I was recently delivering a conference speech in Singapore and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. A few days after my visit I received a Customer satisfaction survey via email. I am always fascinated by what people measure as this sends a subconscious signal to the Customer about what the organisation thinks is important.
One of the questions the Mandarin Oriental Hotel asked was “How well did we anticipate your needs?” ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘They are trying to anticipate my needs….. and more importantly they are measuring it!’
What a great question. Consider the normal hotel Customer satisfaction surveys. They ask about the cleanliness of the rooms, the speed of check out etc. These are questions from the 1980’s! Surely we have progressed since then?
All too often we find that most organisations’ customer measurement needs a lot to be desired. On a BA flight I received a questionnaire that was 6 pages long asking nearly 100 questions that were mainly insignificant. This questionnaire had undoubtedly evolved over the years to this monster. Given the decline in BA service over the years, they can not be using this output to improve the passengers experience, so why bother?
In my view most measurement needs to be ripped up and organisations need to start again.
We would argue that if you haven’t defined the experience you are trying to deliver how can you measure it? And as 50% of a Customer Experience is emotions, how are you measuring these emotions? Most organisations simply ignore the measurement of the emotional side of the Customer Experience.
We rarely see a system that measures the whole Customer Experience, the physical/rational and emotional aspects.
But in our view this is simple. You need to define the experience that you are delivering. As 50% of the Customer Experience is about emotions you need to define the emotions you are trying to evoke. You then need to measure it!
It can be a challenge to measure emotions. It is not generally as easy as simply asking “do you trust organisation XX”, although it can be. You need to delve into the subconscious experience and define what evokes these emotions; we would advocate defining what is truly important to the Customer and again not just at the conscious level. We believe that you need a top level measure to analyse the whole experience and this is then used to measure specific “events”. Specific parts of the Customer Experience that are important to the customer. These can then be backed up by internal Customer measures like delivery times, % of calls answered etc but these are indicators that the true measure is what Customers think and feel.
Finally, once measured it needs to become important to people. To make a point, if you paid 100% of people bonus based on the achievement of the customer satisfaction measures would this affect the Customer Experience? Of course it would. So what is a reasonable and effective % of bonus so people will hurt if they do not achieve it? Probably around 40% in our view. Obviously this can differ by industry, company but around that number.
In summary I would strongly suggest that a review of most companies’ measurement is well overdue. Take a critical look at your measurement and challenge whether it is fit ffor purpose and what you can do to improve it.
By COLIN SHAW | Published: SEPTEMBER 18, 2008