Last week, as I was not too well, (no sympathy needed) I went to a large pharmacy chain in the UK to get some medication near my office in central London.
At the shelf with the desired products the store assistant next to me stacking the shelves. I asked her for advice (she wasn’t proactive with asking if I needed help, which would have been a positive surprise). She gave the advice and I then proceeded to pay for the items. Suddenly, the store assistance appeared at the till (which now did surprised me). As she started giving me my receipt she went into details about how I could win a daily prize if I provided feedback. She wrote her name, circled the cash prize and said that even if I though she wasn’t good, could I give her the highest rating on the survey.
Will this motivate staff to deliver long term customer satisfaction?
This pharmacy chain has been working with an enterprise feedback management company, which is not necessarily wrong. However, what I do think is is that if the company is wanting to create the best customer experience, it should look at how staff and customers are incentivised to provide feedback. What happened to me in the store is a good example of how customer satisfaction could be skewed due to offering big cash prizes both parties.
Obviously, if the staff member is incentivised to get customers to fill out the survey, it will lead to a better customer experience but if then the store assistant realises that there is 100,000 other employees also trying to win the same incentive programme then this motivation will soon drop off and therefore will not deliver in the long term.
Are we all wearing rose tinted glasses?
We have to be careful not to cheat ourselves into believing that we have the best customer experience. We have to admit that there are flaws and fix them. I may sound like a broken record about fixing ongoing issues but if you don’t fix them, no matter how many surveys your organisation does, you are only cheating yourselves and the customers. If the staff is trying to influence the outcome of the customer satisfaction survey then good is the money being spent?
How can we gather real customer feedback?
I would suggest that you review any incentives offered to customers. If you do offer incentives, try stopping them for a period and see what variances occur in the data.
There are large numbers of ways available for companies to gather quality feedback in a cost effective way;
In-store or Service Industries
- You could use SMS by promoting it on shelf ends, menus, posters around the store or on the till receipts. Companies like Clickatell enable you to receive SMS and capture feedback into a spreadsheet for analysis.
- Use websites such as Qype as your feedback platform, they can even provide business cards to drive feedback. Qype is great at helping you promote your offline business online through it being very well search engine optimised. Check your establishments profile on Qype, take ownership of the listing and they will then allow you to manage listing information.
- Develop a customer feedback page on your companies website, feedback from customers can be published online to create a more transparent relationship with your customers. Again, this can be promoted on receipts and bills.
Customer Services & Support
- Use a survey tool where you can put customers through after a call, if you have basic IVR functionality you are able to do this, or you can use a provider such as VirtuaTel. One tip for after call surveys: choose a different hour everyday when your agents have to ask customers to be put through to the survey, this stops agents ‘cherry picking’ their best calls.
- If you have an email support channel, many email management tools have a tool to send out survey emails when the ticket is closed; if not, use something like SurveyMonkey and add the link to your signature.
Online Retail & Mail Order
- If you are an online retailer or in mail order, then your courier company usually has tracking information available, so once delivered you can send out a survey to ask customers for their feedback on the product and end to end experience. This feedback could be used on your homepage to promote how good your customer satisfaction is, it should help conversion. You may also use a service like Feefo to capture feedback and some customer focused mail order companies are using this solution.
How do you capture customer satisfaction?
If you have used other ways to capture customer feedback, share them with other readers.
Update
Last night at the same chain, I was told that the number on the till receipt was my lucky number. I just needed to go online and answer a few questions to see if have won £1000! Will keep you all informed of some other great examples from the staff to get me to fill out the survey!
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Paul,
Really interesting and points you make and about incentives. I wrote something similar a while ago (http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/customer-survey-response-rates-staff-targets/) where staff on an airline give out feedback forms because it is included on their performance appraisals. However, even when faced with feedback from employees (ie this is not working) they still do not change the system. Why do you think that is? Quest for data? Culture? Control?
What do you think?
Adrian
Thanks for the comment and I read with interest your blog post.
I believe it is more of a quest of data to present to the Board than finding out what the real underlying issues are. Feedback should be from both the customers and staff, which should then be overlayed to see the difference between the two.
I totally agree that those team members who are confronted with the daily issues are the best ones to ask. I regularly discuss issues with front line team members and this enables me to deliver a better customer experience. Companies who do not change their failing processes or procedures are less likely to gain marker share in the customer focused world which is now upon us.
I agree with your points above, and recommend companies do everything they can to gather feedback from every source. The problem with incentives as a way to drive customer service, is that they are very temporary and as you pointed out, the larger the company the faster these programs weaken. Instead, companies should weave a thread of customer experience in everything they do – making it intrinsic to company culture. When company leadership and management set the example, and make it a focus of hiring, training, employee feedback, marketing communication, the positive effects are long term.
Paul
What are the legalities on naming staff members for clients to rate in a client satisfaction survey? Is it OK to do or is this stepping over the line?
It depends how you are doing this, if the customer is aware who they spoke to, it is not a problem to use the team members name in communcations. A good example of how a business uses rating for individual team members click here but check with your HR or legal team first. The suggested site is a travel site and the staff are likely to be on high commission levels or self employed, which would mean they are very competitive.