research

January 2, 2019

#85 – The art of persuasion, BA NPS manipulation, CX tips for 2019, 1-800-GOT-JUNK NPS podcast

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / banks, Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, PwC, research, VOC /

Happy New Year! Some thoughts about the art of persuasion in 2019, how British Airways manipulates NPS numbers. Welcome to the 85th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

How to motivate people to act in 2019
British Airways color-coding NPS scale (Don’t do this)
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – 19 CX tips for 2019, 1-800-GOT-JUNK NPS podcast
Looking forward – Our books are great gifts for your teams, colleagues and friends

How to motivate people to act in 2019

People, including people in our own teams, often act in ways that we can’t understand. Put aside insanity as an explanation for a moment. (Though if you enjoyed The Psychopath Test as part of your holiday reading, you will understand that mental problems can sometimes be the explanation.) Let’s assume that a predictable mechanism exists and is being followed by those you can’t understand. What could that mechanism be?

Regular readers won’t be surprised by my suggestion that the explanation lies in what Nobel-winner Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2, meaning the two different ways our minds function. You may remember that System 1 is emotional, intuitive, and quick to react. System 2 is slower and more rational. Most importantly, if System 1 has reached a conclusion, System 2 may not engage at all.

Here is the thought I would like to offer you for 2019: To persuade people to do things, rely on System 1 and try to forget about System 2. The best way of engaging people’s emotions is through stories. In the case of customer experience, these stories should ideally be told by customers. Naturally, if you are a customer experience leader, you will want to select and manipulate the stories that are told so they match your strategy, your funded initiatives; the things you need to achieve. These should of course be based on a System 2 methodology that is scientific in its nature.

My thoughts are evolving about the subject and I can use your help. You will probably recognize all of this as an evolution of the blog I sent you recently. I am trying to come up with a single image that communicates what I am getting at here. What follows is a first attempt. The upper row represents System 1 thinking and the lower row System 2. I have deliberately made the font size smaller in the second row to indicate that it is less important as a motivator. If you have other ideas on how to communicate this, please let me know.

British Airways color-coding NPS scale (Don’t do this)

In the last newsletter I covered a Hilton hotel employee’s attempt to manipulate NPS results by writing a note soliciting a 9 or 10 and leaving it in a guest’s room. It is just human nature to try to influence any score you are measured on. While your managers may hope that you will do this purely by improving your performance, other methods are possible too.

British Airways has now started to color-code their NPS scale when soliciting feedback. You should absolutely not do this, according to Reichheld and Markey. I have to say that providing explanations about the numbers on the NPS scale is one of the most common questions I have been asked over the last few years. The explanation is usually something like, “I don’t think customers understand what the numbers on the scale mean, so I feel I should add some additional explanation.” A couple of times it was positioned as a way of addressing the cultural differences in the way people answer feedback requests. “If those grumpy Australians could understand that a Passive / indifferent score is actually a 7 or an 8 they would score us higher.”

Doing this sort of thing biases your results, and I believe you would fail an NPS audit (should such a thing ever exist). Note in passing that you should never compare customer satisfaction results between countries. Your competition is local, and you should only do single-country competitive comparisons.

And yes, this is yet another instance of Goodhart’s law, as covered a couple of weeks back here.

Here is what the relevant part of the latest BA email feedback request looks like. Thanks to reader Loch Miwa for sending.

Our latest blog posts

Only one new entry in the last couple of weeks. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

Some time ago I wrote a short article suggesting that the plural of the word ‘anecdote’ is not ‘science’. My point was that just because a lot of people have said something does not make it true. Let’s take this further and talk about anecdotes and emotions.

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

The final article in the series covers what is often the most difficult area: Can you actually get the sponsorship and resources for your new strategy? The questions I propose should at least help you find out. And once you have analyzed the six situation analysis areas, you need to assemble your top insights about how to achieve a breakthrough strategy, whether for customer experience or anything else.

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

This time the situation analysis process moves on to relevant trends in your industry and in the external environment. Accurate observations about these areas can give you a competitive advantage. As always, you need to ask new questions to get new answers.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

CustomerGauge – 19 tips for great B2B CX in 2019

Katerina Sinitskaia wrote this great set of tips on the CustomerGauge site. I would have liked her to indicate her personal top three. Seems like a good checklist for everyone in any case. You can find them here.

Bain NPS podcast – Interview with Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK

With my B2B focus I was not sure I could learn anything when I started to listen to this Net Promoter System podcast. Rob Markey interviewed Brian Scudamore, who seems to be somewhat of a serial entrepreneur. His focus area is helping people with relatively ordinary tasks like moving house, painting a house, and some other household-related tasks. He seems to use students for at least some of the work. I found it all fascinating and relevant to all types of business from about the 20th minute onwards. I believe we can all learn something from Brian’s approach. Listen to it here.

Looking forward

It’s January and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books to get 2019 off to a great start!

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. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

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.

December 13, 2018

#83 – Most-read articles update, manipulating NPS scores, funny videos, AI bias

Maurice FitzGerald / Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / banks, Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, PwC, research, VOC /

Last week’s ‘most-read articles’ list is already way out of date, and an example of bad research from a major company. Welcome to the 83rd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Most-read articles update – Includes one I could not mention last week
Don’t measure individuals on NPS – They will find a way to manipulate it
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Funny service videos, AI bias
Looking forward – Our books are great gifts for your teams, colleagues and friends

Most-read articles update – Includes one I could not mention last week

Over the last week I have learned quite a lot more about what people (including you) apparently like to read. On Friday I wrote an article about the badly-written PwC customer experience research report that I mentioned here last week. It has already become by far my most popular article on LinkedIn this year, doubling the prior number one’s reads. The new article is here. Note that I wrote to the lead author of the report last week Wednesday suggesting he retract it until it can be improved. He did not reply, so I put my full critique on LinkedIn on Friday. It is more extensive than what I wrote here last week.

And an article I wrote two weeks ago that is not about customer experience just became my second-most-read post on LinkedIn. I criticized a different piece of research, this time on the ‘morning routines’ of ‘300 high achievers’. Their suggestion was of course that if we all copy such routines that we will be high achievers too. The defect in the research is that there was no control group. Perhaps the medium and low achievers among us have the same routines, or maybe something even more intense that we should therefore avoid. Who knows? My article is here.

However, the most-read thing I wrote last year did not appear on LinkedIn and was not on my own site either. It has had over 16,000 reads. It is on Quora, a site where people ask questions and get answers. (I suspect the majority of ‘answers’ are written by the people who ask the questions, or at least the first answer on the list.) Quora had a huge data breach two weeks ago, which is why I did not include my post in last week’s list. In this case, the question was “Why do business people fly the expensive business class if the goal of businesses is to minimize cost?”

Here is what I wrote:

“When the CEO and/or other senior executives feel they are justified in flying in Gulfstreams at $46 million each, it is hard for them to take a position that everyone else should fly in coach/economy. One Gulfstream costs the same as 300,000 advance purchase Chicago-Atlanta return fares. I just looked for midweek flights a month from now, on Delta, from Midway to Atlanta, so am not making this up. I realize that some companies still do have Gulfstreams and a coach-only policy. The same companies also impose travel freezes for Chicago-Atlanta (for example) while continuing to own and operate Gulfstreams.”

300,000 is not a typo. Let me know what you think. This reinforces my general view that (sadly) people prefer negative messages over positive ones.

Don’t measure individuals on NPS – They will find a way to manipulate it

A family member checked in to a Hilton Garden Inn this week. This message was in her room:

This is a typical example of what happens when you measure individuals on NPS. Compared to your reference period before you started the individual measurements, your NPS will improve, whether or not the service has actually improved. I am not picking on Hilton here as they are not worse than many others. Indeed, I have received a note from a car sales person asking me to phone first if I could not give him a 9 or a 10. His year-end bonus depended on the number of Promoter scores he received.

If you find yourself stuck with a system like this because (for example) your CEO thinks it is a great idea, do what the General Motors CX leader does and ignore the scores. Just read the answers to the ‘Why?’ and ‘What could we do better?’ questions.

Our latest blog posts

The articles listed here are part of a new series on a specific aspect of strategy creation: the process of asking new questions so you can get new answers. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 3: Competitors

There are two main categories of competitors: traditional and emerging. The emerging category includes companies you do not know about yet, but who may be about to take over your business. Here are some questions that will help you understand how you are doing compared to your competitors.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Curated by Userlike – 16 great and really funny customer service videos

I love these and could not stop laughing. Enjoy them here.

You Are Not So Smart podcast – Machine Bias

The actual title of this podcast is ‘How we transferred our biases into our machines and what we can do about it’. It is the best explanation of the topic that I have heard, and I consider it to be essential listening. The ‘You are not so smart’ podcasts can occasionally be tedious, but this one is definitely not. Learn more here.

Looking forward

It’s December and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books! Great end-of-year gifts, in my unbiased opinion.

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.

December 4, 2018

#82 – Most-read articles, how not to do research, mandatory NPS for UK banks, cartoons

Maurice FitzGerald / Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / banks, Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, PwC, research, VOC /

The things I like to write and you like to read, and an example of bad research from a major company. Welcome to the 82nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Our most-read articles on our site and on LinkedIn
What is your favorite color? (How not to do customer research)
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Mandatory NPS for UK banks, cartoons
Looking forward

Our most-read articles on this site and on LinkedIn

I have been reflecting on the types of things I should write about. As you might expect, I would prefer to write things that you want to read. I think the best information I have about what you like to read (other than this newsletter with its ever-expanding distribution list) is the list of most-read pages on our website and the most-read articles I have posted on the main LinkedIn feed. Interestingly, to me at least, the lists are not the same.

Here are the top three from our site:

And here are the top three from LinkedIn:

If you have not read some of these please have a look. And please let me know the main types of things you would like me to write about.

What is your favorite color? (How not to do customer research)

Please bear with me for a moment. I am going somewhere with this. What follows is the general format used to gather data for a customer experience research paper published by a major global consulting firm. OK, I am going to exaggerate a little, just to make my point.

Please pick your favorite color from this list:

Red
Orange
Yellow
Light blue
Sky blue
Pale blue
Navy blue
Aquamarine
Purple
Sparkly glitter color

Here are the (fictional) research report headlines based on analyzing the answers:

In a shocking development that should change the way you think about color, global consumers prefer red, orange or yellow to any color of blue by a margin of over five to one. And for the first time ever, green has totally disappeared from global color preferences! Global fashion houses are in turmoil and those who have overstocked green items are expected to lose half their value on Wall Street.

This is why you should never base customer research on a closed list of choices that you have made up. The answers would be completely different if you simply asked people the open question, ‘What is your favorite color?’ and let them write it in a blank field.

I wish I were exaggerating, but I am not. Even reputable companies do closed-list research. Here is a new publication from PriceWaterhouseCoopers that claims to tell us what ‘really matters to American consumers’. The core questions, based on a closed list of 20 choices were ‘Q: When it comes to great overall customer experience, how important do you think each of the following will be in the future? Which of the following things are worth paying more for?’ Choices ranged from ‘Charitability’ to ‘Efficiency’, as you will see on page six of the report. Personally, my top answer would have been ‘That a company remembers me’ but that was not among the choices. Try to think of your top choice before looking at the graph with the list on page 6.

The report gets worse in that the headlines and takeaways do not seem to match the research. On page two they have an overview that says “What truly makes for a good experience? Speed. Convenience. Consistency. Friendliness.” Speed and consistency were not even among the possible choices on the list. The person writing the report seems to have made it up based on personal bias, or just on nothing at all. Disgraceful.

If you work at PwC or believe I have this wrong, please let me know.

Our latest blog posts

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 3: Competitors

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 2: Partners

The majority of companies have partners for at least some of their business. The three main categories of partners available to most businesses are resellers, implementation partners, and subcontractors. This article concentrates on the questions that should be asked and answered to get new insights about partner strategy.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Ian Golding: The future of VOC measurement – don’t let organisations do it themselves!

Ian is one of the top CX people on the planet and has great success with his ‘Masterclass’. The full article is worth reading and the core news is that UK banks are now required to be measured on customers’ willingness to recommend them and they have to post the results in their bank branches. This healthy development was driven by reports from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) saying that UK banks do not compete enough with each other. Apparently only 3% of UK consumers change banks each year. The new regulation requires independent measurement of customer satisfaction and they are of course using the NPS recommendation question as the main score. GfK did the first study. Read Ian’s article here. Fascinating.

Marketoonist – Cartoon Powered Marketing

I just came across this entertaining site. I suggest you start with the customer experience article not far from the top. Tom Fishburn is the artist and he licenses his work. You can find it here.

Looking forward

It’s December and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books! Great end-of-year gifts, in my unbiased opinion.

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 19, 2018

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

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / Bain, benchmarks, Net Promoter System, NPS, research, Surveys, Temkin /

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.

What is benchmark research?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a benchmark is ‘something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged’. In the case of customer experience research, understanding your NPS, CSAT, ACSI metrics, trends, and reasons for those trends compared to those of your competitors would be a good example. The challenge lies in how to obtain numbers and other data, such as verbatim responses, for your competitors that are measured in the same way as the information for your own company. This is where the concept of double-blind benchmark research comes in. I don’t see how you could do it on your own, so using a third party seems inevitable.

Why can’t I do my own research?

It seems really unlikely that you could get an accurate contact list for your competitors’ customers. While you may have employees who used to work for your competitors, it is generally illegal for you to ask them for the competitors’ customer lists. Even if you had such a list, phoning or emailing them from your own address will necessarily bias the results. You need something totally neutral and unbiased.

What should you be looking for?

Here the three factors I feel are most important, based on years of using various companies for such research. All of this supposes that you cannot easily find benchmark studies that already cover your industry. For example, if you work for a large company selling to US consumers, the ACSI, Temkin Group, and others may already have what you need.

The single most important factor is the quality of the contact lists for your competitors and for your own company. I feel you should prefer companies that recruit their own panels of respondents, rather than those who source them from third-party panel companies. The reason is quality control. You need to be able to interact directly with the company that recruits panel members. At one point in my work at HP, I noticed that some answers to verbatim questions were pure garbage. People just hit random keys. One even wrote ‘I am just doing this for the points’. There were also cases of NPS scores which were opposite to the sentiment expressed in the verbatim comments. The company with whom you contract has to be able to eliminate such panel members, without your intervention.
A company that has already done this type of research, ideally in your industry. Industry experience helps vendors to correctly identify positions and people who are decision-makers, influencers, and simply end users of your products or services.
Ability to do basic data processing and presentation decks without your intervention. Ideally, they should be able to identify surprises in the research results for you. Over the years I learned that if you have to do a lot of work just to understand your own results, you lose the ability or motivation to dig deeply into your competitors’ results. A vendor who can supply the data in a way that can be directly analyzed using Tableau (or similar software) and text analytics would be ideal.

Syndication is another possibility

Since many companies choose to publish misleading NPS and other metrics, you and your competitors may actually be motivated to cooperate on a common benchmark methodology, and share the cost of hiring a company to do it for you. You could choose to make this into ‘open’ research, meaning you allow additional companies to join the effort and share the cost. This is ‘syndicated research’.

Some vendors

Bain has started an NPS benchmark research certification program. Their certification criteria are not yet public. J.D. Power and ROI Consultancy Services were the first two companies to be certified. You can find a list of research vendors on this page. Note that they do not indicate which vendors have been certified, and that I have no commercial relationship with Bain or any of the research vendors.

Conclusion

The three points above reflect the most important things I have learned over the years. Other factors may matter to you too, and I welcome learning about them. Benchmark research is the only type of research that should be able to accurately predict your revenue trends relative to your competitors. According to Bain and other research, competitive NPS trends explain 20 to 60% of market share trends, for example. Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey’s thoughts on the subject are here. Decent analysis of answers to open questions like ‘Why?’ and ‘What should we improve’ should guide your own efforts and give you competitive insights.

Please let me know what you think below.

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