of an award) for participating.
Inc. Magazine sends me regular surveys and when it sends surveys, it says I have a chance at winning an American Express Gift Card or a signed book or something whenever I participate. I actually won a book once, so I believe in the possibility of it actually happening. If Mailtrust gave away something, it would increase the response rate and encourage even more people to participate in the survey.

4. Include a support / help link.
In the email and/or on the actual survey, there should be a link to contact the company directly or at least an email address to contact support. The logo links to their homepage, which subsequently has a link to support, but that isn’t direct enough.

Overall, this was a well done survey. It wins a lot of points for simplicity. The next step (one that perhaps Mailtrust can clue us in on) is how they will use the data and what they can do to increase their response rates (and of course, the ratings) next time around.

I was working with a client the other day and was listening to a call. Towards the end of the call, the representative (who had done a good job) basically begged for good marks on the satisfaction survey that the company sends out after each call. He said things like “I trust you will give me good marks?” and so on. The representative for very friendly about it, but I told my client to discourage their employees to do that.

As a customer service representative, you can’t hassle or push the customer to provide you with good marks. They will do it if they want to, but it is completely uncalled for to make more than a friendly reference about the survey. If you are a manager and notice representatives doing this, you should work to put a stop to it. It is terrific if employees get great marks, but they shouldn’t coerce customers to provide them.

Something that is very important, though, is subtly encouraging customers to take the survey. If they don’t respond to the survey, you don’t even have to worry about how good or bad they’re rating you or your employees.

There is a fine line between annoying the customer by asking too much (which can negatively impact scores anyways) and encouraging them to fill out the survey. My favorite technique for this is basically bribing people to take the survey. After them a $5 credit or a chance to win a gift card or something of that nature. It is a pretty effective method.

For companies not willing to do this, you can have the representative tell the particular customer a survey will be sent to them, that it will only take a few minutes (unpaid surveys should never take more than 3-4 minutes), and that it helps the company improve its customer service. Keep it short and sweet.

If this process is somewhat scripted (so the representative doesn’t overstep the thin line), it should be a nice way to tell customers about the survey and encourage them to take it. The customers that really don’t want to take the survey still won’t take it, but customers that were on the border will probably take it now. 

For more on surveys from Service Untitled, including sample surveys from various companies, check out this link.

I have already told you about my experience with Toyota (the good part and the bad part). A few days ago I got a survey from Toyota in the mail. I could either fill out the paper version or go to a web site called Toyota Voice and answer the questions there.

I decided that I share the questions that Toyota asked with Service Untitled readers. Commentary will follow soon.

Pre-questions:
They asked these questions to verify that the survey was going to the correct person, that they had their records straight, etc. Toyota said the survey would take about 5 minutes.

• <shows name and address> Is all of the information above correct? (Yes or No)
• Is NAME the principal driver of the VEHICLE TYPE?
• We do not have an e-mail address for you on file. Please provide your address:
• Do you still own/lease this VEHICE VIN# NUMBER? (Yes, No, Never Owned/Leased)
• Did you have your VEHICLE serviced at DEALERSHIP? (Yes or No)

Survey Questions:
This is the actual survey.

• Why did you choose the dealership? Trust dealership personnel; Authorized Toyota dealership; Convenient hours; Referral/recommendation; Coupon/service reminder; Other
• If you made an appointment, how would you rate the following?(If no appointment was made, skip to question 3) Excellent, Good, Average, Fair, Poor, N/A
  • Waiting time on the phone
  • Effort to understand needs
  • Availability of appointment times
  • Confirmation call
  • Comments on question
• Please rate the following when you first arrived and had your service order written up:  (Five Point Scale - see above) 
  • Promptness of greeting you                         
  • Courtesy of service advisor                         
  • Effort to understand service needs                         
  • Recommendation of appropriate work                         
  • Explanation of work, cost & time required                         
  • Length of time to drop-off vehicle                         
  • Comments on question
• In regard to the work done on your vehicle, please rate the performance of the following: (five point scale)
  • Completed all requested work                         
  • Quality of work performed                         
  • Work completed within time promised                         
  • Effort to obtain parts
• Was your vehicle fixed right the first time? (Yes or No)
• If not fixed right the first time, what explanation was given?  (Check all that apply)
  • Could not identify or duplicate condition
  • Deemed normal condition
  • Parts not available
  • Work not performed properly
  • Other
• After the service of your vehicle was completed, please rate the following: (five point)
  • Explanation of costs                         
  • Explanation of work done                         
  • Price paid met estimate                         
  • Helpfulness of cashier                         
  • Ease of picking up vehicle after service                         
  • Length of time to pick up vehicle                         
  • Cleanliness of vehicle
  • Comments
• After your service visit, did the dealership phone, mail or e-mail you to determine your satisfaction with your service experience? (Yes or No)
• At any point during or after your service visit, did you ask the dealership to resolve any concerns regarding the visit? (Yes or No)
• If yes, how would you rate the following?  (five point)
  • Efforts of dealership personnel to resolve the concern                        
  • Outcome of the contact
  • Comments
• Please rate the service department on the following: (five point)
  • Hours of operation                         
  • Cleanliness                         
  • Comfort of waiting area                         
  • Amenities in waiting area (television, magazines, refreshments, etc.)                         
  • Ease/convenience of parking at the dealership
• Please rate the overall performance of the dealership on this service visit: (five point)
• Would you return to this dealership for future service needs? (Yes, No, Undecided
• Would you recommend this dealership to a friend or relative as a place to service their vehicle? (Yes, No, Undecided)
• What aspects of your service experience did you LIKE MOST?
• What aspects of your service experience COULD HAVE BEEN IMPROVED?

What are your thoughts after seeing the survey? I will provide mine in a post soon.

Some companies that try to provide great service will often ask “how was your experience today?” or “did you enjoy your experience/meal/etc.?” From when I’ve asked that question either as both a manager and a consultant, I’ve noticed that a lot of customers will say “fine.”

I tell companies that fine isn’t good enough. When a lot of companies hear a customer answer “fine”, “so far so good”, “okay”, etc., they just move on. The answer didn’t express obvious discontent, so everything is fine and dandy, right? Wrong.

There is a nice little statistic that says if customers rate you as a 3 (usually good) in a survey with a 5 point scale (1-5, with 5 being the highest), they are just as likely to leave your company for a competitor as the same customer who rated you a 1 (very poor). In this context, it means that a customer who says something average like fine isn’t really that happy. Basically, fine isn’t good enough.

From now on, when a customer answers with something like fine or the like, do the following:

Tell the customer.
Tell the customer that your company is striving for something a lot better than fine. Then, you immediately do the next step:

Probe a little.
Ask some more specific questions about the service, the product, the representative the customer they’ve been dealing with, etc. Ask about their favorite and least favorite parts of the experience. It isn’t that hard to probe - just remember to be specific with your questions or you will likely continue to get pretty vague answers.

Ask another question.
This is different than probing. It can be done in addition to or instead of it. When the customer answers fine, ask “what could we have done (or do) to make the experience great?” Some companies like fantastic, terrific, unforgettable, etc. It really depends on what sort of experience you are trying to deliver.

Don’t bug the customer.
There are plenty of customers who say fine just to shut you (the manager) up. You have to read the customer and learn not to bug them. There is a fine line between extracting valuable information and bugging the customer. If their answers continue to be short or they seem to get annoyed, just leave them alone and offer to help if they need any help.

If a customer says something negative, act on it!
It is not uncommon for managers to ask a customer how their experience was, hear the customer say something negative, and then pretty much ignore it. A lot of managers like to stop at “Thanks for the feedback. I apologize about the inconvenience.” This is unacceptable. If a customer says something went wrong, act on it!

This is part two of the interview with Bruce Eicher, Vice President of Guide Care at ChaCha.

In this part of the interview, Bruce tells me about how ChaCha deals with its biggest challenges, what ChaCha guides do well at, what they have the most trouble with, the site’s registration process, and how they ensure quality.

(more…)