Can’t get no, satisfaction

Do you run customer satisfaction surveys or  use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to track your performance? Have you ever thought about what customers feel about it? Do you realise customers on the whole do not like participating in customer sat surveys, which is why  response rates are so low.

Why? Firstly, there’s nothing in it for them as it is an asymmetrical exchange of value: they give their time, you get the benefit, they get nothing.”But if we ask we’ll be able to improve our services so they will gain eventually” you argue. But the methods used and the questions that get asked actually have a negative impact on customers . Questions like “would you recommend..” or “how would you rate the service” are questions YOU want to ask not what is important to customers. So by not asking them important questions, they know nothing will get better. (Sometimes I even get asked to participate BEFORE I’ve had a service experience,  as a non customer – pop-ups on websites I’ve browsed seem to do this a lot – which is ludicrous).

Many service providers are involved in sectors where the notion of ‘satisfaction’ is a problem in  itself. There are many sectors – utilities, financial services, telecoms – where customer expectations are low or they are so disinterested that asking them how satisfied they are makes the inquirer seem delusional. All customers want is the thing to work so they can get on with their lives not take part in surveys after their supplier has resolved a problem. And anyone with experience of these sectors know that nothing ever gets better irrespective of the number of surveys they run so why bother to invest time in a futile exercise?

Finally, asking customers to predict future behaviour (NPS is built on one question “would you recommend..”) is a nonsense as questions about future behaviour are no predictor of behaviour. Look at how wrong the 2015 UK Election polls were to see what I mean.

“But talking to customers would raise the cost astronomically” you say. Well yes, the quantitative methods of customers satisfaction surveys makes them cheap to run. But customers know this. Service providers who care about the customer experience and want to improve on it, will talk to me; service providers who ask daft questions to keep score, clearly don’t.  Which one are you?

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