Comments on: Measuring customers

By: Deliver Magazine

Deliver Magazine — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:44:28 +0000

Measurement – It’s Easier than You Think

Put down that spreadsheet. Throw away that calculator. Demonstrating ROI for your marketing efforts could be a calculation so simple you can just as easily do it in your head.
As marketers, we often think of customer satisfaction as a very complicated…

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:36:54 +0000

Sylvia, you are looking at this from a customer perspective, and this is what companies need to consider as they put their “incentives” together for sales and service. Behaviors that are only geared to getting a “top 2 box” score on satisfaction don’t look or sound very sincere to customers, and as you point out, they can be downright irritating!

Interesting how the personal touch made such a difference for you with the independent service center. You are not a sucker at all; you just want someone to let you know they care (I am guessing here)!

Thanks so much for joining in the conversation!

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:12:01 +0000

Dr. Bleuel (customerinstitute.blogspot.com), thank you very much for your insight! I especially like this statement: “Satisfiers may not build loyalty but dissatisfiers cause defections.” So many companies forget that just having satisfied customers doesn’t mean much (even if they are ‘completely satisfied’. There are just too many other factors that impact true loyalty. Taking away the main dissatisfiers is critical, and to me, this is a major reason why it is so important to look at the customer experience.

By: sylvia martinez

sylvia martinez — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:35:18 +0000

I take my car to an Acura dealership for service, and dread getting the same stupid phone call survey afterwards. They ask inane canned questions and you can only answer on their numeric scale even when the question doesn’t make sense. If you duck the call, they keep calling back. I always think, “I just spent x hundred dollars I didn’t want to and all you do is bug me?”

It’s obvious that they are trying to keep quality up, but my time is valuable. I just answer “excellent” to everything because it gets me off the phone faster and I like the dealership. So most likely they aren’t measuring what they think they are measuring.

Now the service people start to prep you for the call as you leave, probably because they get rewarded for good ratings and punished for bad ones. More time wasted. Maybe they should actually talk to me instead.

Last month I had to take my car to an independent service center, and the owner sent a handwritten note thanking me for my business. OK, maybe I’m a sucker, but contrasted to a stupid impersonal phone call, it was nice. I’ll probably go back.

By: Professor Bill Bleuel

Professor Bill Bleuel — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:41:34 +0000

this is a very complex topic. I have been working in this area for about 25 years. My first point is that satisfaction is a passive state and has a very small loyalty component. My second point is that dissatisfiers are not the negative of a satisfier. Most people do not detect the dissatisfiers. Dissatisfiers are more critical than satisfiers because when a dissatisfier occurs the customer usually defects.Satisfiers may not build loyalty but dissatisfiers cause defections.

One concern that I have was documented in the Pepperdine GBR (business magazine) in a brief note titled the measurement trap.

I hope you will continue to write – this topic is probalby one of the most mis-understood aspects of understanding customers.

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:29:24 +0000

Paul, thank you for sharing the metric you are using with your clients, NPS (or NetPromoter Score). I agree with you that any metric taken by itself does not tell the whole story. Understanding the drivers behind the behaviors, as well as the customer needs met (or not) by the product or service goes a lot farther towards being able to predict future business success!

Lewis, good addition on the price-centered customers. When another offer comes along at a cheaper price, they are gone. They may come back and forth, but they won’t stick. We need to take the relationship beyond price in order to truly develop loyalty.

By: Lewis Green

Lewis Green — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:26:06 +0000

I love this: “What about a customer who is “hostage” to a company? In other words, what about a customer who has no other options for that service (ex: the only cable company that serves a remote area)? Does this customer’s satisfaction lead to their loyalty, or will they jump ship when someone else finally enters the marketplace?”

The same question can be asked about customers who purchase price. Neither lack of choice or price develop loyal customers.

By: Paul Schwartz

Paul Schwartz — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:13:28 +0000

I agree with Becky that you need to first understand the drivers of satisfaction and then go from there. I have never been a big fan of a single measure of customer satisfaction. Many customers will say they are satisfied just before they switch to a competitor. There are very few companies who can correlate a single measure of satisfaction with financial performance. To test if any satisfaction metric is any good, ask yourself “does the result tell me what I should change to improve my performance?” If it doesn’t, then that metric is not very helpful.

I have been using NPS recently, but I’m not sure it is “the Ultimate Question.” You need to add the follow-up to it, by asking why they would or would not recommend to get richer informaton. I think you need to dive deeper and have the ability to connect an attitude (such as satisfaction, or referral) to a behavior (what did they actually purchase, how much, how often, do they really refer …)