adding the strategic value to your business. These are your loyalists. Put another way, with a properly designed survey, you should be happier to receive a sizeable chunk of tens (if that’s your top score) with a smattering of fours than to receive solid sevens across the board. The sevens are not Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services
77
loyalists and are not going to sing the praises of your brand from the rooftops. Furthermore, with the mad skills you’re learning from this book, you’re not going to let that smattering of fours scare you: you’re going to reach out to them pronto and work on winning them over and getting them up to a ten before they fill out another survey.
Six Survey Blunders: How to Alienate Customers Fast
1. Neglecting to respond personally and promptly after receiving negative feedback. When you receive negative survey comments, respond quickly by telephone (this is best in most cases) or email; this is a situation where a handwritten note takes too long to arrive and can leave a customer stewing in the interim. Don’t set a batch of surveys aside for later en masse response without scanning them first for negative responses that require immediate replies.
2. Failing to thank—again, personally —anyone who offers you personal praise on a survey. A handwritten note is wonderful in this case.
3. Providing a reward for a completed survey that doesn’t fit with your company’s image or a sweepstakes chance so unrealistically small as to be meaningless. (Rather than offering either of these, it would be better to simply say, ‘ We really want to improve—please take this survey to help us out if you’d be so kind.’’)
4. Asking customers to be on an ‘‘advisory council’’ or hold a similar honorary position . . . and then only contacting them with obvious come-ons.
5. Creating a survey that is too much work to fill out, with no opportunity to answer a short form or skip any portions of the long survey. (Do you really only want to know the preferences of customers who took the time to answer a thirty-question survey without leaving a single answer blank?)
78
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
6. Asking intrusive demographic questions (such as income or gender) and not making the questions optional. Do not assume that respondents will trust your privacy practices.
Secret Shoppers. Professional ‘‘secret shoppers’’ will anonymously patronize your business and describe the experience to you in detail. For some businesses, this can be invaluable. The fact that a critical review comes from a complete outsider is very helpful to some organizations.
Members of an organization respond differently to criticism from somebody outside of their social and power hierarchies—someone who pre-sumably has no dog in the fight. Some employees find it easier to accept truths about their service shortcomings, and to get right to work making important changes, when the news comes from a secret shopper service.
On the other hand, as with outside survey services, a secret shopping firm needs to know what you want it to test for. What’s important to your business may be very specific and contextually subtle. So the generic checklist used as a default by an outside service is unlikely to be useful. Instead, you will need to work with them to ensure that they are after what you are after.
Steering a Company Is Easier with a (3-D) Dashboard
You could, in theory, drive a car without a dashboard. But sooner or later you’d be caught speeding, or run out of gas, or burn up the engine—all hazards that indicators on a dashboard would have signaled far in advance. A company also needs a dashboard: a complement of highly visible meters and early warning signs that protect against foreseeable problems.
The kind of dashboard we recommend includes more than
traditional ‘‘hard’’ measurements. Steering your company while only looking at such measurements is kind of
77
loyalists and are not going to sing the praises of your brand from the rooftops. Furthermore, with the mad skills you’re learning from this book, you’re not going to let that smattering of fours scare you: you’re going to reach out to them pronto and work on winning them over and getting them up to a ten before they fill out another survey.
Six Survey Blunders: How to Alienate Customers Fast
1. Neglecting to respond personally and promptly after receiving negative feedback. When you receive negative survey comments, respond quickly by telephone (this is best in most cases) or email; this is a situation where a handwritten note takes too long to arrive and can leave a customer stewing in the interim. Don’t set a batch of surveys aside for later en masse response without scanning them first for negative responses that require immediate replies.
2. Failing to thank—again, personally —anyone who offers you personal praise on a survey. A handwritten note is wonderful in this case.
3. Providing a reward for a completed survey that doesn’t fit with your company’s image or a sweepstakes chance so unrealistically small as to be meaningless. (Rather than offering either of these, it would be better to simply say, ‘ We really want to improve—please take this survey to help us out if you’d be so kind.’’)
4. Asking customers to be on an ‘‘advisory council’’ or hold a similar honorary position . . . and then only contacting them with obvious come-ons.
5. Creating a survey that is too much work to fill out, with no opportunity to answer a short form or skip any portions of the long survey. (Do you really only want to know the preferences of customers who took the time to answer a thirty-question survey without leaving a single answer blank?)
78
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
6. Asking intrusive demographic questions (such as income or gender) and not making the questions optional. Do not assume that respondents will trust your privacy practices.
Secret Shoppers. Professional ‘‘secret shoppers’’ will anonymously patronize your business and describe the experience to you in detail. For some businesses, this can be invaluable. The fact that a critical review comes from a complete outsider is very helpful to some organizations.
Members of an organization respond differently to criticism from somebody outside of their social and power hierarchies—someone who pre-sumably has no dog in the fight. Some employees find it easier to accept truths about their service shortcomings, and to get right to work making important changes, when the news comes from a secret shopper service.
On the other hand, as with outside survey services, a secret shopping firm needs to know what you want it to test for. What’s important to your business may be very specific and contextually subtle. So the generic checklist used as a default by an outside service is unlikely to be useful. Instead, you will need to work with them to ensure that they are after what you are after.
Steering a Company Is Easier with a (3-D) Dashboard
You could, in theory, drive a car without a dashboard. But sooner or later you’d be caught speeding, or run out of gas, or burn up the engine—all hazards that indicators on a dashboard would have signaled far in advance. A company also needs a dashboard: a complement of highly visible meters and early warning signs that protect against foreseeable problems.
The kind of dashboard we recommend includes more than
traditional ‘‘hard’’ measurements. Steering your company while only looking at such measurements is kind of
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