Angry and Bored? You Must Be a Customer

Online surveys offer speed and convenience to both the companies creating them and the customers responding to them. But that power can lead to abuse. Piotroski says companies must respect the patience levels of core customers. "The promise of continuous customer feedback could erode if people are constantly being surveyed," she says. Timing is everything. "Typically, an optimum period is right after a service interaction or a transaction, when the experience is fresh in the customer's mind." But beware the temptation to "use surveys to constantly ask, 'How'm I doin'?'" she says, "because that can easily backfire."

Gartner's Kolsky cites another potential drawback. "You need to avoid data overload, where you've accumulated so much data on the customer that you lose the sense of what it all means." He suggests that clients set up a committee that decides when various customer segments will be surveyed, and agrees with Piotroski that companies have to be judicious in their solicitation of customer feedback. Sometimes the key to boosting customer demand is to make no demands of your own.

Russ Banham is a contributing editor of CFO.

On a Scale of 1 to 5...
Surveying the World of Surveys
Divining how satisfied customers are (or aren't) with your company's product or service is a major driver behind Enterprise Feedback Management, but the technology can provide a useful platform for other kinds of surveys as well, including:

• HR processes (internal customer satisfaction). Human-resources surveys are usually administered to all employees in an organization or to specific groups (for example, help-desk users) to monitor their feelings about the organization, specific processes, and overall changes they'd like to see adopted.
• Market research. Similar to customer satisfaction, but with a focus on future products or services and likely to involve multiple collection channels.
• Process enhancement. A newer use that helps companies monitor processes that require consensus or periodic reporting; emphasis is on data collection, reporting, and storage and retrieval of results.
• Compliance. Used to track quality-dependent certification processes (Six Sigma, ISO9XXX, help-desk certifications) that require that periodic monitoring and quality assurance steps be completed on time and properly.

Source: Gartner

Call-center Technologies
Getting a Read on Customers
Online surveys aren't the only way to employ technology in the service of assessing customer attitudes. Vendors including Nice Systems, Verint Systems, and Witness Systems sell tools that monitor — sometimes in very novel ways — the interactions between call-center staff and customers. Asurion Corp., a Nashville-based enhanced-wireless-services company, for example, uses a system from Witness to "listen" to how call-center reps handle customer queries and complaints. The system uses data or screen capture to see what's on a customer-service rep's computer, and then uses that data to check whether the rep is properly processing the claim. "In the old days, we listened to a taped recording," says Paul Hineman, director of financial planning and analysis at Asurion. But that method is laborious and unlikely to show all the detail needed to ensure compliance with the claim process. Nice Systems offers, among other capabilities, "emotion detection" that evaluates the overall tenor of a call, helping companies discover whether a disproportionate number of callers seem to be getting hot under the collar — a marker for impending defection if ever there was one. In short, there seems to be little about customers that companies can't learn, if they ask the right questions and invest in the relevant technologies. "Prior to using this system," says Hineman, "we had a 92 percent claims-resolution rate. It's now 97 percent, a 5 percent increase that generates millions of dollars for us in annual savings." — R.B.

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