#8 Keeping things simple, six signs a company does not care about customer service
Keeping things as simple as possible Yesterday morning I read yet another proposal for a complex customer satisfaction index that a company in the financial services software industry has implemented. (Since someone from that company receives this newsletter and I don’t want to embarrass him, I am not going to provide a link, or name the company.) No less than 30 individual metrics are aggregated to come up with their Customer Health Index. Their marketing manager announced it with the headline NPS is Dead! I have worked on customer experience, off and on, for over 35 years. This is by far the most complex metric I have ever seen. Some composite customer satisfaction indices, such as Bruce Temkin’s, combine three or four metrics and are better revenue predictors than a single metric. This new Customer Health index includes things like ‘$ partner co-sell’ and ‘number of closed won opportunities’ in the mix. It seems like an excellent sales management dashboard, and it may well predict the probability of the company closing the next deal, but it has little to do with customer experience. There is nothing about what customers want to see improved, for example. Composite metrics all suffer from one defect compared to NPS, whatever their benefits. They are much harder to communicate clearly and effectively. If you have to spend the first ten minutes of every presentation explaining how the metric works and why you chose a particular set of components, you are doomed. Keep customer experience metrics simple. Use Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, or something else that uses a single question and whose trend relative to the competition predicts revenue for your business. And of course, remember that the metric is less important than understanding why customers gave you the score, and what they want you to improve. Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.
Forbes article: Six Unmistakable Signs a Company Doesn’t Care about Customer Service I normally find myself agreeing with Micah Solomon. Not so much this time. He provides six useful illustrations of symptoms. I believe the single most important one is far bigger and easier to spot. Companies that consider that customer service is not a core competency or critical to their business subcontract it to someone else. I have to say that my views on this particular point are well known. I believe that bad customer service can be a reason for customers to leave a company. I also believe that there is little value in providing ‘great’ service, compared to ‘good’ service, for most companies. Investment money is usually better spent elsewhere, once the customer service is good enough. Once the processes are good enough, you can consider transferring it all, including the people, to a company that is specialized in that sort of thing. Micah Solomon’s article is here. Forbes again: Happy Employees Equal Happy Customers? Well, Yes, But It’s Complicated (No, Forbes is not all I read.) Given my own meta study, I could not resist reading this article written by Rodd Wagner. While overstating, as usual, the relationship between the two factors, they provide interesting data from BI International suggesting that unhappy employees may not cause unhappy customers. “Sabotage is rare” is one notable statement. The three graphs are quite easy to misinterpret. Bear in mind that the measurements are relative, rather than absolute, as you look at them. The article is here. Looking forward On the book front, my brother and I continue to make progress, slightly delayed by my first strategy work for a new client this week. I am reasonably close to getting all Kindle devices to display the text and graphics the way I want. I have also decided to go ahead with print versions. My best current guess is that the Kindle versions will be available for pre-order within two weeks, and actually deliverable a week or so later. I suspect the print versions will take a further week or so. I have not yet gotten to grips with the graphic format required for print. And my current plan is that both electronic and print versions will be available on all Amazon sites. Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter here. I have put cleaned-up links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below. You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net. To change your subscription, click here.
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