Service Recovery & MR
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Mar 15, 2010
Market researchers have not traditionally concerned themselves with using surveys to intervene on behalf of individual customers, because of the need for respondent anonymity and the interest in measuring rather than affecting customer satisfaction. But applied feedback techniques require designing processes that include service recovery after a dissatisfied respondent completes a survey. This prevents negative comments from getting buried in the report and facilitates direct action while there is an opportunity to recover.
Similar to customer satisfaction surveys, social media research is not anonymous - when your monitoring tools report back feedback, you can identify people (or at least their online personas) and either thank them for that feedback or try to get them assistance if they need it. Some organizations are expanding their customer service teams to monitor social media directly, so that they can respond as issues are tweeted and blogged. The market research department is then free to collect the feedback simply for aggregate analysis.
But with surveys the MR department needs to make sure that customer service is included. Here are three past posts that provide more detail:
- Survey Triggers for Feedback Management - Typically, a web survey of customers is set up with triggers or alerts that are fired off to staff each time a respondent gives a low rating to satisfaction or loyalty questions.
- Transforming Transactional Surveys - Adding triggers to a traditional questionnaire starts the transformation from a survey project to a survey process. Here are four issues to consider when you add survey alerts to an existing survey.
- Examples of Survey Alerts - Finally, here are six quick examples of using triggers to integrate surveys into process workflows.
Even when research organizations practice service recovery, rarely do they talk about it. One of our customers recently made it a point of pride when presenting the overall satisfaction results to the wider organization. They discussed the number of instances where customer service directly contacted the customer to address an issue and shared some of the follow-up comments from those customers.
Service recovery and market research will walk hand in hand for customer research from this point on.