Airlines

August 22, 2018

#72 – McDonalds, Singapore Airlines, and lots more

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter / Airlines, Behavioral economics, Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, NPS, Surveys, Temkin /

Strange in-restaurant survey by McDonalds, Singapore Airlines feedback process. Welcome to the 72nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

My experience providing feedback in a local McDonald’s
Singapore Airlines customer feedback process
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Cognitive Bias, ROI of customer experience improvement
Looking forward

Read this newsletter online instead

My experience providing feedback in a local McDonald’s

I made a rare visit to a McDonald’s restaurant in Geneva a few days ago. While enjoying my meal, a person who seemed to be a supervisor came up to me and told me I could have a free coffee in return for answering an online feedback request. It did not take long but did contain a (negative) surprise. After some thumbs-up/thumbs-down questions about cleanliness and the meal, I got the following two screens. (The screen captures were taken after I answered the questions.):

So, what is surprising, you may ask? The answer is simple: I had no contact whatsoever with their website. (For readers inclined to be picky, you can see that the URL for the feedback form is not a McDonald’s URL.) The following question was the recommendation question about the restaurant, but I had no way of knowing that when answering about the website.

I believe this issue could have several explanations. First, McDonald’s seems to have implemented the Net Promoter Score in an inappropriate way. NPS is an overall brand metric that is also useful at the level of an individual product or service. Second, the people in charge of selecting the research vendor are probably IT people responsible for their website and they decided to slip the question in there anyway. Third, since the copyright notice suggests the survey form may exist since last year, it is possible that nobody reads the results or acts on them. Perhaps they are only interested in the numbers.

Anyway, we live and learn. My advice: use the Net Promoter System and Score only at the overall brand level, or to measure and improve individual products or services. Your website is not a product unless you are a company that creates websites.

Singapore Airlines customer feedback processes

Singapore Airlines usually finishes at or near the top of lists of the world’s best airlines. A flight this week gave me a chance to understand their email/web customer feedback process. It includes what I believe to be the single best thing you can do to improve response rates, and still has room for improvement. Indeed, there is a major ‘gotcha’ that I will describe at the end.

The feedback process for Singapore Airlines is administered by Qualtrics and there are several Qualtrics subscribers to this newsletter who may be able to act on some of my comments. The email I received 24 hours after the flight is just below my comments and suggestions.

First, embedding the NPS rating scale in the outbound email is the single best thing you can do to improve response rates to feedback requests sent by email. In my own A/B testing at HP it at least doubled response rates. Others have found that it triples response rates.
Personalizing the emails helps response rates too. This one is doubly anonymous. It is sent to ‘Sir/Madam” and we have no idea who has sent it. The lack of an addressee name may be a consequence of privacy laws that prevent transmission of personal data to third parties such as Qualtrics without the consent of the people concerned.
There is no commitment to improve anything, at least according to the email. The purpose is research only, apparently.
This is a relatively short survey with just ten screens, including the thank you screen at the end. However, the email provides no time estimate and there is no progress indicator as you answer the different questions. Providing a time estimate helps response rates. And I am still traumatized by the British Airways survey I received about three years ago that had over 100 screens.
It is explicitly stated that you will not be contacted, no matter what your feedback. That’s pretty disappointing.
Response rates and customer sentiment can be improved by telling people what you have learned and improved in the past.

However, none of the issues mentioned compare to the single biggest problem. I received the feedback request, but I did not take the flight. I booked it for a family member who received her boarding card by email, so I know the airline had the correct email somewhere. This also happened to me with Thai airways a couple of years ago.

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Time to think about the plural of ‘anecdote’ in new ways

Just a few thoughts based on hearing that “the plural of anecdote is not data” twice in the last week. I think there are two new ways of thinking about accumulations of anecdotes…

Avoiding confirmation bias when interpreting CX, NPS, indeed any research results

Some thoughts on how to avoid confirmation bias when interpreting research results. While I will use Net Promoter System research as an example, this applies to all forms of research…

Thoughts about survey infrastructure for Net Promoter and other feedback/improvement systems

Unless yours is a very small company, you will not be able to implement and operate an effective Net Promoter System or any other feedback and improvement system without appropriate…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

The Atlantic: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

Ah… cognitive bias. One of my favorite subjects. This 15-minute read by Ben Yagoda covers all of the common reasons our brains trick us into believing things that are not true. While it all seems particularly relevant in the modern political environment, this is a customer strategy newsletter so of course I would like you to take a different perspective. Use the article to understand why your colleagues and friends believe many things about customer experience (OK, and other topics) that are simply not true. And if you want to be a bit Machiavellic about it, learn how you can exploit these biases to communicate your own messages more effectively. Learn about it all here.

Temkin Group: ROI of Customer Experience improvement in 2018

Bruce Temkin and his team have just published their 2018 report on the ROI of customer experience by industry. As a software veteran, I am not at all surprised to learn that software is the industry with the best ROI on CX work. The research covered 318 companies in 20 industries. Fascinating. Read the summary here.

Looking forward

Book sales continue their positive trend. We first published the books starting in March 2017 and every month in 2018 so far has had better sales than in 2017. As mentioned previously, the thing that helps most is Amazon reviews, so please provide your views there, no matter what you think.

As you probably know, my brother Peter illustrated our books. He has an Oxford doctorate in cognitive psychology. While not about customer experience, I want to mention the three books he has just published in Kindle format. All three are photography books, demonstrating how a 90-degree rotated view of people, landscapes, and architecture can change our persepctive. Read his LinkedIn article on the topic here.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put 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.

March 28, 2018

#52 – Economics of loyalty, non-relationship between employee and customer satisfaction, AI for airline customer feedback, more

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter / ACSI, Airlines, CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, employee satisfaction, Glassdoor, strategy /

Welcome to the 52nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Short answer to a question about the economics of loyalty
Reactions to articles on the non-relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – AI analysis of airline satisfaction
Looking forward

Short answer to question about the economics of loyalty

A reader asked ‘I wonder if you can assist me in understanding the concept of “The Economics of Loyalty” with examples’. You will see that I do not pretend my answer is 100% complete. I just feel these are the most important points. Please let me know if you disagree. Here is what I replied:

… Good timing for the question as I have been trying to work out how to express the concept concisely. I am sure you have found long descriptions like the one at http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/calculating-the-economics-of-loyalty-forbes.aspx. You may also have read what I have written on the subject in my NPS book Net Promoter – Implement the System.

Reducing it all to something simple is tricky, and I am not sure that what I will write here works for all types of businesses. Anyway, here are the two points I feel may be the most important:

Cost of acquiring a new customer compared to cost of keeping an existing one. In an ideal situation, your sales people bring in new customers, while the sales process for renewing existing contracts is mainly administrative and costs a lot less. Divide the total revenue from new customers by the total sales and marketing budget, and you have the cost proportion for the first part. A similar calculation can be used for renewals. The two are often difficult to separate, and you may need to estimate the proportion of sales people’s time selling to existing customers.
The profit margins from existing customers, versus new customers: This probably matters as much as the first point. Happy existing customers tend to pay close to full price. Unhappy customers tend to get price reductions. New customers tend to pay less than existing customers, at least for B2B.

Reactions to my messages on customer / employee satisfaction

Thank you for the many comments whether received directly, via LinkedIn or on Twitter. I wrote four articles in all. Newsletter subscribers received a long one, with details of the methodology. Note that I had to update it slightly due to an error I found in an Excel formula. The updated article is in the blog list below. The second article gave the lists of companies who were in the top 10% for both cusotmer and employee satisfaction, and those in the bottom 10%. The third article provided the counter-intuitive lists, meaning companies in the top 10% for one factor and the bottom 10% for the other. LinkedIn and Facebook are two of the four companies whose employees love them while their customers hate them. I doubt Facebook’s latest tribulations will change that. You will also see a short summary of the new information on the blog list below.

Most people who gave feedback were positive and appreciated that employee happiness and employee engagement are two different concepts. Employees can be happy about many things that have nothing to do with customers. Two reactions I received were in the ‘my anecdotes trump your data’ category, meaning they just did not want to believe the data. And one, unfortunately was just “My data says the opposite” without any indication of what that data is or where it comes from. I would love to have been able to see it. I really don’t want to believe that employee satisfaction counts for nothing in most businesses. However, that’s what the data suggests.

As always, feel free to disagree…

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

	Yet more reflections on why corporate cost benchmarking is often evil and destructive Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of cost benchmarking. The reason is simple. I think it is almost always misused, sometimes producing disastrous results. The primary reason is that the cost cutting takes place in the absence of clear statements and actions to spend more on the areas where companies want to invest and grow.
	Employees love these companies, and customers hate them… and vice-versa My research this month and a year ago (see below) has established that there is little or no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. This post simply gives the lists that should not exist: the companies employees hate but customers love, and vice-versa. If the conventional wisdom that the two always go together were true, these lists would not exist.
	The large US businesses with the best and worst customer and employee satisfaction Here are the large US businesses that everyone (customers and employees) love, and the ones they both hate.
	Short update on last year’s research: There is almost no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction This article is intended for readers who remember last year’s article or have read the corresponding chapter in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. Others should read the longer version below.
	New data: Does employee satisfaction drive customer satisfaction? Not really! This article is an updated version of what I wrote on the same subject a year ago. The results continue to be surprising and to go against what most people think. If you remember the details of last year’s article, the short version may be enough for you.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Thematic software: Why US airlines rank best or worst, according to passengers

Great article by Alyona Medelyan on how to use web scraping and text analytics to understand what your customers are thinking. Truly an innovative approach. You can read it here.

CMO: Businesses rate themselves two times higher than consumers on CX

An Australian article about the main findings of the 2018 Starcom Media Futures report. And that gap has almost doubled since last year. Read more here.

Looking forward

I am currntly trying to suggest how a large sports association with three million members should go about getting feedback from its 60 national associations. I have never done anything like this before, so any relevant experience you have would be most welcome.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

February 27, 2018

#50 – Program management Speed Dating, Airline complaints and satisfaction, Top 30 CX books, more

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter / ACSI, Airlines, Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, program management, Speed dating, Top 30 CX books /

Welcome to the 50th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

‘Speed Dating’ as a critical step in program management
Do complaints and on-time % correlate with satisfaction ratings for US airlines?
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Top CX books, and the million dollar CX question
Looking forward

‘Speed Dating’ as a critical program management skill

Large improvement programs present many management challenges. The biggest issues I have seen arise when sub-teams are dependent on each other, but don’t do anything to address these dependencies. When working on the integration of HP and Compaq, one of my colleagues, Paul Maguire, came up with the Speed Dating concept. I have used it many times since then, and always found it to be helpful. Here are my views on program kickoff meetings and the Speed Dating they should include.

Ideally, you should hold your first implementation meeting face-to-face. This is particularly important in large organizations with people in multiple locations. Trust is established far more quickly when you can look someone in the eyes. If you are in a large company, I am sure you will have witnessed colleagues who freely criticize those they have never met. It is much rarer when people get to know each other. Ideally, when kicking off the set of new initiatives, you should have the project teams for all approved projects get together in a single location. The primary purpose of the first workshop is to produce the first task plan; the list of work, deliverables, resources, timing and interdependencies for each initiative. The teams should also address completion criteria and risk management and do some simple ‘speed dating’.

Speed Dating is an evocative name for an essential process. It is common that project teams identify dependencies on other teams or individuals when they write down their task plans. Surprisingly, it is also common that they never discuss the interdependencies with the people concerned. Projects then get delayed or don’t succeed. Organize simple speed dating towards the end of your kickoff workshop. Each team visits each other team purely to discuss their mutual dependencies. For example, a service center may want to improve their call handling software and depend on help from IT and procurement people to make it happen. Use printed versions of each task plan to facilitate the work. You will also find some work duplication and the short speed-dating discussion should resolve it. Use a countdown timer to signal the end of each session. Ten minutes each may be enough.

And don’t forget to have some fun.

Do complaints and on-time % correlate with satisfaction for US airlines?

I have been interested in airline satisfaction since the time, over 30 years ago, when I started to travel most weeks. There is a lot of public data in the USA, less elsewhere. The US Department of Transportation has just published its consumer report that includes data for all of 2017. I decided to correlate two of the data sets with the satisfaction data published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index people. As an added bonus, I also looked at employee satisfaction, as measured by Glassdoor ratings. The results are surprising, at least to me.

So… being on time does not matter much, apparently. The airline with the worst on-time record for all of 2017 finished with the best customer satisfaction score.

Please have a look at the correlation line. What the scores mean is that the higher the number of complaints per 100,000 passengers boarded, the worse the ACSI score is. And the higher employees rate their own satisfaction, the better the ACSI scores are too. It also seems logical that the happier the employees are, the lower the number of complaints.

I have already demonstrated scientifically (last year) that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction do not correlate, overall and across all industries. My study also showed that there are high-touch industries where employee happiness does seem to matter. Airlines are one such industry. I would love to be able to demonstrate the relative importance of different operational data for all industries, but there are very few for which it is available. Fortunately, at least some operational data is available for airlines. Surprise: operational excellence does not seem to matter much.

As always, feel free to disagree…

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Sometimes the best process is no process at all

Continuous improvement is a common catchphrase. It is easy to believe that making every existing process more efficient should be the focus. But what about eliminating the processes altogether? Three stories from my personal experience may help make the case…

Choosing a benchmark research provider for NPS, CSAT or any other customer experience metrics

I am trying to form my thoughts about what criteria are reasonable when deciding on a benchmark research provider. My current thinking is below. I welcome your additions and corrections.…

Valentine’s Day classic blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!

It was Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and I was puzzled by the results of some HP customer experience research. The data source and volume were impeccable. However, the results contradicted a lot of commonly-held beliefs about the behavior of unhappy customers in particular…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

eglobalis: Top 30 Customer Experience books

Ricardo Saltz Gulko has put together this book list. It combines what he considers to be the best books he has read in 2017 with his list of the best forthcoming books of 2018. I was pleasantly surprised to find our Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation book on his list, and of course Ricardo’s own forthcoming title is also there. You can read it here.

Ian Golding: The Customer Experience Million Dollar Question: Will my customer come back

Ian often blogs about travel and hotel experiences. This time he talks about the experiences he had with his three children, as he took them to the cinema and two restaurants. Customer loyalty to your company matters, no matter what your business. Read more about Ian’s experiences here.

Looking forward

I have started to work on my now-annual research on the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction for hundreds of US businesses that sell to consumers. It should be ready four weeks from now. I think it will be just as controversial as the last time.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

August 31, 2017

#30 – Airlines, Difficult Customers, Customer Growth Indicator

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter / Airlines, Customer Experience, Difficult customers, strategy /

Welcome to the 30th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The four topics this week are:

What is really happening to customer satisfaction with US airlines? (Not what you think)
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites
Looking forward

What is really happening to customer satisfaction with US airlines?

Given the amount of negative attention about customer incidents on United, Delta and other airlines this year, there must be a serious problem, right? Customers must be angry with US airlines, right? Customer satisfaction must be going through the floor, right? Wrong!

Customer satisfaction with US-based airlines is the best it has ever been since it has been covered by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, meaning since 1994. So what gives? In reality, this is all to do with The law of small numbers. When data sets get very big, you can always find some small numbers that look very unattractive indeed. Let me give an example that is closer to home. Here in Geneva, about 7 million passengers went through the airport in 2000. This year the total will be about 16 million. The explanation is mainly a single airline: EasyJet, that decided to establish a major hub here when Swissair almost completely abandoned Geneva. EasyJet now carries over 40% of all passengers. My favorite Sunday newspaper (Le Matin) regularly carries stories about people getting stranded in Lyon when their flight was too late for the Geneva curfew, as well as stories affecting individual passengers. Always negative stories. No positive ones at all.

The point here is that when you carry 6 or 7 million passengers out of a single city, some people will have bad experiences. Since the airport has understandably struggled to keep up with passenger growth, there may be a few more of these experiences than in an airport with no capacity issues. Since the population of the Geneva urban area is just about 300,000, it is easier for the rare bad events to become known. Social media helps too.

I am not saying that United, Delta, EasyJet, or indeed any other airline is wonderful. I am just suggesting that individual incidents that are not handled well do not mean much. In the USA at least, most passengers seem to be happier than ever. Here is the ACSI results table. If a score is in green, it is the better of the 2016 and 2017 scores.

ACSI airlines

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Use emotion and ‘identifiable victims’ in customer experience reporting

No strategy is worthwhile and no project is worth doing if you cannot communicate it effectively. Once the communication is about how your customers and partners feel about your company, emotion enters into play…

Net Promoter Open Question Analysis – Survey Results

Thanks to those who have taken the survey on analysis of open-ended questions. This article summarizes the results and hopefully provides a few insights. I was surprised at how manual it all is today.

OK, You have given me a strategy development method… but what customer-centric strategies are actually possible?

The best strategy development method I have come across is one I learned from Willie Pietersen at his Columbia Executive Education course and is also described in his books. This Bain article complements it by suggesting there are just 30 possible customer ‘value drivers’ for consumer businesses. Choosing to be great at just a few is the secret of success.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Inc. – 7 Powerful Ways to Deal With Difficult Customers

A Some good tips for dealing with “rude and demanding” customers. Personally, I think number two ‘Listen’ and number three ‘Apologize with empathy’ are the most important. See what you think. Read it here.

McKinsey -The Customer Growth Indicator: How to win the battle for initial consumer consideration

An interesting new article from McKinsey that includes some short video clips. At first I thought their contention that 70% of purchasing decisions depend on initial consideration was obvious and arbitrary. Then I read more and watched the videos. Some good insights relating to past customer experience in particular. Have a look here.

Looking forward

As mentioned last week, we decided to run some Amazon ads to see whether they have more effect on book sales than they cost. (We are happy with the sales even without advertising, but why not try?) I set up four campaigns earlier today. For anyone who is interested, my brother and I decided to use two books as our references and we are only about a third of the way through them at the moment. They are The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman, and Mastering Amazon Ads by Brian D. Weeks. Weeks is very scientific, and we are trying to follow his methodology precisely. I should be able to let you know how it is going about six to eight weeks from now.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.