Angry and Bored? You Must Be a Customer

Question Authoritatively
Online surveys are not a panacea, however. They may still result in bad data driving poor decisions. Knowing the right questions to ask of the right people at the right time is critical, as is appreciating the suitable number of questions to ask (no more than 10 seems to be the best practice). "The technology is easy, as is administering it," says Susan Piotroski, brand and customer strategy senior executive in the Boston office of Accenture. "Asking the right questions is not."

In drafting questions, Piotroski says the surveyor "must understand the original problem that drove the need for the survey. If the right questions are asked, the answer to the problem is there."

Customer-loyalty guru Reichheld says that companies have to "get to the sane customers, the people who don't waste their time," and convince them that their input has value. That's the key to turning a detractor into a promoter. "If customers are willing to promote you," he says, "that's the clearest indication of loyalty. If they're not going to promote you, follow up with more questions to determine why — build a dialogue that turns them into promoters."

Online surveys alone won't do that, but they provide a useful start. When the business unit of GE Capital Solutions surveyed customers about the experience of applying for credit by telephone, Schauenberg says, "the NPS was a negative 11 percent, which is absolutely terrible."

The company put a Six Sigma team on the case and it managed to reduce the process from 65 minutes to 4. The next survey found that the NPS was a positive 11 percent, which the company says translates to nearly $200 million in incremental value. "Whenever we put the NPS of a business unit on a matrix along with the growth rate of that unit," Schauenberg explains, "there is a definable correlation between the two." Reichheld says this connection between customer satisfaction and growth is not uncommon. "Our research over the past decade reveals that in most industries, the firms with the highest NPS have the strongest profits and the healthiest growth," he comments.

Customer feedback takes many forms. For eBags.com, an online purveyor of luggage, handbags, and computer cases, a sophisticated survey process focuses more on customer reaction to the products than to the service itself. Within 21 days of purchase, customers receive an E-mail asking them to rate the product on four attributes (appearance, durability, utility, and price/value) and assign a 1–10 ranking for each. "Then we ask the key question," says eBags CFO Mark DeOrio: "Would you purchase this product again?"

Customers seem happy to oblige — in fact, nearly a third respond. Popular products have hundreds and even thousands of customer ratings, giving prospective customers a reliable picture of how the product has been received in the marketplace. Additional features, such as customer reviews ("The pockets are comfortable and it holds my gear without becoming too bulky...."), the option of accessing just the negative reviews, and a customer assessment as to whether a given review was helpful to them all help to foster what DeOrio calls "an open and frank approach to shopping that is fundamental to our value proposition."

The company's sales are up 40 percent over the past two years, and DeOrio says customer feedback has a lot to do with that. "People want to feel they're part of the process," he says. "The customers who interact with us have a strong loyalty to the brands we market. Financially, this equates into the highest lifetime value."

If "Do you like me?" is the ultimate question, then EFM vendor WebSurveyor got the ultimate answer when one of its clients, DigitalMailer Inc., decided to resell the product as part of its communications offerings. The company, which provides credit unions with a range of Web-based communications services including E-statements, newsletters, marketing campaigns, and more, used WebSurveyor to get a grip on its customer base and liked it so much that it now helps its customers use the technology to assess their customers.

The business-to-business company pays $1,500 a month to WebSurveyor for a multiuser survey-software license, and then customizes the product for its clients, which pay about $1,500 a year to use the online tool to gauge their customers' satisfaction levels. "They're using the tool to measure branch and staff performance, in terms of how customers are handled, which tells them where they may need to make staff changes, beef up the staff, or move a branch to a different location," says DigitalMailer executive vice president and CFO Greg Crandell.

Apple Federal Credit Union, a DigitalMailer client, purchased the online-survey tool as an adjunct to its more traditional market research. "I needed an inexpensive way to get a timely response from our members," says Chris Cooper, CFO of the Fairfax, Virginia-based credit union. "This is an excellent and low-cost tool to supplement our traditional [and more comprehensive] market-research surveys."

One benefit of online surveys is that their cost and simplicity allow business units to take control. At Apple Federal, for example, department heads identify problems affecting various customer segments and create surveys using the question library that is part of the software. At any given time there may be four or more such surveys under way, which would be prohibitively expensive if handled by mail or phone. Sometimes the results translate into immediate savings; Cooper says that the WebSurveyor tool (used in an online-form capacity) helped Apple facilitate migrating the majority of its online banking members to E-statements, which is expected to save the credit union more than $7,500 per month.

• « previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• next »