Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

There’s a really big issue in the world today that’s affecting companies in every industry. So many surveys and so little results. Have you noticed how quickly companies will write to you as a customer, sending you a text message or an email? “Can we ask you a few questions? Would you please fill out our survey? It’ll only take a few minutes.”

The problem with this is threefold. First of all, filling out a survey is rarely an uplifting experience for you as the customer. And the companies aren’t even realizing that this last impression of directing you to a score card clearly focused on just collecting data, is not obviously about creating a better experience for you. Second problem is that you spend your time filling out the form, but are you actually confident that it’s going to make any difference? Do you ever hear back saying, “Hey, thank you so much for your feedback. We appreciate and we’re going to act on your ideas.” No, because they rarely ever even ask you for your ideas. Or in something like Net Promoter Score, they’ll only ask, but if you give them a very low rating or a very high rating, and then it’s like, “What did we do right?” Or “What do we do wrong?”

When you ask people that you serve for a CSAT score, customer satisfaction or an NPS score, or a customer effort score or an employee engagement score, you’re not asking the important questions that can actually move the majority in the middle to become your more frequent, more loyal, and more valuable customer, or you’re more engaged and committed employees. Fortunately, there is a solution, and it’s this. Stop looking backwards and saying, how did we do? And instead get your customers looking forward, getting them thinking about the future with you by asking better questions like “What could we do?” Or “What should we do to create more value for you?” Or “What else can we do to build a stronger relationship with you?” Or even more directly, “What will it take for you to prefer working with us as your trusted service provider into the future?”

Now these questions are focused on value creation, not a constant looking backwards evaluation. Here’s an example. When we started working with Nokia as a client, they had a customer satisfaction survey in B2B with more than 100 questions. Yikes. You know, the only people who actually use that survey were customers who were upset and wanted to send a message, kind of beat them up with low scores. Not only that, it was worse because the organization had tied specific scores to employee compensation. And you can be sure the employees had learned how to game the system. I mean, think of how many times for you you’ve noticed the questionnaires are given to happy customers and how rarely they’re offered to those who are truly upset.

So Nokia working with us, changed this. They literally got rid of a 100 question survey and instead they came up with four questions. Number one, “What do you like that we’re doing when we serve you that you want us to keep on doing?” Number two, “What do you not like about the way that we serve you and you think we should stop?” Number three, “What else would you like that we could do for you that would be valuable for you?” And then the fourth question, really interesting, was “What does any other provider of service to you or to your organization does something very well that you think that we could learn from?” And if they tell you about something that another organization does very well, and it’s not in the same industry as you, well, that’s called service benchmarking, where you’re curious and looking for best practices coming from any organization, any industry. And if they tell you something that’s in the same industry that one of your competitors is doing, that’s called competitive intelligence.

This shift from looking backwards to looking ahead requires more than customer feedback, or in this case, more than customer feed-forward. It also internally requires that you have a culture where all the people in all departments are curious to hear what customers want, what they’ll appreciate, what they’ll pay for in the future. You want people who will ask customers and colleagues internally for their ideas on what you can do better, and who will then act on those ideas with their heads, their hands and their hearts. Now, in uplifting service, this is what we help leaders do. And if you’d like some help thinking about how you could do this in your organization, book a call with one of our expert advisors and we will gladly listen to your current situation and the future that you want to create. And then, from our decades of experience, what we got also to offer you are some customized ideas and recommendations that could work for you. But first, right now, what do you think about this issue? As a customer, what are your feelings and your experience about all those surveys asking “How did we do?” And if you use these surveys in your organization, how’s that working out? What impact does it have on your people and on your future?