Why?  Because customers don’t always know what they want; because customers don’t always tell the truth and because customer feedback is always historical.  Also there are a few other factors that come into play that further reduce the usefulness of feedback: customers are often irrational, customers who respond to feedback forms are usually either very happy or very unhappy and therefore are not a true reflection of most customers and customer response depends on their mood when they fill in a form – not when they are next thinking of using your service.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my customers, I thank them heartily for paying my mortgage, but I have never sent any of them a feedback form.  And that is my real bone of contention, not the seeking of feedback as such but the lazy delivery of endless feedback forms that serve no useful purpose.  Such forms are not intended to collect data to help drive service improvements but are more likely to be used for some internal, self or department serving purpose.

The use of feedback forms is marketing dressing and the main reason for that is as above: we all know they don’t work but we feel obliged to send them out anyway.

The key to serving customers is get inside their business, their heads, understand how you can help them achieve more.   That old quote from Henry Ford - and much loved by the late Steve Jobs – about his customers just asking for faster horses is a truth.  In fact I was reminded on Twitter how Jobs took that thought further: ”Start with the customer experience and work your way back to the technology” he was quoted as saying. (No idea if it’s genuine but it suits my purpose.)  Ignore ‘the technology’ bit and replace it with ”how you run your business” and you’re just about there.

Customer feedback does not tell you about the customer experience and their emotional reaction to it.  You should not use data from feedback forms to inform you to how you run your business.   Understand what you could give them and understand how they would react to it and use it and what value it brings.   But don’t ask them to tell you what it is.

In fact most senior managers already know this and find the real use for this data is in internal politics and self justification. It is used to show what a good/poor job someone is doing, it is used to justify investment/disinvestment and it is used to convince judges you should win awards.

But as an operational measure it is fairly useless. It gives no indication of how the customer will respond to their experience, satisfactory or otherwise: there is no guarantee that a satisfied customer will come back, spend more or recommend your business. Frequently there is little information as to what caused that satisfaction so as a means of feedback to update processes it is unreliable. And again that history issue comes in – you are making decisions now for the future about things they may have happened in the distant past.

Much better to make planning decisions on what you think the customer will do. And that needs contemporaneous research and outcome assessment. Net Promoter Score (NPS) makes a start on this but doesn’t go far enough.

The best use for satisfaction surveys is to respond to poor feedback quickly and directly to the customer. You can always read the good ones when you’re retired and want to relive the glory days

I wrote this as part of a great discussion in a LinkedIn Group. You can read it here: What do you do with your Customer Satisfaction results?

In their call centre they have Team Leaders who are often managing up to 15 people (far more direct reports than any CEO is expected to have by the way) and their role is to coach, mentor, inspire and lead by example. The Team Leaders report to Line Managers. Their role is to ensure that the teams hit their productivity targets such as average handling time (AHT). More closely their role seemed to be more command and control where they beat the Team Leaders over the head with automatic measurement data.

So here’s the thing: it seems agents need leadership but team leaders only need management. Who leads the leaders? Why don’t they need coaching, mentoring and inspiration as well? No wonder with this “them and us” divide that Team Leaders have little ambition to go into “management”.

Here’s the next thing: where’s the focus on things that make a difference to customers? Was there ever a more irrelevant and potentially damaging measure in a call centre than AHT?

All sorts of customer service pointers here.  To me its leadership that is the important one and an essential credential for true leadership is integrity.   Another aspect that niggles is that Roux and his ilk seem to put the responsibility for service in a restaurant solely on the waiting staff when in reality it requires management to create the processes, working conditions and training behind the scenes for the staff to work the frontline effectively.

Clearly the show is not really aimed at improving service standards.  Like the Mary Portas Secret Shopper farrago, it is aimed at creating a cult around its presenter and being entertainment and they do little for the customer service community.

In fact the announcement represents a convergence of hype as cloud computing has almost as many advocates as there are software companies. Cloud is a generic term for computing applications and data that are accessed over the internet and which aimed to change the rules of the IT game. The iPad was to be its trusty foot soldier and missionary.

I am not a great fan of Apple but then neither am I a fan of PC brands either – to me they are just tools to do a job. But could the popularity of the iPad help the cloud get a better foothold in business spaces like field service? The question really revolves around whether the iPad is a suitable field service device. ServiceMax is a partner of salesforce.com, the cumulonimbus of the concept, and it reckons the iPad is a natural choice “with its touch screen capabilities, portability and easy app installation”.

Other observers are less convinced: “Considering the price point, fragility, and limited ability to upgrade hardware to conform to new software demands, the iPad would not be sufficient to serve as a primary device for field applications,” said one expert. Another was more direct: “An iPad wouldn’t stand a chance in most field service scenarios.”

Of course there are different degrees of field service device stress. Some environments are like working in an office where the biggest risk is have coffee dropped in it. In others the device will need to deal with the rough and tumble suffered by all the other kit in the back of an engineer’s van travelling from site to site while other environments are significantly more hostile – oil rigs, transmission antennas or frankly anything outdoors in the current climate. The iPad may be made to be portable but it is not truly ruggedised.

So, if the iPad is a horses for courses device, what of the cloud in general – does it have a future in field service? One of its appealing qualities is that it liberates an organisation of many of the difficulties and restrictions of running its own IT infrastructure; effectively allowing the corporate department to be bypassed by not having to seek their approval or dip into CapEx.

This can appear very attractive. There is a long running grumble about the service department being at the rump end of any corporate IT investment or innovation. Other attractions are the lower operational costs because the software and servers are run by the expert provider (although you’ll still need your iPad or other terminals), the solution should be easily scalable (up or down) and the applications and data will be available over any internet connection.

A word of warning though – look closely to see if any solution you assess does what it says on the tin. Computing companies love to jump on any passing bandwagon and if there’s any hint of an internet or remote application in the company’s system and suddenly the marketing department declare “it’s cloud”.  As a sage opined: “The cloud can look very attractive in the sky but when it comes down to earth it’s just fog.”

Blog first appeared on ServiceManagement365.com

Obviously these two people have differing perspectives and I am sure many readers will have had their own interesting experiences here when driving change.  It does seem to be one of the ironies of life that is the human’s ability to adapt to its environment that has made it one of the planet’s most successful species but we can all still get uppity when we are given a new tool at work. 

So one of the big challenges on any new mobility programme (by which I mean communicating with field engineers or their vehicles either directly or indirectly) is to get the engineers on board. Issuing orders or diktats isn’t effective – you might get it installed but you won’t get it working to the best of its capability.  “Engineers have that passive aggressive thing which means equipment has a strange habit of malfunctioning if they don’t like it,” said my friend.

So how do you get them to not only accept but also embrace this change? Appeal to their self interest was the conclusion of my straw poll.  Here are some favoured ways I’ve heard.

1. Tell them it’s for their own safety particularly when working alone.  This won’t necessarily win their hearts but for their minds it is difficult to argue against
2. Sell them the more interesting, personal benefits such as how much easier it will make their working day by reducing paperwork, better diagnostic tools, access to colleagues to discuss tricky problems.  Perhaps it might even give them access to the internet while they are travelling or an app which can tell them the location of the nearest donut shop
3. Get them flashy kit they’ll like to show off to their mates down the pub – engineers are gadget lovers so appeal to that one-upmanship
4. Bribe them – give them cash at the installation and a reward once it starts producing savings
5. Appoint a peer group leader – someone who has the team’s respect, will champion the cause and lessen the them and us attitude 
6. Run a competition for the best engineers and the winners get the new system – make it a badge of honour and having it aspirational
7. Engage with them on the kit or system you are buying.  Let them test it and feel they have had a hand in the purchase and that it’s not foisted on them

In summary, although it may be hard to believe for some managers, engineers are only human and so may have a better nature to appeal to.   If you have ever done that successfully some other way please share it with others at the Service Management LinkedIn Group. 

This article first appeared on Service Management 365.

My first thought was: ‘that’s rich coming from Gartner which pretty much makes its business out of hyping up software and suppliers to flog its reports until that opportunity is dead and buried or the next  bandwagon passes by’.    But, putting that prejudice to one side, I think there is a potentially dangerous sub-message in this hypothesis that needs correcting. 

Delivering good service demands that managers constantly push the almost Sisyphean rock up the steepening hill of customer experience and expectation.     A performance that stays, at best, constant will eventually and increasingly underwhelm customers.  Meanwhile, your competitors will be raising the bar of performance and your customer’s expectations with it – beyond the level at which you were performing. 

So what you did to achieve, say, 90% customer satisfaction in 2000 is not going to cut the mustard in 2010.   In fact you could now be performing at what you consider to be, say, 20% better but ‘only’ achieving 93% satisfaction.  But the truth is that is a great result that needs applauding not attacking a) because you are still in the game and b) you have out-performed customer expectations.

That $75bn of investment was made by organisations in order to carry on playing – and then to try and edge their noses in front.  That is not wasted cost, that is an investment required to be a player.  Yes, I am sure a lot of that money could have been spent more efficaciously but let’s kill the notion that investing to improve your service delivery is fruitless and wasted.  On the contrary it is paying dividends and vital.

Article first appeared on Service Management 365.

The major conference has gone (the event was called SMECON when I first went to it as Service Management magazine’s editor in Wembley in 1989) but more importantly I reckon none of the current exhibiting companies were the same as those at my first event.

Now, you could look at that as a negative thing but I take the view that it is to the credit of the field service industry that it has such a track record of innovation and change. In 1989 SME was dominated by service management systems – clunky green screen software; fourth party companies – specialist parts suppliers and repairers particularly of disk drives; tool kits and cases, while pagers were the mobile communications medium of choice. Service was about mending things and doing it as cheaply as possible.

Now the buzz is about optimisation with tools like tracking, scheduling and workforce management, with mobility tools like wireless data and internet, and handheld computers so powerful they could fly the space shuttle and with sophisticated logistics solutions running delivery, collection and repair networks more complex than the D-Day landings on a daily basis.

So what’s changed to drive the industry like this? Two conceptual things – making a profit and providing customer service. The “revolutionary” idea that service can in itself make money has provided a massive shift in thinking, work practices, investment and so on. But also the understanding that providing a better service could generate better customer retention, enhance brand values, better customer recommendation and, of course, more equipment sales has put the service department up the business agenda if not always in the board room – yet.

Still, that’s not bad for an industry that 21 years ago was regarded as a “necessary evil”. Here’s to the next 21 years.

As an additional thought, having been at the relatively young eCommerce Expo this week,  I wondered how many other B2B high tech trade shows there are that have survived 24 years.  Certainly none that I go to so another reason for SME to celebrate and feel proud of itself.

Asking the question to deliver a longed-for answer is using measurement to justify a predetermined action.   Proper customer experience research is not just about quantifying things like satisfaction.  Customer experience research should be about delivering answers to the questions you didn’t know to ask,  bringing insight and understanding about how your customers feel and think and how this drives what they do.  With that sort of research you can start to define a new strategy.  But if you don’t delve into the unknown then you can’t learn anything.

When dealing with customers this is vitally important. You can’t control them; they do seemingly random and illogical things and they get emotional.  This is even more pertinent to online retailers who may not have any human contact with their customer. So a survey set up just to prove you satisfied your customers is pointless. Maybe you do the survey every couple of months and can see if you’re getting better or worse.   But that is only useful if you know the root causes so you can address them. Far better is to find out what makes them satisfied, what makes them want to come back and what makes them recommend you and then you can do more of it.

Customers don’t care how you organise your business, how much effort went into your creative or the latest software you put in your call centre but most company based research programmes are there to test and measure these sorts of things – to test what you deliver. What is far better is to test what the customer takes away from your site – to measure customer experience across the full range of emotions and not just the very happy and unhappy customers who fill in CSat surveys.

This needs to be done independently of your in-house departments to escape intentional and unintentional prejudice and to be independent of vested interests so it can tell the story from the customer’s perspective.

Sure it is a little harder to do than putting up an online customer satisfaction survey but there are some different research methods out there and ultimately it will be more rewarding for you and for your customers.

Most online retailers collect their customer data in silos.  They have reams of data off the web site, they get feedback from their third party delivery companies on fulfilment and they get customer satisfaction data off their post-event forms or emails.  All useful in their own ways but they don’t give a picture of the individual customer’s journey or experience. If you don’t measure it you can’t understand it and so you are going to struggle to improve it. 

What about those silos?  I have seen web site managers flicking through reams (yes, it was usually printed off) of paper.  But one of the big problems with this very detailed web data is it tells you what visitors have done but you have to infer information about why they’ve done it.  With post-event satisfaction surveys you tend to get data from either end of the happiness spectrum. Whereas the majority of customers are usually either slightly happy or slightly unhappy and tend not to respond. But unless you understand this single biggest group you are never going to move them up the happiness scale. 

Also ask yourself why you are collecting information and what are you going to do with it.  Satisfaction ratings are a top level measurement of past performance but they don’t tell you what is driving performance – it’s  a bit like trying to reorganise the defensive line of a football team at half time in a game based on their final league position last season.  

Because this customer data is collected and stored in solos it is coming from three different groups of customers so it is inconsistent.  This means it is impossible to link together to get a picture of the customer experience or journey across multichannel interactions. (There is another point here about measuring and so treating customers as individuals and not as socio-demographic groups but that’s for another blog.)

The best way to break down these silos is to follow individual customers as they experience the different channels.  As you do you’ll find many will have largely good journeys and you can identify what they qualify as a good experience and so you can deliver it more often and a few will highlight where problems occurred so you can address them. 

And don’t forget to ask the three key questions that will allow you to understand the outcomes of the customer experience: how satisfied were you?  Would you repurchase from this site? Would you recommend this site to friends or colleagues?  Armed with intelligence you can target your improvement programmes.

It will also give you an idea of the weighting of how serious an issue it is for a customer i.e. is a call centre issue more significant than a web site navigation one in driving poor recommendation levels.    You will gain insight into the “why” customers do things as well as what they have done. 

Use this actionable intelligence to feedback into development and you will improve your performance for the silent majority.