Actually, I think customers satisfaction surveys don’t work because people don’t want to hear what the customer is really saying. The questions are designed to only give data that appears in a chart instead of listening to each customer on an individual basis.
Want to know what your customers think? Ask one question: ‘What could we do to make it easier for you to do business with us?’
Then read their answers, take action and respond to your customers. Here is a report on why the surveys don’t work.
Retail Customer Experience: Why customer satisfaction surveys don’t work
Recent evidence suggests fully 95 percent of our cognitive processing is subconscious. That leaves all of five percent of the rational mind to do what it does best: rationalize (some might say “guess about”) our decisions and actions to ourselves.
What that means is we’re pretty poor at telling others what we like or don’t like, and why we feel that way. And the science suggests we’re even worse at predicting what we might like, or do, in the future. One might wonder then, if we’re so horrible at this, just why businesses continue to crank out standardized customer satisfaction surveys. How can you get closer to the truth, to determining real, actionable steps to drive customer behavior, when you don’t know what they’re thinking in the first place?
And there lies the real paradox: our actions are driven by emotion (in our irrational subconscious) much more than logic. Yet, to really understand your customers, you can’t look at those emotions. Instead you must take a step back, stop making assumptions and focus on their behavior. Behavior, it turns out, leads to the truth.
Paco Underhill, a self-described “retail anthropologist,” has understood this for a long time. In his book, Why We Buy, The Science of Shopping, he makes a compelling case for employing observation of customer behavior over other techniques like surveys. To help his clients get closer to the truth, he doesn’t ask customers; instead he sends his “trackers” out in the field to the actual retail environments, and observes customer behavior in real time.
It was through this power of observation that Mr. Underhill discovered what he referred to as the “butt brush factor.” He noticed that there were serious and unintended consequences when two product displays stood in close proximity to each other. If a customer wanted to bend down to take a closer look at a product on a lower shelf, it forced passersby to turn and shuffle by, resulting in said “butt brush.” This seemed particularly uncomfortable for women, and it meant very low sales on the products in those displays. The behavior, in other words, held the answer to an actionable improvement to the customer experience, and to desired customer behavior.
This same idea — that behavior is truth — holds in the online retail world as well. You can’t just ask customers if your website is “satisfactory,” or what improvements they’d like to see.
Can you see just what your customers are trying to do on your site? Where do they enter, and what path do they start down? Where are the road blocks? It’s been our experience that, once you look at the behavior, it’s not that hard to see where customers are abandoning the site, where they are stalling or backtracking, and more.
So remember, it’s not what they say, it’s what they do.
November 4, 2009 at 7:18 pm |
Hi Tom,
This is John from Laramie, WY.
QUESTION:
Do know of any places that have a software system(?) that would allow our Downtown Business Assoc. to do a “rewards” program for avid downtown shoppers? We do NOT want a pricing POS system. In your many travels, have you run across any downtowns that have a low cost computerized “rewards” program???
P.S. We are also trying to get an answer through Main Street channels. THANKS! John
November 7, 2009 at 3:21 pm |
John,
Let me make some calls on your behalf and I will respond directly to you. Tom