Tag: customer-experience

Gaming the System: have we reached peak customer experience survey?

Surveying the customer seems like a good idea to find out ways to improve. Yet, I’ve been on the receiving end of customer experience surveys that show me we’re doing it all wrong.

Anyone who has purchased a car or who has had their car serviced recently by a car dealership is likely aware of the 10-point customer experience survey that arrives, via email, after the dealership visit. Other interactions with their customer service (say to troubleshoot the connection between said new car and the proprietary little app system that runs the electronics) also trigger a “rate our customer service” email. All these chances to provide feedback are good, right? Nope.

When each interaction with your service creates more work for me, the customer, I wonder. Also, the sales operation doesn’t feel open to actual feedback, it seems they’re only interested in the goal – getting the top mark. They show this in unsubtle ways. Visual cues for how the dealership would like to be rated are on the back of the salesman’s cubicle and on the wall facing the seats in the service department waiting area.

Coaching poster about the customer experience survey in the dealership.

Before I switched to a Chrysler product, I had a car with another brand name. And that dealership sent very emotive letters ahead of the survey, essentially saying if you cannot give us a 10, please let us know so we can correct it before you fill out the survey. Basically, let’s keep this between us, don’t tell Papa Franchise/OEM about any frustration.

Please give us a “5” rating on the question with a 5-point scale. (The 0-4 scores don’t count and we want your rating to count!)

Earlier this year, I got this form stapled to my receipt at the drugstore. It says that I may receive a survey, and if I don’t answer a 5 (top score for them) my response “won’t count”!

This pharmacy’s assertion that a rating below “5” won’t count cannot be true, and this note is the opposite of customer service. It’s just forcing the customer to be involved in gaming a corporate system. Yuck. With the people who are the subject of the surveys (sales and customer service folk) specifically asking to subvert the intention of the survey….how can we take this data seriously?

We know from online ratings that people really don’t bother to review a company or an experience unless they’re thrilled or torqued off. Yet, most of the experiences we have with brands, stores, and car dealers are somewhere in the middle of horrid to spectacular. It’s unrealistic to expect they’ll be spectacular 10.0 across the board all of the time. And it’s particularly silly to ask your customer to enable this charade.

Don’t bother your customers

Bothering the customer to give you top marks on a survey isn’t a good customer experience.

I’ve started a new behavior in response to this: I won’t fill these silly things out.

If I can’t give the customer service top marks, but it isn’t the agent’s fault (e.g. the issue is mechanical or technological) I have a hard time rating the interaction at all. I can’t give it a 10 because I’m still unsatisfied. But the agent was nice and at least sympathetic to the weirdness of the [insert technical or mechanical issue here]. So, should I be honest and say they’re eroding my faith in their brand but they hire friendly people to take the hit? That’s not an option in the survey, so I just delete the customer experience surveys now.

July 20, 2015
Customer Service: Actions “behind the scenes” matter to customer experience

What is your team doing when they aren’t “customer-facing?” Hint, it influences the customer experience too.

Welcome, made available by halfrain via Creative Commons on Flickr

There is a fancy grocery in Ann Arbor where I sometimes shop (and that will go unnamed). Generally, the folks here are friendly at the cash registers and at the cases where I order seafood, meat, or prepared food. Yet, I’ve noticed that the staff at this grocery are in a hurry when they’re in the aisles. When I’m shopping with a cart, I’ve had to “pull over” and wait for staff hurrying by to pass me.

When this happens, I wonder what’s so important in the back room—a smoke break, the punch clock, or an angry manager? I imagine that the store’s leadership has stressed quickness or efficiency over courtesy (a customer experience failure). In my head I rewrite my shopping list to frequent other stores.

There is another “fancy” place in town – Zingerman’s. I visited a friend at the Zingerman’s Bakeshop recently, and he walked me around behind-the-scenes. Everywhere we went in the facility, people stopped what they were doing (at their computers, wheeling a hand truck through a loading area…) and greeted me. I’m sure they had as much to do as the staff at the other location, yet they weren’t in a rush, seemed genuinely glad to meet me, and meeting each of them was a pleasure.

Zingerman’s has published their mission and guiding principles. They emphasize two relevant phrases in their mission:

“giving service that makes you smile” and

“showing love and care in all our actions.”

Through stopping to greet me, the Zingerman’s team exemplified courtesy and the mission of the company. While I didn’t yearn for a chat with the team at the other store, I would prefer not to feel “in their way.” I don’t shop there as often as I might, and I don’t want to work there.

So the question becomes—what values do you promote in your organization? Values and intention matter whether it is a knitting group, a writing circle, a start-up, or an established business.

What experience do you want newbies, visitors, new team members, and the old guard to experience? Because it is those values that shape the behavior of your team and the experience of your customers.

March 23, 2015
Customer Service: A Name, My Name, is Important

I have a difficult name – the first and the last names are unfamiliar. I haven’t met another Dunrie, and the only Greilings I have ever met are relations. People mess up the spelling, they don’t know how to hear it, they think Dunrie is my last name a lot and ask for my first name.

I’ve developed a few patterns to try to avoid certain common misconceptions about my name. It’s often misheard as “Dumrie” instead of Dunrie, so when I spell it out, I often say “N as in Nancy.”

Well, I went to a neighborhood coffee shop last week, after the morning rush. I was the only person in line and the cashier (who, I believe, is also the owner) asked me my name to keep with the order. She started to write “D U” on the slip, and then when she heard “N as in Nancy” she crossed off the D and the U and said, “I’ll put it under Nancy.”

I like tea. I also like my actual name.

What I should have said was, please don’t. People have special sense for their name. I would have heard Dunrie when the barista called it into the noisy coffee shop. I had to listen for Nancy. Besides, there was no one behind me, so I’m not sure what the personal or professional loss would have been to attend to the last four letters of my actual name.

What did I say? Nothing. I moved along, listened for “Nancy” and took Nancy’s fancy tea latte. I felt cross and misunderstood. Efficiency 1; Customer Service 0.

It’s a Dale Carnegie truism that almost nothing is more melodious to a person than her name. Maybe the shop owner was having a bad or busy moment that wasn’t obvious to me. Yet, it’s hard to make me feel more unwelcome in your shop than refusing to get my name right.

February 9, 2015
Great wrapping (packaging) extends the gift

I can be a minimalist. There’s almost nothing I like better than organizing things for disposal. I like to give away books (to friends, to the library); I like to give away clothing I haven’t worn for a while. I love to reuse cardboard boxes that come in the mail – to organize items for travel, to use for a gift box – and then to recycle them. I resent “wasting” money on gift packaging, preferring to reuse what I’ve received. I love using leftover yarn as ribbon and I have used newspaper once or twice to wrap a gift even recently. Yet there is some packaging that I cannot bring myself to reuse or recycle.

It’s well-designed and carries sweet memories, and I can’t bear to part with it, even though I detest clutter.

I cannot part with….

Tiffany Boxes

Over the years, I’ve received a few Tiffany gifts. Great-Aunt Jane and Great-Uncle Chuck gave us crystal candleholders for our wedding, and I’ve thought of them and recalled our wedding day each time we use them. More recently, Delta Airlines has been giving Tiffany Gift Cards as an option for their Diamond Medallion members as a year-end perk. Smart choice: For the frequent business traveler, give the wife something sparkly to distract her from your absence.

Tiffany packages everything as a gift — the gift card has its flat box and white ribbon and then the item it purchases gets its own box and ribbon. Each step in the chain brings more white-ribbon-wrapped Robin’s egg blue boxes, a series of gift experiences. The boxes are lovely and I enjoy the whole experience, even though the boxes (especially the ones for the gift cards) become immediately useless. Reusing them seems out of the question. It would be such a let down – to receive something that’s not Tiffany in a Tiffany box! Yet, I have a difficult time tossing them. So they pile up, and I try to use them for special items, like the puff of our sweet cat Floyd‘s fur I found behind the couch, years after he passed away.

Stella & Dot Boxes

When you go to a Stella and Dot party (my neighbor had one, a colleague of mine at work had another), you can order jewelry and it will be delivered to your home. Like Tiffany, each item is packaged as a gift, and the items I’ve purchased have been for me, so a couple of gift boxes hang around after I start wearing the jewelry. The boxes are colorful and printed with nice patterns, and they have a couple of steps to open them (a paper case that slips off before you can open the box).

The Stella and Dot boxes sat around and I could not reuse them (again, it would be strange to give it without Stella and Dot inside). Eventually, I summoned the courage to pull them apart and recycle them. It took a while.

The box for Gerla Chocolates

In Turin, Gerla makes wonderful hazelnut-chocolates (gianduiotti) that Dave brings back from his trips to Italy. Similar to the Delta gift of a Tiffany gift card, I think this tradition started through the canny wisdom of his distributor colleague there – give a gift to keep the wife amused while the husband is in Italy. The Gerla boxes are a strange shape: kind of semi-rounded with squared edges. And I’ve taken to reusing them for knitting supply storage (needles, notions) because, again, I simply cannot toss them.

Wrapping for Gifts from Japan

The wrapping pinnacle is Japanese packaging – special bottles of sake and special cakes have made it home from Japan tucked in Dave’s luggage. Each item is perfectly wrapped in many layers. Typically a printed cloth or paper surrounds a lightweight perfectly fitted blonde-wood box surrounding another layer of insulation (or custom cut wood inserts) surrounding the present. Because neither we nor most of our gift recipients read Japanese, these items are easier to reuse. I use the paper or the cloth to line drawers or shelves and the boxes get repurposed for Christmas gift boxes.

Great Wrapping extends the Gift

When I encounter the wrapping, a decorative liner underneath my cosmetics in their drawer, knitting needles stuffed into a Gerla box, special treasures safely tucked inside Robin’s egg blue boxes, I remember the gift, the giver, and re-experience a positive feeling about the brand. Well done, Tiffany, Stella and Dot, and Gerla designers for attractive packaging that makes the gift last.

July 5, 2014
Holiday Marketing Messages Can Go Awry

My inbox is getting full of marketing messages about Father’s Day, and I don’t like it.

OpenTable would like to help me make reservations at a local restaurant for Father’s Day brunch. Two Guys Bow Ties might ensure he’s snappily dressed for the occasion. Princeton U-Store wants me not to forget the college-themed gift, ThinkGeek offers up some nerd fun, and LocalHarvest and Vosges wonder if I should get my dad some yummies.

Topical messaging is good. Bothering me is bad.

While I am all for fatherhood and dads, especially my own Dad, all of the Father’s Day messaging rubs me the wrong way. I am not a parent and my Dad has been dead about 16 years (wow…longer than I thought).

Dear Brand I choose to follow, why do you want to remind me of my loss? Not a good strategy for you.

If there were a holiday opt-out in email marketing, Father’s Day would top my opt-out list. I imagine I’m not alone, folks with recent losses or who are facing infertility may be even more sensitive than I am.

Until I can opt-out of holidays that poke me, I might set up an email filter to avoid having these little reminders interrupt what is otherwise a fine day.

June 13, 2014
Pretty and Nice

We rented a canal boat in France in May with friends. We piloted it ourselves and moved between small towns on the Saône, the Seille, and the Canal du Centre in Burgundy. We had a great vacation, enjoying the sights, the countryside, the cheese, and of course the wine of France.

Five of the six of us had taken French in high school, one much longer, and so we got by in French much of the time. Additionally, the English of many folks in the hospitality industry was much better than our French, so we switched often. For instance, we conversed easily with the staff at the port where we picked up and dropped off the boat, the mechanic who came to help us when we had battery trouble, people in restaurants, and the staff at the capitaineries where we payed to moor the boat, hook up to shore power, and take on potable water.

Some in the group enjoyed using their French, while others of us felt overwhelmed. My joke is that I don’t really like speaking in English, and speaking in French is even more intimidating! Still, we enjoyed the little pleasantries, such as when we bought our pain au chocolat in the morning, we chatted amicably in French with the vendor. We said we were happy to have the pastries because we were hungry, to which he replied “c’est une bonne maladie!” A good problem, especially in France. Before we left, he wished us a pleasant journey, a great day, and a few other nice things. It was difficult to match the ardent good wishes and blessings we received!

M. Malaprop strikes!

As you might expect, we managed a few hum-dingers with our half-remembered French. We had a wonderful time at the tasting room of Domain Mestre Père et Fils in Santenay. It took us a lot longer than we expected to traverse the eleven locks from the Saône up to the wine country on the Canal du Centre. The locks make canal travel slow-going, and our trip was further slowed when we got stuck in one of the automatic locks. Its doors closed after the first boat exited and before we were able to leave, so we had to wait for the remote lock-keeper to drive up and free us. We became fast friends with the lock-keeper and saw him on several of the locks going up the Canal and then going back down the next day.

By the time we got to Santenay, we were running up against the end of the day. We had called ahead, and although we were initially told they closed at 6PM (or 18 hours), we switched to English with someone else on staff who offered to give us a wine tasting if we arrived before 6PM. We got to Santenay a little after 5PM, and although it was a short walk from our mooring on the Canal du Centre to the center of town and the tasting room, it likely wasn’t much before 6 when we arrived at the tasting room.

We had a wonderful tasting, we enjoyed the wine, learned a lot, spoke in both English and French, and picked up some bottles for later in our trip. We would have bought more if we could take it home easily. At the end of our tasting, after we were shown their wine cave with stacks and stacks of bottles below the tasting room, we thanked our host in French. Instead of saying, it’s so nice (“c’est très gentil”) one of us said it’s so pretty (“c’est très joli”) – they actually sound more similar in French, although they are not homophones. We corrected ourselves immediately. Our host, without skipping a beat, replied, in French, that he was both pretty and nice. That describes our experience perfectly – pretty and nice, and good humored.

If you’d like to travel by boat on the Saône, Seille, and Canal du Centre, we had a great time with le boat!

June 12, 2014