Transactional Surveys that Build Customer Loyalty
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Aug 13, 2009
One of the exemplary aspects of the
Domino’s Pizza transactional survey is that the questionnaire is updated in real time to display the name of your cook and the name of your delivery driver. This clearly communicates to the respondent that they are rating employees and that this feedback will most likely make its way back to those employees.
How valuable an approach is this? As Brian Koma reported in his summary of our
Customer Experience study findings, one of the CEM best practices with the highest correlation to customer loyalty is sharing with employees the ratings of them done by customers.
So expanding your existing
transactional surveys to close the feedback loop in this way can help you improve customer loyalty over the long term. That said, it does require changing much about your survey process. Many transactional surveys are
pulse surveys, taking the overall pulse of customer satisfaction with your service, rather than providing detailed diagnostics. Here are some of the changes you will need to make:
- Larger Sample - A random sample of, say, 1 out of 5 customers is perfectly appropriate for the traditional pulse survey and provides an accurate measurement of overall service levels while not inviting every customer. Unfortunately, if you want to be able to provide cross-tabulations by employee, you will want at least 30 responses per employee. As a result, you will need to increase the incidence rate dramatically, possibly even moving to an attempted census, contacting every single customer.
- New Personalized Reports for Employees - Often, when moving to transactional surveys broken out by employee, the desire is for fresh data about an employee daily. That is often misleading, and we encourage weekly scorecards instead. One day’s results are simply too small to be meaningful. In fact, with small cell sizes per employee, it may even be necessary to provide a rolling multi-week average of an employee’s ratings rather than an average for just that week.
- New Personalized Reports for Managers – A daily summary of results for all of a manager’s direct reports, treated as a group, provides trend tracking that can act as an early warning system, alerting a manager to important issues. Hierarchical reports can even be rolled up to provide higher levels of aggregation, by contact center or division, for instance.
- New Executive Reports – Another useful way to analyze the data is by reviewing all the open-ended comments for the highest-rated employees and contrasting them with the comments for the lowest-rated employees. This can then be used to develop training materials to educate low performers about the practices that have proven successful with the high performers.
While the data gathered from an employee-segmented transactional survey is most valuable as a way of coaching and mentoring employees, for some staff it will be necessary to use this data to justify terminating them. With the employee-employer relationship being the most regulated relationship in America, you will want to make sure that you are collecting and analyzing this data in an objective and appropriate manner.
When first rolling out such a system, it is far better to concentrate on the opportunities for improving employee engagement with customers, providing valuable feedback to employees to help them serve the customer better. That’s the big opportunity to build customer loyalty.