Yesterday we examined why Jack and Suzy Welch's (or, as I call them, "Jazy") admonition to survey your employees to
determine their engagement wasn't the best possible way to establish just how
committed your employees are. (The column I referred to yesterday is premium
content, so I can't provide a link.)
Jazy says that the second important measure of your
company's health is Customer Satisfaction. They explain that you have to meet
customers in order to know how they feel about your products / services /
people. Good advice. Then Jazy say’s “And don’t leave without finding out if
each customer would recommend your products or services.” Even better advice. But
the best advice of all would be “Get evidence that your customers like you, as all
the meetings and glad-handing is meaningless in absence of evidence about how
your customers really feel."
How do you do that? Glad you asked. You look for heat. You want hot customers, not cold ones, and you want customers that show you the love. Here is a method I have used before to determine both the health of an individual customer relationship and, even more importantly, the overall health of all of your customer relationships.
The "Heat Index" I propose (which is a modified version of a concept I first ran into at Resumix) has three dimensions:
- Heat - How passionate is the customer about you, your
products / services and people? Heat ranges from "Blue" (Ice Cold) to
"Red" (Red Hot).
- Value - How valuable (or detrimental) is that level of
passion? Value ranges from -4 (really detrimental) to +3 (really valuable).
- Evidence - What evidence is needed to establish this
level of passion? Evidence range is discussed below.
When you combine these three elements you get the
following scale:
- Blue - Ice Cold (-4) – We (the company and / or customer
service rep) have evidence that the customer has actively sought to disparage
our company, product and / or people. We know for a fact (or beyond a
reasonable doubt) that the customer has contacted someone unsolicited and told
them we stink.
- Light Blue - Cold (-2) - We have evidence that the
customer has said bad things about us when someone asks them. They aren’t out
there putting effort into kicking us, but they are a lousy reference when they
get called.
- White - Neutral (-3) - We have no information one way or
the other, or the customer really doesn't care enough about us to have an
opinion. Neutral is always bad. Neutral means either you have no evidence of
anything (either bad or good) or when customers are asked for an opinion they
just shrug. White is considered the second worst possible heat level as neutrality
must be assumed to be a “No News is Bad News”
situation. Every person who works with a customer must know whether the
customer is happy or angry: they must always be collecting evidence.
- Orange - Warm (+1) - We have evidence that the customer
says good things about us when someone calls. We can be confident that they
will be a good reference. They don't go out of their way to preach our sermon,
but they like what we do, what we deliver and who they work with.
- Red Hot - (+3) - We have real evidence that the customer
has actively sought out people to sing our praises.
The value number shows you the relative importance of each
heat level. For instance, the numbers show that there is more downside to
having people running around saying bad things about you than there is upside
in having people running around saying good things about you. Bad news feels stronger and
lasts longer than good news (which is a basic fact of human nature). The value numbers
help you understand the varying level of seriousness / benefit of each level.
Through this system you can get both an individual
customer pulse and aggregate pulse easily and accurately. Customer service reps
and sales people can’t inflate the numbers: either the evidence exists or it
doesn’t. "Happy Ears", a phenomenon that has killed countless
companies (including one of mine), can be avoided. You hold customer touch
points accountable for having proof of their customer's state of mind.
"What about repeat sales?" I hear you say. If a customer buys a second time, isn't that a good indication of their satisfaction with your products, services and people? Unfortunately no. A repeat sale is satisfying in that it usually costs less to acquire than an initial sale. But there can be many reasons that people buy a second time (habit, inability to find something better and high cost of switching to another vendor are three major reasons people buy from the same company a second time). Fortunately, you can safely assume that there is really only one reason a person takes their time to tell others about you: their level of satisfaction.
Just as I said yesterday, I am sure that there are subject matter experts who can tell us where this scale / system is wrong or inappropriate. I am confident however that this approach will yield better data about the health of your company than charming your angry customers wih drinks and handshakes.
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