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Satisfaction Guaranteed
Many companies spend large sums of money on measuring customer satisfaction. Sample volumes can be high, and reports may be produced frequently – even monthly. The reasons often quoted are that a high volume is needed to make sure that the measurements are robust, and a high frequency is needed to ensure that any problems are identified rapidly.
However, when the results are delivered (sadly, the typical 100 slide deck!) very little has changed. If there has been a problem, the results are often reporting on something that happened four or six weeks previously.
So why not take a different approach? Harness the power of an alternative source – customer complaints! These may not give a representative picture of everything that’s happening (especially things that are changing slowly), but they provide an almost instant indicator of real, new problems.
If you can trap these immediate problems, you can probably reduce the frequency of your more general measure of customer satisfaction to just three or four times a year, to pick up the slower moving trends. As the main expense in large-scale customer satisfaction trackers is the cost of fieldwork, just think how much you could save by slashing the frequency!
Any complaints?
In an ideal world, all customer complaints are handled centrally. But in reality, they are often more dispersed (e.g. those coming over the web may handled by different people to those coming in by post or phone). And are complaints that come through as part of the mix in a call centre adequately logged?
The starting point is to find out who, if anyone, has overall responsibility for complaints. Then explain that you would like some kind of formal feed of complaints to improve your customer satisfaction tracking. Undertake an audit of how customer feedback actually arrives in the organisation and is logged and classified. Look at how this could be improved, and implement a simple but effective method of getting the results fed through to you.
You need to be wary of internal politics. Typically, complaints handling is reported elsewhere in the business, and your request could be seen as a threat (at worst) or at least as an intrusion. They may see that you gain from cutting your costs, but at the expense of more work for them! So think it through carefully, take it gently, and be diplomatic! Involve someone more senior if this is appropriate.
Once the data starts flowing through to you, the final stage is to know how to report it. How do you filter out factors such as a sudden surge in complaints that all stem from a local incident? How do you avoid duplicating any existing reports relating to complaints?
There are no simple answers, and every situation will be different. However, the reward is worth all of the effort – potential cost savings at the same time as helping your organisation to become more responsive.
