Surveys

July 10, 2019

NPS (15) – Use direct marketing techniques to improve survey response rates – 15th in the series on NPS

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Net Promoter System, NPS / Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, response rates, Surveys /

This is the 15th article in a series on the Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System. The subject this time is the use of classical direct marketing techniques to improve response rates. By classical, well… yes, I do mean ‘old’.

Like most people, I receive lots of survey requests by email. Unlike most people, I don’t just delete them all. I want to learn. What I usually learn is that most survey designers don’t understand even the most basic direct marketing techniques. Here are some that you may want to consider.

Direct marketing reference source

My direct marketing guru is Drayton Bird, author of Commonsense Direct & Digital Marketing. Most of the techniques for getting people to do what you want them to do have not changed since direct marketing was done by sending people things by snail mail. Here are the most critical points:

Personalize

Make your invitation as personal as conceivably possible. Use the person’s first and last name. (It is better to err on the side of formality. There are cultures where using an adult person’s first name only will turn them off. France is a good example.) If you have additional information about them, like the city where they live, the industry in which they work and so on, use that too. Personalization applies at the outbound source as well. If you are doing an overall brand image/relationship survey that is being sent by email to smaller customers and partners, it should go out from the CEO’s mailbox. Product-specific surveys should go out from the product manager’s mailbox and should start with “Good morning Mr. Doe, I am the product manager for the DoubleBubble Jacuzzi you bought recently at Home Depot…”

Single action request

Only ask the person to take a single action. When I was taught direct marketing, I was taught to think of the recipient holding a stack of letters and standing over a waste bin. The first letter asks the person to do A. She puts it in an action stack on her desk. The second one asks her to do B. She puts it in the bin. The third one asks her to do A or B… She thinks “Wow, A or B, which should I do? I can’t decide.” So she drops it in the bin. Like most aspects of direct marketing, this has been studied using A / B testing; the technique where you change only one thing in a marketing piece and measure what happens. While intuition would tell you that giving a person two choices would double the overall response rate, the opposite actually happens. Your overall response rate halves if you give a person two choices rather than asking them to do a single thing. If you give them three choices, response rates drop to a quarter.

Herd instinct

Appeal to herd instinct. The UK government has a partially privatized unit called the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’, generally known as the ‘Nudge unit’. They have convincingly shown that writing to people who are late paying their taxes in a particular way works. Something like, “Almost every company here in the greater Homeville area has paid their taxes on time. In the last year, these taxes have paid for a new playground on Middle St. and the new recycling centre behind the farmers’ market. Please join your fellow citizens in making Homeville a better place to live.” Of course, all that has to be true.

Since you are unlikely to get half the recipients of an email to respond to a survey before sending a reminder, the reminder could say something like, “Acme customers from all over the greater Chicago area have already answered our three-minute survey and are helping us to improve our lawnmowers. Please add your views to theirs to ensure all of Chicago is represented.” Naturally, this requires knowing that that the person does indeed live in that area. Again, the more personal you can make it, the better.

The correct choice of fonts

For some reason, this one is controversial and when I talk about it, I am usually told I am wrong, at least by the people who are being polite. The others use stronger words. The font you use makes a big difference to response rates. You should always use a serif font for body text in your emails or paper forms. Serif fonts are the ones with little hooks on them and with bases on all the vertical strokes. These extra hooks and bases are the serifs.There is a reason 99.999% of all books are written with serif fonts. These fonts are much easier to read.

Most people will recognize Arial as a ‘sans-serif’ font and Times New Roman as a serif font. The serifs give the eye a natural line to follow. Comprehension is much better than with sans-serif fonts because your eye never accidentally skips to the previous or following line. This is not an issue with short headings. Look around you and you will see that most books and magazines have sans-serif fonts for the short headings, and serif fonts for body text. This has been tested repeatedly in direct marketing, especially by Drayton Bird. The common view that this is no longer the case because so many sans-serif fonts are used on web pages is simply wrong.

Place pictures carefully, if at all

Don’t break up your text with pictures. Drayton Bird’s research shows that a high proportion of people won’t read anything below your picture. If you have to have a picture, it should be at the top or bottom, or perhaps to one side. Note that if you are sending emails to a new distribution list, the customers’ email clients may block the display of images.

The image below is an example of a survey request I received from Thai Airways. My Outlook client blocked the images, though not the button image, while my iPad mail client displayed it correctly. I can’t resist noting that while they know that I took the flight, they don’t know my name. Did you know that airline slang for passengers is ‘Self-loading freight’? Should I be consoled by the fact that they don’t know the name of the EVP who sent the email either? I suppose I should complete my pickiness by adding that you should spell out dates to avoid confusion. Thai has used the US date format for a European customer.

Reminders

Send a reminder after two days. When you send a survey invitation by email, you will typically get 90% of the responses within 24 hours. Almost nobody files this sort of thing away for later consideration. They either handle it when they see it, or not at all. Only send the reminder to people who have not already responded. If 100 people responded to the first email, my experience suggests that about 65 will answer a second email telling them there are only 24 hours left to provide input.

Incentives

I suppose I should add a word about incentives. Incentives can improve response rates, but should not be used. Way back in early 1994, I ran a project to launch a Digital-Microsoft software subscription service across Europe. It was a precursor to Microsoft’s launch of a volume licensing program. The main technique used was direct-response advertising. One country project leader (OK, it was Norway) ignored my advice and included an incentive. The incentive was to be entered in a draw for two tickets to the soccer World Cup in the USA that year. Norway had qualified, to their surprise, and the promotion was a spectacular success. Surprisingly, it almost got me fired. A certain Steve Ballmer was leading sales at Microsoft at the time, and he apparently became irate that we had taken 20% market share in Norway with the promotion. The incumbent Microsoft resellers were unhappy and complained bitterly. My boss’s boss’s boss (John Rando at the time) had signed the agreement with Microsoft, came to see me, determined that everything was OK and defended me. Whew! In any case, it proved that incentives work in direct marketing, and have consequences.

Incentives produce positive bias

While that is an extreme case of an incentive, there is a more general issue that has to do with human nature. Providing incentives seems to positively bias responses to surveys. Humans have difficulty believing they can win something in a random prize draw if they give very negative feedback. So, if your intent is just to improve the metrics but not to gain accurate insights, go ahead and use incentives.

A/B testing

Direct marketing introduced the concept of A/B testing. This is where you change just one thing in an email (for example) and compare the results randomly with emails that do not have the change. If you want to test the effect of using a person’s name on response rates, randomly pick half your email list and start with “Dear customer” while starting the other half with “Dear Mr. Doe”. Try another experiment the following time, like using the person’s name in the subject line of the email.

Conclusion

This is not a complete list of everything you can do to improve response rates. It is just the subset that has to do with direct marketing techniques. Feel free to disagree with the above, or add your own suggestions below.

Looking forward

The next article will be the last one on improving response rates. It includes a number of proven ideas that don’t fit into a single category. One of the five is the one that I have personally found to have the strongest positive effect.

As is often the case, the above is a slightly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide, and from your better book retailers.

April 23, 2019

Can we, should we reverse-engineer customer experience strategy for speed and effectiveness?

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Customer Experience, CX, Metrics, NPS, project management, Sponsorship, strategy, Surveys /

As regular readers will know, I have been quite frustrated by the focus customer experience professionals place on metrics. Your primary focus should be on designing and implementing improvement projects, not on measurement. In that context, I would like to suggest a strategy development architecture that emphasizes that point and prioritises speed over precision.

First step

Yes, if there is no conceivable way you can get the people and money you need to drive improvement projects you should abandon your customer experience strategy effort. What you do next is up to you.

Second step

If you don’t know what your customers want you have no rational basis for selecting your improvement projects.

Third step

If the top three to five things customers want you to improve fall cleanly into the responsibilities of individual business units or functions, then please just let them get on with those improvements. The central customer experience leadership role should limit itself to communicating the improvement work internally and externally.

Fourth step

If customer improvement priorities cross business and functional lines (and only then) you need a cross-BU, cross-functional team to agree the design and implementation plans. Remember that to retain sponsorship for your work your projects need to have meaningful names, need to produce meaningful results every two to three months, need to reflect things senior leaders talk about, and need to be easy to communicate effectively.

And now… step five

Yes, you should resign if you have followed the agreed funding process and the answer is negative. Your CEO or senior leader has lied to you and they cannot be trusted. Use the experience to find a more trustworthy leader elsewhere, ideally before you actually resign. (There is an old Dutch saying that I like: “Never throw away your old shoes before you have new ones.”) Assuming approval, then just get on and implement. Then start the cycle again when the first project is complete.

Conclusion

I see this as a simple and effective approach. Only do CX research if you are certain to be able to drive improvements. If you need additional customer research, only do it in areas that customers tell you are important. You don’t have unlimited resources. You need to use them where you, your team, and your company can win!

As always, feel free to disagree or provide other perspectives below.

More of this sort of thinking in our books. They are all available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

April 4, 2019

Is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) dead?

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, NPS, Strategic initiatives / CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, Metrics, NPS, Surveys /

The Net Promoter Score is dead! Or are the reports on NPS simply fake news? Well, the image at the top of the article shows what I found with a simple Google search. So… is the Net Promoter Score dead? Here are the views of two important people:

And of course this well-known quote:

For reasons I won’t go into at the moment I have had to research what those who do not support NPS have been writing over the years. Here are some of the objections I know about and what I think of each. If you have others in mind, let me know and I will provide my perspective.

‘Compound metrics’ are better predictors of revenue and market share trends than NPS’

Yes, this is true in many cases. It is possible to design and implement more sophisticated measurements that are better predictors and a number of them exist. Reichheld and Markey have never claimed otherwise. Reichheld’s original contention was simply that the recommendation question was the best single-question predictor among those studied, for the majority of industries. The issue with compound metrics and the reason none have ever caught on is that they are extraordinarily difficult to explain. And because they are not common, every single communication about the results has to start with an explanation of how the metric works. Too boring. Audiences go to sleep, no matter what the value of the sophisticated metric is.

The recommendation question is not always the best or most predictive single question to ask

Yes, that is true and Reichheld says so in his 2003 HBR paper. Indeed, he refers extensively to Enterprise Rent-A-Car in his paper and the question they ultimately used and that turned out to be a great predictor for them was ‘Please rate your overall satisfaction with your rental’. When eBay implemented NPS their target customers were people making their living selling things on eBay. The found that when they asked the recommendation question they got answers like “No, I am never going to recommend to a friend that they should compete with me on eBay.” So they implemented “How likely are you to continue selling on eBay?’ and continue to use that question to this day.

Lots of other things affect growth more than NPS

That is certainly true in some industries. Overall, Bain and my own research suggest that NPS scores predict between 20% and 60% of revenue / market share trends, depending on the company. There are clearly industries where external factors drive 100% of the revenue and customer satisfaction will drive market share only. Take gold sales. Revenue depends on the price of gold. Market share will partly depend on how customers feel about you compared to your competitors. Where there are monopoly providers of essential resources like electricity, customer sat has no effect on revenue, as should be obvious. You can the relevant information from Reichheld and Markey here.

NPS is easy to game

Yes, that is true, and the same is true of every other metric like CSAT or Customer Effort Score. Here is a blog I wrote about how to cheat a couple of years ago. https://customerstrategy.net/gaming-survey-results/

Companies publish fantasy numbers as their NPS numbers in their annual reports

I wish that were not true, but it is. The only number they should publish is a double-blind competitive NPS benchmark score. Some companies choose to publish numbers that correspond to some positively-perceived subset of their business such as a support desk that only a minor proportion of their customers actually use. Again, the same self-measurement phenomenon could happen with CSAT or other metrics.

NPS is not a good predictor of revenue

While I will go into specific papers about the topic below, I want to make a few general points first. Not all NPS numbers are equal. The only scores that are consistent and reliable predictors of revenue and market share trends are double-blind competitive NPS benchmark trends. Double-blind means that the people answering the feedback requests do not know who is funding it. Ideally the people analyzing the feedback don’t know either, though this second ‘blinding’ may be tricky to achieve. If, for example, the only NPS numbers you have are feedback from a support desk survey, you should not expect it to predict revenue or market share at all unless yours is simply a support desk business. And of course if your numbers improve but your main competitor’s numbers trend is even better, you will lose market share. I emphasize share rather than revenue because some industries are in decline. If your score is better than your competitors’ scores you may simply decline more slowly in that industry.

We did deep research on this while I was at HP and I have posted the top-level results of the relationships we found between relative NPS trends and revenue in various places. Since then, Dr. James Borderick of Micro Focus has done even deeper research on the subject across more than 30 global software vendors and once again proven the strong relationship between NPS and market share trends. I don’t know exactly what level of detail he has been allowed to publish as his work does of course include some confidential company data.

An often-cited quote from Fred Reichheld about his own research

There is an often-cited quote from Fred Reichheld stating “A number of perspicacious readers have noted that the statistical evidence provided in my book The Ultimate Question is imperfect. It does not provide proof of a causal connection between NPS and growth. Nor are some of the timeframes ideal.”: This quote comes from one of his own blog posts (here) and has been used by a number of people to ‘prove’ that Fred felt his own research was defective. The quote is horribly out of context. Here is what he says immediately afterwards and which proves he believes his research was entirely legitimate. “When the manuscript was completed in mid-2005, that data, imperfect as it was, represented the best available information: 8 quarters of NPS and annual organic revenue growth rates for competitors in a dozen or so industries. Today, this database has grown enormously. Bain has conducted additional research in scores of industries around the world, gathering NPS data and apples-to-apples revenue-growth statistics for individual competitors. Bain teams consistently find that NPS explains the majority of variation in organic growth rates across an industry over many time periods. More importantly, we have found that individual customer responses to the ultimate question predict those customers’ subsequent behaviors across the multiple drivers of profitable growth: repurchase rates, margins, cross-sell, retention, referrals, etc. Many companies, including GE, Intuit, eBay, American Express, and others have seen similar results.”

Proof of the relationship between NPS trends and revenue / market share trends has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal

Not true at all. For example, here is one that Andrew Stephenson, Jana Fiserova, Geoff Pugh, and Chris Dimos had accepted for the British Academy of Management annual conference proceedings. It actually won best paper at their 2018 event. The data is from the UK-based multinational furniture retailer that has over $1B in annual revenue. It is quite a ‘deep’ read. To me, the essential point is their choice of using feedback gathered six months after purchase. This seems like a great way of getting a pure brand-level NPS number. I would like to invite you to take the time it takes to read it, if you are at all interested in the subject. You will see that the relationship between NPS and revenue is established in a quite compelling way. The paper is here. (This should open with a completed search for the name Stephenson, and you can download the paper directly from the search result.)

Keiningham et al. paper ‘A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth’ – Journal of Marketing vol 71, July 2007

Let me try to be polite about this. It is a disgraceful failure of the peer review system that this article could have been published in the form it was published. Here is a link. While there are a number of issues, the main thing that should have disqualified it from publication is on page 43. During the second of the three years studied the price of a barrel of oil dropped 30%. This is a great example of an industry where you would not expect any customer experience metric to have predictive value for revenue. The only factor that matters is the price of oil. This is so blindingly obvious that I can only believe that it was included in a deliberate attempt to deceive readers. The other half of the same page proves the opposite, meaning a strong positive relationship between NPS trends and revenue / market share for banking. Without the gas station example, the overall conclusion of the paper does not stand up.

However, that was not enough for the authors. They added to the what I feel is the deception with an extensive comparison between NPS and ACSI as revenue predictors, proudly showing that ACSI was at least as good a predictor and thereby ‘proving’ that the recommendation question is not the best single-question revenue predictor. However, they knew that ACSI is not the response to a single question. It is a weighted average of the answers to three different questions so is a compound metric (see above). Keiningham knows about my objection and rejects it as it has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. He does not deny the facts I set out.

Morgan and Rego paper ‘The Value of Different Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Metrics in Predicting Business Performance’ – Marketing Science Sep-Oct 2006

In the abstract and full paper the authors write things like “metrics based on recommendation intentions (net promoters) and behavior (average number of recommendations) have little or no predictive value.” Unfortunately, this is another, perhaps even more disgraceful, failure of the peer-review process. Morgan and Rego did not study the recommendation question at all! The paper should never have been published as written. They used the answers to two other questions and then state that they are equivalent to the recommendation question. Here is what is on page 429 of the article: “We utilize ACSI data concerning consumer responses to the questions “Have you discussed your experiences with [brand or company x] with anyone?” and “Have you formally or informally complained about your experiences with [brand or company x]?” I suppose they felt compelled to write something about NPS, had no data at all, and so invented something deliberately deceptive that supported the conclusion they wanted to make.

There are a number of other papers published in various magazines and journals that pick on particular aspects of NPS or specific industries. I have one that covers just two industries, one of which is PC manufacturing. Reichheld said they had found no relationship between IT manufacturing and the recommendation question in his HBR paper, so the ‘finding’ is hardly surprising. Note that for the HBR paper end users of IT were asked, rather than the corporate purchasing decision-makers, so it is really not a surprise that there was no relationship with revenue trends.

I suppose you can tell I feel strongly about some of these objections while considering others to be valid. If you have more that you would like me to examine, please feel free.

More of this sort of thinking in our books. They are all available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

March 20, 2019

Answers to two questions from new Customer Experience leaders: Where do I start, and to whom should I report?

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Strategic initiatives / CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, Metrics, NPS, strategy, Surveys /

I attended and spoke at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in central Amsterdam last week. It was fabulous event, held in a theatre that has been created in an old church building. I was able to socialize extensively with the attendees, the speakers, and various people from the CustomerGauge team. I found my interactions with their software developers particularly stimulating.

Two questions came up most

I have not attended this type of conference in a while and did my best to learn what was on customer experience leaders’ minds. The most common questions I was asked were, “Where should I start?” and “Where should I report?” These are simple questions, though the answers are not simple. Or at least the answers are not simple if you exclude “It depends.” as an acceptable answer.

Where do I start?

The best way to ensure that you have the support of the leadership team from the start is to go and ask each of them what you should do. This is a tactic works best at two points, one of which may surprise you. I believe the best possible way you can start is to try to talk to other members of the management team you are trying to join while you are still in the interview process. I did this once, for my biggest promotion. I had already met two of them and made it my business to meet several others before I interviewed with the head of HP EMEA. When he asked me the inevitable question, “What do you think should be your priorities?” I was able to answer, “Well, here is what various people on your team suggest. I agree with these three suggestions and want to add a fourth of my own. What do you think?” I suppose this also addressed a more general interview technique which is that the person who shows they want the job the most usually gets it.

My second suggestion for where to start is almost the same as the first. It consists of going through the same process with your new teammates, just after your appointment. In both cases you should be trying to get their suggestions for work that crosses organizational boundaries. I don’t think there is any point in asking (for example) the support leader what the support team should do.

Just the first steps

The above are my suggestions for the very first things you should do. They are designed to achieve consensus about the priorities. That consensus should make it easier to take the subsequent steps, which are mainly around ensuring you have the people and funding you need to implement what has been agreed. Once you are in motion you can take the time to work more deeply on your mid-term strategy.

If you have already been appointed some time ago and are still asking where you should start… well… you probably have a different problem. And I am going to try to answer it in a different way, by talking about where you should report, or at least the teams with which you need to have your closest relationships.

To whom should I report?

In a perfect world you would report directly to the head of the organization for which you are the Customer Experience leader. While I had that privilege, it is rarely the case. I have quite strong views on the next-best options, and they may not be what you expect.

The best reporting line is to the Chief of Staff, if your organization has such a position. That person usually sets the agenda for and runs all leadership team meetings. They always know everything that is going on. This ensures that CX will be on the leadership team agenda and will be well-connected to whatever is going on.

The second-best reporting line is to the sales leader, at least in B2B companies. The reason for this is quite simple. If your work is successful, win rates will improve. Reporting this way can also remove one of the major obstacles CX leaders face: resistance by sales people to customer interviews. Sales people commonly say “I already know everything that is going on with my customer so we don’t need to do any more research.” I have never found this to be true. Face-to-face interviews with the top customers always bring new surprises. Once you are seen to be addressing any negative surprises you will find it easy to get the support of the sales team.

Reporting lines best avoided?

There are two common places that CX leaders report and which I believe are best avoided. The first is Marketing. Indeed, this may be the most popular reporting line. The reason I don’t like it is simple: CX work is too far from the Marketing mission. Marketing exists to do demand generation and sales support, primarily for current-quarter business. Marketers refer to the necessary resources as ‘People and Programs’ and need funding for both. If there is insufficient funding for this core work, lower-priority work such as CX gets cut. The second place CX sometimes reports is to a support organization. I see two disadvantages here. First, that normally moves you a management level further from the top as the support leader rarely reports to the CEO. Second, it moves you to a team whose role is primarily a reactive one of ‘putting out fires’. I find this far less motivating than improving sales win rates, for example.

Conclusion

It was great to be in Amsterdam with such a large group of enthusiastic people. I learned a lot and can only hope that I contributed something useful to the audience. As you might expect, the organizers ran an NPS-type survey after the event and I am looking forward to seeing the results. The views expressed above are representative of how I tried to answer questions on these two topics during breaks in the conference. I hope you find them helpful.

More of this sort of thinking in our books. They are all available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

February 6, 2019

What skills do you and your customer experience team need to be successful? (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, Psychology, Strategic initiatives / Customer Experience, CX, Metrics, Natural Language Processing, NPS, program management, skills, strategy, Surveys, training /

While pure luck was a major factor, my use of Microsoft Project version 1.0 on my personal Mac certainly had a major positive influence on my promotion to the European HQ of Digital Equipment Corporation. I printed out multi-page GANTT and dependency charts for a major project and used them to present to my future manager. It made me look like I knew what I was talking about. That was what I felt too: seriously competent.

Ten years in Geneva and many projects later, I had a new manager. Don Gordon invited me into his office in Munich to review a major program I was managing. After about ten minutes he said, “Maurice, you know almost nothing about program management.” I did my best to stay polite while disagreeing strongly. He said, “OK, just answer this question: What is a deliverable?” I have to say that I struggled to answer. And I quickly understood that it was a critical and fundamental concept in program management. A deliverable is the thing you can observe so that you can tell that a piece of work has been completed. For example, if you have completed some customer research, the deliverable will probably be a report or a presentation.

Program management skills are critical

The single most important skill set needed for customer experience improvement is program management. You and the people in your team have to be able to get things done in a professional and predictable manner. The easy way to learn the basics is to attend formal training such as that given by the Project Management Institute (PMI) or PRINCE2 training. Courses are available in many languages. Learning the basics from a colleague who has already attended formal training is an acceptable minimum.

Some program management concepts are quite important when you are presenting a new initiative for approval. The single most important thing you have to avoid is called ‘scope drift’. This usually happens when the program completion criteria are not well-defined. Imagine a situation where your improvement initiative is the implementation of a Chatbot as an option for customer support. When is the implementation complete? Is it when you have completed a proof of concept? How about a pilot covering three countries? Or have you completed your part of the work when it has been implemented in 87 countries and 20 languages? I strongly suggest you define this type of thing before starting.

Success criteria are also important and should be agreed before starting. Let’s suppose your Chatbot project is complete when you have implemented a pilot in three countries. Has the pilot been successful? How do you know? Is success defined by a number of cases closed, a customer satisfaction metric, a cost metric, or what? To avoid scope drift, you have to agree these points before starting.

Interpreting data

I will try to avoid using the term Data Scientist. (Oops, I just used it.) Correct interpretation of structured and unstructured customer data is the second of the two core customer experience skills. Within that broad area, the most important knowledge areas are statistics and at least some basics of Natural Language Processing.

I feel strongly that statistics do not belong in any executive-level presentation. By this I mean you should avoid presenting things like confidence intervals. If you happen to get someone who loves statistics in your audience, everyone else will go to sleep while you answer his or her questions. You should simply invite anyone who wants the technical details to see you after the presentation. However, you still need to be confident that the numerical part of your work has been done competently. Any basic statistics course should do, and I don’t have any particular recommendations, though I suggest that you need to get beyond the Normal distribution. (Net Promoter Scores, for example, are not Normally distributed.)

Unstructured data too

If you use the Net Promoter System, and indeed most other customer feedback systems, you will get a lot of unstructured data too. This means the text answers to the open questions you ask, such as “What could we do better?” Software to analyze lots of text in lots of language is in constant evolution. At the time I write this, most software that is available on the market works extraordinarily badly.
The most common defect is the requirement for lots of human intervention, mainly to ‘tag’ answers, assigning them to an existing list of categories. As soon as more than one person is doing the work, the results are inconsistent at best, incomprehensible at worst. The second-most common defect is that a lot of the software returns single-word categories. For example, the most common word found in a survey about a restaurant might be ‘food’. But what about the food? Was it good or bad? Who knows? Great Natural Language Processing software groups unstructured data into themes; multi-word concepts, each of which groups answers that may use different words that have similar meanings.

Presentation skills

The final skill you need is the ability to present compellingly. While I suggest a formal course on such skills, I don’t believe it is enough. I believe you have to be a storyteller. That will be the subject of another blog.

While the above is new content, I make related points in some our other books. All books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

January 24, 2019

The nature of customer-centric strategy and why your team needs one (Intense 3-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, Psychology, Strategic initiatives / CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, Metrics, NPS, strategy, Surveys /

I have been broadening my writing horizons somewhat over the last few weeks. Among others, I have contributed thoughts on customer strategy to discussion on LinkedIn, Quora and the members-only forum of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. I suppose I should not be surprised by what I read online, but I was.

99% of all customer experience discussion seems to be about metrics. This is just wrong!

Data is easy, information is difficult

The reality is that it does not matter all that much whether you use CSAT, NPS, Customer Effort Score, the Wallet Allocation Rule, or whatever. The critical question you have to answer is what you are going to do to improve. The metric itself and even its trend does not give you that information. The most important data gathering question is how you can determine the top few actions you can take to improve customers’ lives and thereby your business. (This applies equally well to government agencies with no financial objectives.)

Strategy is all about how you deploy your scarce resources

You can’t do much. By this I mean that effective strategy is about winning. Nobody wins a military battle or a sports competition by deploying all resources equally over the entire field of battle. You have to decide on one or two things, try them, then adjust. Then start again. You don’t have unlimited people and money. Whether at the level of an individual business or function, or at the level of an entire company, you have to concentrate resources on just a few initiatives that will let you crush your competition.

Having lots of metrics can prevent you developing an effective strategy.

What do you need to know about your customers?

From a customer experience perspective, you want to know just three things:

How much do your customers like you, ideally compared to your competitors?
Why do they like or dislike you?
What do they want you to improve?

There is nothing else worth knowing from their point of view. This does not seem to be the point of view of hundreds of business professionals online, all of whom seem to want to know many many things about their customers. There is a fundamental truth about customer research: you have to provide more value to customers than you extract. Unless they have told you it is critical, it does not provide value to customers to get their view on how pretty the shipping carton was, or how much they like the color of your new logo.

If there is some consistency in what customers want you to improve, you pick the most important items, set up a team to drive each improvement, tell the customers you are doing so, and execute. You should only have about three such initiatives at any given time. That will make them easy to communicate and understand internally and externally.

What do you not need to know about your customers?

To pick a semi-random example, you don’t need to know anything about the perceptions of the professionalism of your service agents unless customers have said it is a major problem. So, don’t ask about it. I believe the only things worth researching beyond the three questions mentioned above are additional levels of detail you may need to define your improvement initiative correctly. There are too many surveys out there. Adding more, particularly ones that will not contribute to any major improvement initiative in any way, is insulting to your customers and to your own teams.

I make similar points in a lot more detail in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

November 8, 2018

#79 – Implicit search, Skeptics Guide, bad service

Maurice FitzGerald / Cognition, Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Psychology, Strategy / bad service, Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, Podcast, Skeptics Guide, Statistics, Surveys /

Implicit search, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Welcome to the 79th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Could ‘implicit search’ revolutionize two-way customer feedback?
Just started reading The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – An article and some statistics about bad service
Looking forward

Could ‘implicit search’ revolutionize two-way customer feedback?

Some time after HP acquired the Autonomy software company I was appointed as the only ‘legacy HP’ person on the Autonomy leadership team. Ian Black was one of my new colleagues and was quick to show me an impressive technical demonstration. This was how I learned about Implict Search.

The principle is quite simple, though non-obvious. We are used to searching explicitly for things. We type our search terms and get a list of answers. This demo was different. As I typed out a series of sentences in Microsoft Word, the IDOL add-in displayed relevant search results at the top of the screen. I did not have to do anything. The text I was writing simply ‘implied’ that I might be interested in the corresponding web pages.

Before drawing my conclusion, let me state my greatest personal disappointment in what we all (and yes, I am including you) do as customer experience professionals every day: In 99% of all cases, based on my own research, we ask customers for feedback and then never get back to them in any way. We don’t tell them what we have learned from their feedback, and we don’t tell them what we plan to improve. We are a disgrace to our profession!

This is where implicit search could come in. Suppose a customer is filling in a feedback form about why they like (or hate) your company and what should be improved. Imagine using implicit search to close the loop back with customers while they are still filling in the feedback form… For example, in all too many cases, software customers suggest that already-existing features should be added to the software. Implicit search could detect this and let the customer know how to find and use the feature. At the very least, we should be able to detect the subject matter of the complaint or suggestion and provide at least some immediate automatic loop-closing. What do you think?

Just started reading ‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe’

Steve Novella, his brothers Jay and Bob, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein have been publishing a weekly podcast for over ten years. Their mission is to promote science and critical thinking. I have been a fan from the time I discovered them about six years ago. Quite a lot of their style of thinking and communication has worked its way into our books and blogs. Now Steve has led the team in the writing and publication of the book of the same name, which appeared a month ago. I just received it and am only at page 48. I am already a Promoter! I definitely would recommend it.

Steve is a practicing neurologist. He goes into great detail about the ways our brains trick us, how to tell that this is happening, and what we can do about it. Above all, I find their devotion to the scientific method admirable. Customer Experience leaders, and indeed business leaders in general, can learn a lot from the team. There are a lot of simple but profound insights, such as their short explanations of common logical fallacies and of the difference between the unexplained and the unexplainable.

So, why not give it a try? Their latest podcast was recorded with a live audience in Cambridge, UK, though the team is based in the USA. You should be able to find their book on Amazon and from leading booksellers in the USA, Canada and UK so far. I don’t know the full list. They have found additional publishers and the range of countries covered is increasing. I suspect other languages will come quickly. Note that I have no relationship of any kind with the team. I just love their work.

Our latest blog posts

The top one on this list was inspired by an early chapter in the SGU book mentioned above. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Invisible gorillas prove you need automated text analytics. Seriously! (7-minute read and videos about inattentional blindness)

We are awful at observation. Our brains just don’t work all that well. Various psychological experiments lead to the inevitable conclusion that our brains work hard to fit whatever we perceive to the list of things we already know about…

Tips for communicating the purpose of cost reduction (7-minute read)

I was talking to a former colleague yesterday. He described a recent meeting where he learned that major cost cutting still continues where we used to work. The discussion made me reflect on the horrible mistakes and best practices I have seen when cost reductions are communicated…

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

I have a sort of hobby: answering companies’ requests for my feedback and seeing whether they will write back to tell me what they have learned and what they are going to do to improve. They almost never do…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

SurveyMonkey – And the award for World’s Worst Customer Service goes to…

OK, so this is completely unscientific; rather disappointing from SurveyMonkey and contrary to my usual way of thinking. However… however… the four anecdotes told here are indeed entertaining. Just remember, as the SGU people say, “The plural of anecdote is not science.” These companies do not score badly in any public CX ranking I am aware of.

Read the anecdotes here.

Statista – Companies which received the highest share of negative responses to their customer service in the United States in 2017

Since we are on the theme, here is something more scientific from a site you may appreciate. Statista provides (surprise!) statistics on a huge variety of topics. This particular graph covers a subset of US companies that customers do not seem to like much. Have fun exploring the data on this and other topics here.

Looking forward

Thank you for the kind feedback I received about the Net Promoter System podcast on healthcare that I recorded with Rob Markey and which was released last week. Other than that, I should have time to do more writing and blogging as the days get shorter and shorter here in the Northern Hemisphere.

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. The thing that you can do to help us most is to write reviews of our books 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.

October 26, 2018

#78 – My new NPS podcast on Healthcare, customer and employee satisfaction research, dropoff rates, Temkin/Qualtrics

Maurice FitzGerald / Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / Bain, Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS, Podcast, Qualtrics, response rates, Surveys, Temkin /

My new Net Promoter System podcast on healthcare with Rob Markey, customer vs. employee satisfaction research . Welcome to the 78th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Starting my annual research on customer and employee satisfaction
My new Net Promoter System podcast with Rob Markey is available
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Survey completion rates, Temkin & Qualtrics
Looking forward

Starting my annual research on customer and employee satisfaction

Most of you know that I have published research on the relationship (or lack thereof) between customer and employee satisfaction in March this year and last. My process is to assemble employee satisfaction data from Glassdoor in October and November, and to add the American Customer Satisfaction Index data for each company the following March. The thought process is that changes in employee satisfaction should lead to changes in customer satisfaction. We would not expect the effect to be instantaneous.

Once I have three years of data I should be able to do my first investigations of the trends over that time. If a company has had three straight years of employee satisfaction improvement or decline, has that had any effect on customer satisfaction? And I expect to investigate market share trends for some industries.

I was going through some Glassdoor data today I was wondering whether employee satisfaction has declined at companies that have had major scandals of whatever kind. This is not the place to describe the nature of each scandal, but here is the 2017 to 2018 employee satisfaction trend for a few such companies:

Wells Fargo: No change from 2017, and the 2017 score was up slightly from 2016.
Facebook: The 2018 score is lower than the scores for 2017 and 2016, again slightly.
United Airlines: Employee satisfaction improved slightly.
Apple: No change.

Two remarks. First, I did not decide that these companies had notable scandals. I just did a Google search on ‘Corporate Scandals’. Second, employees don’t seem to care much about scandals that affect their employers.

It will be interesting to see how the customer satisfaction trends turn out.

My new Net Promoter System podcast with Rob Markey is available

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had recorded a new ‘Net Promoter System podcast’ with Rob Markey of Bain. It went live on the iTunes podcast feed just before I wrote these lines. The subject this time is customer experience measurement, or I suppose it is really patient experience measurement and improvement in the healthcare industry.

The podcast is the first in what I hope will be a series on specific industries. I feel strongly about healthcare because I believe it is the extreme example of an industry that measures things for its own benefit and does so in a way that does almost nothing for patients. I believe this is easy to understand.

If you have been hospitalized for any reason, think back on how the hospital asked you for feedback after the intervention. Let’s pick the semi-random example of a hip-replacement operation. It takes some time after the operation before you can understand how effective it was. So… when did the hospital ask you for feedback. It almost always seems to happen just as you are preparing to leave or are walking out the door. Did anyone (including the surgeon) ever come back six months later to ask you how functional your hip was, and whether you would recommend the operation to someone else? I thought not.

I write these lines, the iTunes podcast feed has pushed this one to my phone. It is not yet live on the Bain site. You can find all past Net Promoter System podcasts, including the eight I did with them, on iTunes and at http://www.netpromotersystem.com/resources/podcast.aspx.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Tips for communicating the purpose of cost reduction (7-minute read)

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

Contra Revenue: Could it be your easiest way to improve profit margins? (5-minute read)

On the general subject of ‘customer-centric cost reduction’ I would like to discuss an area that many medium to large companies do not examine at all, and the rest do poorly. If you have never heard of Contra Revenue, please read on…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

SurveyMonkey – The effect of the number of questions on survey completion rates

Please read the title and what follows carefully. This is not about response rates, but about completion rates. There is a difference. The question the people from SurveyMonkey answer comprehensively is whether adding more questions causes a significant number of people who have started to respond to a feedback request to stop responding when they are part way through. The answer is that there is only a very small effect. To study the question, they looked at 2,000 randomly-selected surveys with one question, 2,000 with two questions and so on, up to 2,000 survey with 50 questions.

There is, however, some evidence elsewhere that the quality of responses goes way down as survey forms get longer. After a while customers may just pick random answers from a list in a bid to get finished quickly. People creating surveys also do silly things. An example would be a popup survey that appears immediately when you open a web page, and which asks you what you think about that web page. You may be prepared to answer any number of questions randomly in a bid to get to a comment box that lets you say that the feedback request should come after you have been able to actually use the site.

The study is about ‘dropoff’ or ‘dropouts’. This is not at all the same as response rates, as the research only covers people who answered at least one question. If they did not answer any questions they are not included in the research. I have to say that I have tried to work out how to study the effect of the number of questions on response rates, and I can’t come up with a good scientific method. Suggestions welcome. Read it here.

Temkin Group acquired by Qualtrics

Bruce Temkin just announced that his company has been acquired by Qualtrics. They simultaneously announced the creation of the Qualtrics XM Institute which Bruce will lead. The institute will provide both customer experience benchmarks and thought leadership in a variety of areas. I admire the work Bruce has done up to now, including the creation of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. He publishes an annual NPS benchmark report as well as reports covering his own more complex metrics. Read all about the new setup here.

Looking forward

October has set a new book sales record for a month of October! Thank you. Of course there was only a single month of October available for comparison. But still… October last year was by far our record month at the time. Other than that, I am looking forward to hearing what you think of the new Net Promoter System podcast and which industries you would like us to cover, assuming the series moves forward.

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.

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.

October 16, 2018

#77 – The Ultimate Question? Invisible dragons, text analytics, response rates

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, NPS, response rates, Surveys, text analytics, The Ultimate Question /

The ultimate question, the impossibility of proving something does not exist, text analytics, survey response rates and scores for hospitals, LinkedIn groups. Welcome to the 77th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Is ‘willingness to recommend’ really ‘The Ultimate Question’?
It’s impossible to prove that something does not matter to customers
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Text analytics
Looking forward – I am now a LinkedIn Group Detractor

Is ‘willingness to recommend’ really ‘The Ultimate Question’?

In their book The Ultimate Question 2.0 Reichheld and Markey refer to the research first covered by Fred Reichheld in his landmark HBR paper The One Number You Need to Grow. The research was about what single question best predicts revenue growth. Such a question is referred to as ‘The Ultimate Question’. While most people remember the answer as “How likely are you to recommend company X to a colleague or friend?” that is an incomplete picture.

Yes, the ‘Ultimate Question’ is indeed whatever single question best predicts revenue growth. And yes, the recommendation question is that question in most industries. It finished in first or second place in 11 of 14 industries among 40 questions tested. However, there are industries for which it did not finish on top. You can find full details by clicking on the link to the HBR article, and I want to mention that ‘overall satisfaction’ did not make it to the top for any industry.

So, what does this mean if you are starting to implement the Net Promoter System? It means that you are best off starting with the recommendation question as your Ultimate Question. If you ask an additional question and compare its predictive value to the recommendation question you may get a surprise. If the second question is shown scientifically to be a better predictor, then that is what you should use. At the risk of being pedantic, it is not impossible that overall satisfaction could still be the Ultimate Question for your company. However, please ensure that all departments in your company use the same question, or communication will be impossible.

Finally, some objectors to the recommendation question say, “I have come up with this composite metric that is a better predictor of market share.” That may well be the case. However, composite metrics, by definition, are not the answers to a single question.

It’s impossible to prove that something does not matter to customers

I was recently asked “But how do you know for certain that customers don’t want this?” My answer was that I could not prove they didn’t want it. I could only suggest that the science-based research that I carried out suggested that customers did not care about it.

This type of discussion can be quite problematic for customer experience leaders who have strong-willed and outspoken senior leaders to deal with. The most difficult situations arise with managers who say they have built their entire careers in one way: “I trust nothing but my own instinct!!!” (If you are a customer experience leader and your manager does not trust science or scientists, you should probably look for a new job.)

The challenge is that from a scientific perspective it is impossible to prove the absence of anything. I can state that there is a completely invisible small blue dragon hovering between you and the screen on which you are reading this. It is totally impossible for you to prove that this is not so. It is of course extremely unlikely.

We see this communication challenge from time to time in customer experience. However, it is an increasing phenomenon in society as a whole. “Unless you can prove to me that GMOs (or perhaps Glyphosate, or vaccines) pose no risk at all on their own or in combination with any other chemical, they should not be allowed.” That’s a completely impossible task as absence of risk or of anything else can never be proven. Why is it so hard to persuade people to accept scientific consensus?

Our latest blog posts

Two of the three below are new original content. The third is an edited chapter from one of our books. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

Contra Revenue: Could it be your easiest way to improve profit margins? (5-minute read)

Start-ups: Thoughts about implementing the Net Promoter System (3-minute read)

Let’s face it; most start-ups fail. Some fail because they think they are doing what customers want, but they are simply wrong. Some fail for other reasons. For start-ups, I think the Net Promoter System implementation challenge is about ‘Crossing the Chasm’…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Thematic & Alyona Medelyan: Amazing article on text analytics

This is without doubt the best article I have read about text analytics ever. Regular readers will know that I consider it to be the top technical challenge we face in customer research. We tend to send customers long feedback requests with lots of rating questions simply because we don’t yet trust text analytics. Please read the article. It will take you about ten minutes and I guarantee you will learn something new. Read it here.

Business Broadway: The relationship between survey response rates and survey ratings

It is always interesting to read well-structured research that produces opposite results to prior research. In this case, Bob Hayes wrote an article way back in 2012 that shows that the more people respond, the better the ratings. My own research at HP on NPS ratings and response rates showed the opposite, as people who really liked us seemed disproportionately likely to respond when we had low response rates. I wonder whether there is something specific to hospitals that mean that Bob’s results follow a similar but opposite logic. Could patients who were upset with their experience at a hospital be more likely to respond than those who were happy? Please let me know what you think. Read all about it here.

Looking forward

I have spent / lost quite a bit of time over the last three weeks trying to persuade LinkedIn to reverse the changes they have made to Group management. I had a teleconference with representatives of the product team last week and they committed to reverse one of the changes, though with no date attached. That’s really not good enough. The 102,000 members of the Customer Experience Management group that I manage need better. Since the changes were implemented user interaction with new posts has dropped off a cliff. As I write this there are a total of two comments on the last 50 articles that have been posted. The tools I used to use to stimulate conversations and limit the appearance of irrelevant stuff have almost all disappeared. Disappointing. This means that I have to change my NPS status for LinkedIn Groups from Promoter to Detractor. I definitely would not recommend them, including my own group.

On a more positive note, I am running a free one-hour webinar on NPS for the European arm of the Association of Field Service Managers this Thursday afternoon my time, so you should have heard about it if you are an AFSMI member.

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.

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.

October 11, 2018

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Chief Customer Officer, CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, Surveys /

I have a sort of hobby: answering companies’ requests for my feedback and seeing whether they will write back to tell me what they have learned and what they are going to do. I suppose I have responded to about 20 such requests over the last two months, and then heard nothing at all back, except perhaps an auto-reply with a thank-you. So… let me offer my thoughts on whether and when you should ask for customer feedback.

The first step in designing surveys is being selective about what research you are going to do. Make sure you are going to provide customers with more value than you will extract from them.

Sanity check on whether you should gather feedback at all

Here are some considerations that should help you decide where to start:

Are you going to use any new input you get? If you have already established your top five improvement priorities, have staffed them, are implementing, and can’t add a new project in the next six months, don’t do any surveys other than those that provide progress feedback on your improvement work.
Taking a software example, if you are planning a new major release and want user input on what should be in it, ask them in a formal way. After 30 years in and out of the software business, as a leader and as a user, I have never once been asked for formal input about what should be in the next version. Product managers generally feel they know what users want, based on informal and anecdotal conversations, rather than research. This of course applies beyond software.
Not every customer touchpoint is important. Use your overall brand or benchmark surveys to establish which touchpoints customers mention as competitive advantages or disadvantages, and don’t survey anyone about any of the others. To pick a B2B example, surveying people about the friendliness, competence and efficiency of the person who handles a query about the accuracy of an invoice is certain to be a waste of resources that could better be spent elsewhere.

Timing is everything

Survey timing is an important part of research reliability. Seeking feedback about things that are in the distant past is unlikely to be of much value for example. Here are some appropriate times to consider collecting customer input, by type of survey. What follows presupposes that you are going to use the feedback to make improvements for your customers. If not, there is no good timing.

Product surveys part 1 – Unboxing and installing your product

Here we are talking about an individual product, not a generic purchase or other touchpoint experience that applies to all your products. Some products are sophisticated (the marketing word for complex) to install. Others are not. If your product takes time and effort to unbox or download, install and use for the first time, it is worthwhile understanding what your customers think of the experience and how it can be improved. The research needs to be done immediately after the experience. Waiting a week or more will mean losing the positive and negative emotional impact.

If yours is a technology product, I suggest sending the survey request or phoning the customer within 48 hours of delivery. While this will be easy to do in a direct business that sells to consumers, it is more difficult in other circumstances. You want to survey the end user of the product, and they may not be the buyer in a B2B situation, so you might not know who to contact. If you use resellers, they may not want to provide the customer data, and you should offer to run the survey on their behalf, providing them the data for initial screening. If yours is a software product, the installation routine itself should generate the survey request 24 hours after the installation takes place. Requiring or at least suggesting product registration on a website will give you additional sources of end-user contact details.

Product surveys part 2 – Usage

In most situations, you won’t hear anything from a customer who does not have any problems. Unfortunately, the reason for not having problems could be that the customer no longer uses your product. Perhaps they never started using it in the first place. You need to understand the views of customers who have been using your product for some time, and I suggest six months after purchase as a reasonable target for your research. The purpose, as explained to the customer, should be to get feedback for improving the product itself, as well as future products. In my own experience of software product usage surveys, it is common to get suggestions for additional features that the product already has, but the customer has not been able to find. Usage surveys have the same challenge as installation surveys, meaning you may not know whom to contact.

SaaS (Cloud) software is a completely different in that you do know who is using your software and indeed how much they use it. If a customer who has been using your software suddenly stops, contact them immediately. SaaS software usually allows you to see what functions a customer uses. If you can see that they are not using something they really should be using, you can send them a link to a training video, or send over someone who can talk them through it.

Service contracts

The ideal time to get feedback on a service contract is a little before the customer is considering renewing it. This is a bit more subtle than it might seem. If you have a large multi-year contract (for example to provide security services to a company) your competitors will probably know about it, and will start to contact your customer well before the contract renewal data. Since your competitors will be saying how wonderful they are, and how awful you are, you need to have acted well before this point. I suggest an annual survey as a minimum for multi-year contracts, taking place half way through each year. If you have a single-year contract, I suggest doing the research about three months in, so that all improvement suggestions can be implemented before the contract comes up for renewal consideration, probably about nine months in.

Hybrid product / services

An airline flight is a hybrid product & service. This sort of offer should be researched within 24 hours of completion. Most airlines seem to miss the point. Some give you the survey while you are still in the air, not knowing essential things like whether your luggage will show up on the carousel. Others send you the survey after a week or two. Frequent fliers will have completely forgotten about the experience by then, or will confuse it with another flight. This happened to me regularly, as I have been taking over 100 flights per year for nearly as long as I can remember. What did I think of my flight from Atlanta to Paris two weeks ago? Who knows? Since product and service surveys are not mentioned in The Ultimate Question 2.0, this may be a good time to reinforce the definition. An entire flight experience, from awareness, to reservation, to the actual trip itself, involves a sequence of touchpoints. Each touchpoint could be studied by a transactional survey. The airline offers many different products and services, the sum of which might be studied in their brand survey.

Relationship surveys and Brand surveys

Twice a year is a good frequency for your most important customer relationships and may work best for your brand surveys. You may like to run them both on a continuous basis so you can see the effects of things like changes in the economy and your financial and product announcements. This would mean, for example, sampling one sixth of your customers every month. Remember that you need to report results and improvement projects to customers as well as to your own team.

Transactional and episode surveys

While it might seem obvious that they should happen shortly after the transaction takes place, it is surprising how rarely this happens. All too often, I get pop-up windows when I have just started an online transaction. I dismiss the window, and then don’t think about it anymore. For the simplest transactions, surveying just after they are complete seems appropriate. For more complex things, like telephone support for a technology product, it seems appropriate to wait for 24 hours, as it may take a little time for the customer to know whether the issue has been completely resolved.

Your feedback is most welcome.

As is usually the case, this is a slightly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System. All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

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