Monday 5 August 2013

Invade my life with a customer experience survey phone call

The customer survey has been a long standing mechanism for firms to probe your customer experience and get magical insights into how they met your needs.  A common approach to this old school customer experience tool is the cold calling survey that thrusts their way into your life and calls you up to ask your opinion invariably at the most awkward moment; just settling down on the toilet; juggling three kids and a dog; solving your rubik's cube in record time, the list goes on.  So calling up the unexpecting customer to ask them a list of pre-defined questions seeking their scores from 0-5.  How much insight does this really give?  Is the customer in the best place to answer these questions assuming they can still remember the event that lead to this?  You are likely to be on the back foot from the first moment as you have intruded into our lives and we wish this call to end as quickly as possible so will furnish you with whatever answers get you back out of our lives as quickly as possible.  So when answering 3 for the first question this results in a string of related questions being asked about "what would make it a 5", we adapt our approach quickly and from then on simply cut out the middle man and provide you with a 5 from the start killing off any further questions.  Firms need to realise that even if they did achieve an epic customer experience they are unlikely to learn this from a cold calling survey three weeks later.  Lets kill off this dinosaur of the customer insight world and ensure that any feedback is done straight away and if it can't lets use technology and go digital. 

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