Customerville PRO Resources

Transcription

1 Customerville PRO Resources Measuring customer experience is now part of the experience PRO Guide Series The Customer Complaint Trap

2 PRO Guide Series The Customer Complaint Trap Any good Voice of the Customer platform these days will send an instant alert to appropriate managers when a customer is unhappy. What most companies don t know, unfortunately, is that this feature can also be a morale killer among your front-line managers if not done correctly. Here s how you ll manage it right. Try this interesting thought exercise: Imagine that you had a coworker who, upon seeing you for the first time each day, immediately pointed out one of your shortcomings. He also has good things to say in praise of you, but in order to hear those things you would need to ask first. He never offers a compliment without being prompted. How long would you be friends with this person? Would you seek out their company? What wo uld be the emotional reaction in your gut each morning as you saw this person striding toward you? Most people s response to this exercise is the conclusion that they would not seek out this hypothetical coworker s company. And it s understandable. You re receiving a mildly unpleasant stimulus with each interaction, which creates an aversion to continuing to do so. Behavioral scientists call the intentional use of this phenomenon Aversion Therapy. Understanding how this works is extremely important for any healthy Voice of the Customer system. Page 2

3 Falling Into The Red Flag Trap Managers are always on the go, and their "real screen time" can be limited. Because the manager's company's feedback platform automatically forwards complaints to her mobile phone via SMS or , they're always received in the moment. Though the majority of customer feedback is positive, the manager needs to log into a dashboard system to see that. This imbalance between positive and negative creates an aversion to participating in feedback. Why? Because any good software platform these days should have a means of fast tracking complaints via or SMS. That s good business. Complaints are urgent, of course, and demand our attention. This has become even more important now that dissatisfied customers can rapidly share their experiences via social media. The constant "drip" of unsolicited negative criticism in the absence of unsolicited positive feedback eventually creates resentment in managers. This imbalance between the speed and delivery mechanism of good news and bad news has the very real potential of replicating aversion therapy within your company. The unintentional and undesirable result will be creating an aversion to listening to customer feedback. But what about the good news? The things that are going well, which comprise the vast majority of customer feedback? Companies often make that information available to their employees far less frequently and they tend to distribute this good news passively, via infrequent reports or web reporting portals that bury the good news in reams of data. Page 3

4 Making Smart Use of Red Flags At Customerville, we refer to an instant alert sent to a front-line manager in response to a subpart customer experience as a Red Flag Alert. We pioneered the technology over a decade ago our patent lawyer tells us we were the first in the world to do so and right away, the ability to know about a complaint in real time was a big hit. Companies using Customerville loved it, and it remains one of our system s most popular features. checked his phone to read the text message he d just received. It s a Red Flag, he said. And he wasn t happy about it. In fact, he looked a little nauseous. But when we first started using these alerts, we began to notice something: The charm wore off fast. At first, managers perked up every time they saw a Red Flag Alert. But after six months? A year? Two years? You can see how it might get a little old. And the numbers showed it. Managers gradually stopped monitoring their customer feedback. They stopped showing it to their teams. What was going on? Here s how we discovered the problem About a year after launching the Red Flag Alerts feature, Customerville founder Max Israel was having coffee in a shopping mall with a regional manager for a Customerville client company. It was around 8:00 in the morning, and besides the small army of computer bag-toting, Starbucks-clutching regional managers making their rounds and the enthusiastic early morning mall walkers, the place was pretty quiet. As Max and his client sipped their drinks and reviewed their numbers, the manager suddenly The Red Flag Alert Any good customer feedback platform will identify urgent customer complaints, and instant ly forward them to the appropriate front-line managers via SMS or . (Customerville's platform calls these "Red Flag Alerts".) Page 4

5 This immediately caused Max to wonder: What was really going on here? What was going through this manager s mind that would elicit such a strong response? The answer would change how Customerville looked at Red Flags, and how we would change the shape of our software platform for years to come. Max decided that day that if we wanted our clients to have positive emotions associated with customer feedback rather than negative ones, we had to make sure they heard the good news along with the bad. They needed to have some balance. Positivity/Negativity Ratio (PNR) of 3:1 For Voice of the Customer leaders, the counterpoint to aversion therapy is something called Positivity/Negativity Ratio, or PNR. As its name implies, PNR deals with the balance of positive and negative reinforcement that people respond best to. Among researchers like Barbara Frederickson, John Gottman and Marcial Losada, the consensus seems to be that people respond to a ratio of 3:1 positive to negative. This, they say, is true as regards relationships, work performance and just about anything else. (If you re interested in learning more about how companies use PNR, we recommend this piece in Positive Psychology News Daily as well as the Wikipedia posting on PNR.) Seeing the dismay on our client s face that morning at the mall, Max s thoughts came fast. On one hand, he was pleased that the client had reacted so strongly to the feedback he received wasn t that the point of it, after all? On the other hand, though, he realized something else: Emotions are important. They are not to be taken lightly, and they can t be overtaxed. The "Staying-Out- Of-The-Trap Sandwich" Real-time custo mer complaint alerts will always be table stakes in any good feedback platform. And managers will always run short of "real screen time". But you can stay out of the trap by packaging up good news in a push format such as , and sending it on a regular basis. The key to success: Sandwich the negative (which is nearly always a small percentage of overall customer feedback) in between the positive in a quick-read format. Behavioral scientists believe that the overall ratio of positive to negative feedback shouldn't fall below 3:1. This is called the Positivity/Negativity Ratio (PNR). Page 5

6 Balancing Red Flags with Proactive Positive Not long after that, we came up with the idea of ing out weekly newsletters that highlighted all of the wonderful things our clients customers were saying about them, along with their continuously improving customer feedback stats. This eventually led to Customerville launching a full-throttled E-publication engine several years later, which allows companies everywhere to do an even more robust job of sharing positive, inspirational customer feedback in a proactive way. Managers still get the instant Red Flag Alerts, but we make sure that they proactively hear the other side of the story, too. This not only makes them feel good, it also helps motivate them to continue taking the negative comments they do get seriously. After all, they have perspective. They know that their employees are generally doing a great job, and things are getting better all the time. Page 6

7 Video: Engaging Customers in Sharing Feedback Your CEM initiative requires healthy participation levels by your customers. Here's how we ensure this happens. Video Talk To An Expert In the research phase of your CEM project? Talk to an expert no pressure and no strings attached. USA Europe Webinar: The Surprising Cause of Survey Fatigue You hear the term "Survey Fatigue" a lot, but its root causes are actually poorly understood. Listen to a recorded webinar, which brings together concepts from design to research on Asperger's Syndrome. Webinar Customerville USA Seattle Tel. +1 (206) info-usa@customerville.com 6042 Seaview Avenue NW Suite #101 View on Google Maps