Happy customers are business gold, and surveying satisfaction levels is where the treasure hunt begins. But how do you survey customers to maximum effect? Sean Ashcroft reports
As the Rolling Stones reminded red-faced authorities back in 1965, satisfaction – or the lack thereof – is a powerful force. In commerce, it is the difference between success and failure or, at the very least, between excellence and mediocrity, growth and stagnation.
Measuring satisfaction is easy for people: those around us are either smiling, scowling or staring blankly at us. We nearly always know why, too.
For businesses, of course, there are no such easy ‘tells’ to help them gauge, or explain, customer satisfaction. There are no short cuts: it is hard, yet vital, work.
Vital, because happy customers are loyal, and it costs comparatively little to keep them spending money with you – certainly far less than encouraging new customers to fork out. It’s the 80:20 rule: most income stems from a small number of satisfied customers.
“Statistics show it’s three times more expensive to win a new customer than to service an existing one,” says marketing consultant Luan Wise. “This means understanding feedback from existing customers is essential. This is especially true in B2B, where sales cycles can be very long.”
It will have been with concern, then, that UK businesses read a recent report from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), the independent, professional membership body for customer service in the UK. The ICS’s annual UK Customer Satisfaction Index shows satisfaction levels are at their lowest point since January 2010.
ICS CEO Jo Causon says that, although B2B operations are not covered by the Index, its findings should give B2B brands pause for thought.
“In our experience, B2B and B2C organisations perform similarly for customer service, so we’d expect to see that overall, customer satisfaction is on a downward trend.”
Also, customer satisfaction is more important for B2B than B2C, says Causon. “The stakes can often be higher for everyone involved. The consequences of poor customer service have a bigger impact on organisations dealing in high-value contracts.”
She concludes the Index shows there is: “Huge potential for B2C and B2B to drive growth and brand loyalty by improving customer service.”
Let your aim dictate
Of course, customer service can’t be improved in a vacuum: you need smart data to inform decisions. This is where customer satisfaction surveys enter the story. But what’s the best starting point for such surveys?
“Knowing why you’re carrying out a survey is the most important step of all,” says Wise. “This will determine the type of questions you need to ask.
“Is your aim to grow the company? If so, will you grow by retaining customers, or by acquiring new ones? Maybe both? Perhaps you want to enter new markets, or find out what customers think about new initiatives you’re planning?”
Only when the ‘why’ is nailed down should you look at the ‘how’. At this point, it will be the operation-wide customer survey that’ll spring to the minds of many.
Yet many businesses prefer to build customer feedback into their day-to-day operations. One such firm is Brighton-based Emphasis Training, which provides business writing training to corporate clients.
Emphasis founder Rob Ashton says: “As part of every course, we ask people what annoys them most about the documents they have to read. Not only do we build this information into our training courses, we also use it to service our customers’ needs.”
The company also hands course delegates a feedback form. “Some may argue making feedback part of our service delivery could bias results,” says Ashton. “But I think it’s still worth doing. Such feedback keeps our trainers on their toes, and this helps ensure we deliver a consistently high quality of training.”
Emphasis also runs a help desk that customers can approach for writing advice. Many of their queries end up as content in the company’s client newsletter. Ashton says the feedback also “allows us to know what clients are interested in.”
The high value of ongoing customer surveys is not lost on Nick Hague, director of Manchester-based market research specialist B2B International, who says businesses would do well to remember the customer satisfaction scores in large-scale surveys are only a snapshot at a point in time.
“People’s views change continuously, and so too do customer satisfaction levels. Measuring satisfaction must be a continuous process.”
The customer survey
Mark Taylor, global lead for customer experience transformation at Capgemini Consulting, says there’s value in both approaches, because they fulfil different needs.
“If ongoing surveys are a good fit for your operation, then hallelujah. But I don’t believe this negates the need for a more formal check on your interaction with customers across an entire year.
“If you are pulse-checking customers as you go along, what you’re really getting is feedback only about specific interactions. This might be a purchase experience or an after-sales experience, for example. With a more formal customer satisfaction survey, you get a broad picture of customers’ views of their relationship with you.”
If a business opts for a wide-reaching survey, the key decision is whether to keep this inhouse or turn to a specialist third-party provider.
From a technology point of view, businesses are better advised to use a third-party survey platform, believes Paul Orovan, global director of business consulting at Satmetrix, a provider of customer satisfaction solutions.
He says there are: “Very few examples of self-build programmes that provide better value for money over buying from a third-party provider.”
He adds that data integrity and complexity are also reasons for going out-of-house. “You want to make sure feedback is gathered in a trustworthy and uninfluenced environment. This can be challenging when the programme is delivered internally.”
He says third-party providers also have more experience in data collection across multiple customer profiles and many thousands of interviews: “The best ones also offer live reporting tools that let you monitor customer feedback in real time.”
Frequency
But with customer surveys, it’s not just ‘how’ that businesses must ponder, but ‘how often’.
Survey frequency should vary according to the complexity of customer relationships, says Taylor.
“The more complicated the relationship, the greater the need for surveys. Sometimes, the relationship with customers can be very complicated. For example, there might be lots of influences at play in purchasing decisions.”
Orovan says frequency can also be dictated by the ‘rhythms and cycles’ of customer engagement: “A telecomms company might run several ongoing event-driven surveys – when a customer joins, calls support or has a product upgrade, for example.”
On the other hand, he says, a B2B manufacturer might be better advised to conduct an annual strategic survey of its accounts, complemented by event-driven surveys “for measuring things like how well you managed an installation experience.”
Wise, meanwhile, says survey frequency can also be driven by market competition.
“In a previous job with a print company, we asked customers how happy they were every time we completed a project. In a competitive market such as print this is very important, because it’s very price sensitive: if a customer has issues with price or service levels then you have to address these there and then.”
What to ask?
As we can see, the logistics of surveying customers can be complicated – and this is before you’ve even decided what to actually ask them. So, what should you ask them?
An increasingly popular approach is Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measures the loyalty between a provider and its customers, and is based on one or more direct questions, such as: ‘How likely is it you’d recommend us/our products to a friend or colleague?’
Capgemini’s Taylor feels NPS is very much the way to go: “I’m a big believer in NPS. It sounds simplistic but it’s immensely powerful, and because the survey is brief it’s far more likely to get a good response rate. Plus, whatever industry or sector you’re in, NPS allows you to compare yourself against your peer group.”
But most crucially, says Taylor, NPS allows surveys to be qualitative in nature but quantitative in output.
“It’s qualitative because you’re asking customers about their attitude to your brand. But it’s also quantitative because they score this on a scale. And because the output is quantitative you can map it against other dimensions, such as customer type and different services or products – even specific moments in the customer life-cycle.”
Taylor stresses that it is quantitative outcomes that enable businesses to implement change. “I mean, how do you embed emotional outcomes into an organisation? With hard numbers you know what you’re working with.”
Orovan agrees that qualitative research is ill-suited to driving outcomes: “It’s not scalable across large numbers of customers and how feedback is interpreted can be subjective.”
The strength of qualitative questioning, he says, is that it can provide a nuanced understanding of customers’ experiences. He cites as an example the verbatim comments of customers that are encouraged in the free-comments sections of surveys.
But ultimately, Orovan agrees change can be driven only by quantitative questioning. He says: “Organisations really need a customer feedback metric like NPS to rally behind. Whether surveys are conducted inhouse, out-of-house or on the hoof, they have little value if businesses fail to act on the data that’s gathered.
“The biggest mistake businesses make is thinking of customer surveys as a research endeavour. It’s not – it’s an operational fine-tuning exercise,” says Taylor. “If the work you do on customer satisfaction doesn’t drive your operations, then it’s wasted work.”
Hague believes satisfaction surveys work best when companies: “Are genuinely customer orientated.” Such companies, he says, are far more likely to follow-up a survey with an action plan, maybe driven by workshops.
“Workshops are an excellent format for analysing findings and driving through action planning. They must identify not only the root cause of any issues, but also possible barriers to improvement taking place.”
Hague adds: “You need to set measurable targets and allocate resources – usually money and people. Next, you frame any change in a time scale, and then find ways to measure and review progress.”
Fittingly, given that we’re discussing customer satisfaction, Hague points out that a survey is, in itself, an opportunity to cement satisfaction levels.
“It’s important to thank all customers who have been surveyed. Also, remember to share feedback with customers and to give pointers on key learnings and future actions that will affect their business.”
And as the ICS reminds us, today’s customers increasingly expect businesses to include them in the conversational loop.
“The UK is shifting from a transactional to a relationship economy,” says Causon, “so it’s vital customers are involved in a genuine conversation with organisations. There’s a greater emphasis on collaboration and co-creation, where customers play an important role from the very start of product development, especially in B2B.”
