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Rating customer satisfaction 1 – 5 can mislead you into false security.
After our recent switch from DSL to cable service for Internet, I feel a kinship with Charles H. Green’s comments in “Killing Trust with Measurements and Rewards,” in Trust-Based Selling. Green describes how the pharmaceutical industry has been increasing sales representatives while their effectiveness keeps dropping.
Among the problems they have is that as their sales force gets younger and younger, the expertise of their representatives declines. Doctors are seeing these representatives as “pill pushers” rather than as knowledgeable advisors and consultants. Why should they bother wasting precious time they could spend with patients to see salespeople who only care about their own metrics, i.e. how many scripts are written for their products. This is definitely a hard sell approach to sales.
Soft sell sales and marketing, on the other hand, focuses on the concerns and needs of the customer first then on getting the sale. If it’s the right solution for the client, it should flow relatively easy. But it takes patience and knowledge to advise your clients after you’ve listened to enough answers and discussion to understand their problems or desires and identified what will deliver the right results.
Back to the cable company story, it’s an example like the pharmaceutical companies stories Green tells. I’m a knowledgeable user of computer technology. I’m in sales and marketing. I lack any desire to become an expert on the technical aspects of networking computers. So we paid a token installation charge to get the cable and their cable router installed. The service stopped at this point. It wasn’t the installer’s job to ensure our network worked.
One would think that the cable company’s dream is for us to spend money monthly for years to come on their service. More significantly, our having Internet service on cable serves to protect their primary service, cable TV as it’s unlikely we would switch to satellite for TV if we have Internet service on cable. So their revenue is greater than just the web connection.
Without belaboring the point, we’ve had some horrendous problems with the installation. And the vaunted telephone support was a joke. The irony of this is that although the cable company’s employees never resolved an issue, they still wanted us to give them a 4 or 5 out of 5 for their friendly service. They miss the point. Customers want results, not just a friendly voice. If we don’t get the problem resolved satisfactorily, we’re not happy. If we gave their employees a 4 or 5, we would still tell all of our family, friends and anyone else who’ll listen what lousy service they gave. What good was this customer service metrics? We don’t trust our cable company to care one whit about us as customers.
A heart-centered, soft sell customer service approach – and I’ve had this sort of support consistently from Dell on several occasions – would do everything possible to make sure that we were happy with the installation, that our computers and printers all worked as they had on the DSL, before considering the call closed. And instead of a 1 – 5 rating system only, it would invite comments.
So when you attempt to measure your customer service effectiveness, first put yourself in the place of your customers. You build trust by demonstrating understanding of their problems and acting to solve them, not having the computer call for a customer service survey.Take the soft sell sales and marketing approach of listening and then guiding them to the right solution for their wants and needs. Make sure it works. A partial solution only serves to generate hostility towards you and your products and services. Done right, selling – and customer service – can be fun, fulfilling and mutually rewarding.
So, please comment, do you agree or do you feel that numeric ratings are adequate measures of customer satisfaction?
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