Customer Loyalty Blog: All Things are Not Equal

All Things are Not Equal

October 23, 2006
Greg Robinson, Customer Loyalty Blog

Your customers value certain things more than others. This is common sense. But if you look at most customer satisfaction surveys you receive (and maybe some that you send to your customers!) most of them only ask the most basic questions about your last interaction with the business but fail to ask key questions about the customer’s future intent. And the customers that are completing the surveys may not be representative of your customer base.

A major hotel chain was convinced that they had sufficient customer data to start a major process improvement effort. There strategy was to focus on the business travel and provide a level of service that would entice them to make the chain their first choice whenever they traveled.

As the hotel chain began its improvements efforts, they reexamined the data they had received from comment cards. What they found was that while they had a lot of data, the data was not coming from their target customers. The cards were being completed on the weekends, not during the week when business travelers were at the hotel. It turns out that the majority of the cards were being filled out be families traveling with children on the weekend—exactly the opposite of their target market.

Not all things are equal. Your customers are not equal and neither are the elements of your products, services, pricing, delivery, and customer service that drive their future intent to do business with you or refer others. The challenge for organizations is to develop a clear understanding of the drivers of customer behavior for your key customer segments then measure performance relative to customer expectations on an ongoing basis. Basic surveys are typically not enough to provide organizations with sufficient data to make improvements in business operations. In fact, they can be misleading and drive organizations to do the wrong things for their key customers as in the hotel example.

If you are going to take the time to ask customers about your performance, it is worth taking the time to do it right. Surveys must include measures of the key elements of your offering that statistical analysis has shown to be linked to the desired customer behavior. They should be improvement focused—meaning that the intent of the measurement is to find opportunities for improvement as seen by your most important customer segments rather than to make your organization look good. And surveys should assess the customers desire to do business with you going forward given their last experience.