Are You Gaming Your Customers?
By Rowan Jackson
A recent customer experience astonished me. I will not bore you with the whole story, but it is with a supplier to me in the telecoms industry. This industry has customer service on two levels: exceptionally bad or downright abysmal.
The standout shining lights in this industry (experience across several brands) seem to be those engineers who turn up to your house to fit equipment. We have found, in every case, that these delightful, competent, smart, humorous, and long-suffering souls “put up with” their employer and “just get on with it.”
My recent experience was with one of these smashing people. Let us call him John. I do not want him to get into trouble. He came to install a new broadband line. He came, as planned, in his shiny van and set to work, with humour and diligence. Carefully asking me how and where I wanted things placed, he completed his work swiftly and cheerfully on a cold and wet day.
When all was done, he gave me a smart leaflet with the broadband username and passwords on it and asked me to score his performance.
Now this is where it all gets interesting.
John’s leaflet had 3 scoring choices on it. I could score him out of “10-9”, “8-7” or “6-0”. He has placed a large X across the latter two and circled “10-9”, clearly indicating to me that that was to be my choice. Other than the ludicrous scoring method, which is farcical, John did not know that I was someone with decades of experience of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and so I explained what he was doing. I walked him through the NPS story, and explained that he could read about it here.
He explained that if I scored him “10-9”, he would get a bonus. If I scored him “6-0” then his pay would be deducted £10. I then explained to him what “Feedback Gaming” is. This is precisely what his company is doing. It is iniquitous, very unfair on him and extremely bad practice.
What is truly astonishing is that:
1. His company is clearly encouraging and promoting such gaming.
2. In 2023 such behaviour is happening at all. Feedback Gaming has been well known since the 1960s and internationally recognised as an unbelievably stupid thing to do. It has been known for an exceptionally long time that any feedback system open to gaming is useless. Feedback from customers must always be objective and independent. The method that this company is using is neither. One does not need to be too bright to realise that the data is skewed and of little value.
What is happening here?
Firstly, let us deal with the Net Promoter Score. According to its creator Fred Reichheld, NPS is not diagnostic and does not inform any user of the actions they need to take to make improvements. In the same way that a doctor may take a patient’s temperature, doing so does not tell the doctor what is wrong with the patient. It gives the doctor a score: a temperature.
Secondly, let us look wider at customer feedback surveys. Assuming that this company is only using NPS, then they are getting extraordinarily little back from their customers. What they are getting is so skewed to be of no value. It is not surprising then to discover that their customer service is the worst I have ever experienced.
If you are considering obtaining feedback from your customers here are a few golden rules to start you off.
1. Let us say you are going to use a survey. The questions in your survey need to come from your customers and not be internally created. If you create the survey questions, they will not represent what matters to your customers. Do not be surprised then if you get a low response rate.
2. Objectivity and independence are critical to ensure your survey process is not biased. Therefore, you should not issue the survey yourself but use an external firm to do so.
3. Thirdly, many surveys are single point scoring: 3.5 out of 5. This method, while potentially useful, is not diagnostic to the degree that you need. Multipoint scoring surveys are far more useful and will provide you with performance gap scores which can then be ranked according to the size of the gap. The bigger the gap, the more important it is that you work to close it.
4. Lastly, when companies survey their customers, they frequently miss an opportunity to include other questions that reveal critical information that customers will willingly share. In many situations, a company’s customers are also customers of that company’s competitors. It is relatively easy therefore to invite your customers to score your competitors’ performance as well as yours.
If you would like to discover more about some of the techniques covered here, please get in touch.