Willie Pietersen

Welcome to the 89th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

1. Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
2. The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service
3. Latest blog posts
4. Notable items from other sites – Willie Pietersen, Eric Smuda ex-Compaq, HP, Avis, Hertz
5. Looking forward

Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction

The American Customer Satisfaction Index people released the final part of their 2018 customer satisfaction data earlier this week. I have been able to match the scores against Glassdoor employee satisfaction data for 398 large businesses that sell to US consumers. This is up from 345 last year and hopefully makes the data more reliable.

There are a few surprises, though the overall message has not changed: there is not much of a relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. Variations in employee satisfaction across the 398 businesses explain just 6.2% of the variations in customer satisfaction. This is up from last year’s number of 4.4%. There are industries and indeed a whole sector where there seems to be no relationship at all between the two. The big surprise is that the relationship for the retail trade has dropped significantly. This turns out to be an artefact of the ACSI including eCommerce sites in retail this year while they were separate last year.

At the moment I am doing extensive data validation. This is the third time I have carried out the study. I made minor mistakes each of the first two times and am in the process of ensuring I have at least not made the same mistakes again. I will then write a series of blog posts. The ones you should expect are:

• Overall results, including an analysis of ‘high-touch’ and ‘low-touch’ businesses.
• Lists of companies that employees hate but customers love, and vice-versa.
• Lists of companies that both the employees and customers love, and of course the opposite view.

Based on the feedback I receive each year I suspect most of you believe my study is wrong. Indeed, I submitted it to one academic publication and one business publication the first year and it was rejected by both as not being credible. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, has been able to present a scientific analysis that proves anything different. I look forward to the feedback this year.

The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service

I just answered a question about when you should ask customers for feedback about a ‘box subscription’ service. This is the type of service where you receive something different every month. Kiwico is an example, with their scientific toy kit subscription service, and I have seen subscriptions that give you a new book every month. Here is how I answered the question:

1. If you have no people or budget to work on improvements that customers may suggest… well… you are better off not asking them for feedback at all. So, if you have no resources, the right time is never.
2. You want to be able to work on improvements and tell the customers about them before their subscription deadline comes up. If all customers do not have the same renewal date, this really means working on a single improvement every quarter, then telling the customers when you have completed it. Once again, if you don’t have the resources needed, then please don’t ask for feedback.

Your input welcome.

Our latest blog posts

Nothing new this week as I have had my head down working on the employee-customer satisfaction research. Older posts are still available on the blog page.