This is a short story about surveying your customers and how extrapolating too far and too fast from a limited data set can damage your relationships with your customers.<\/p>\n
Before Christmas I attended a London and the South East Contact Centre Forum<\/a> event entitled: Is your contact centre ready for the future?<\/p>\n At the event, an analyst from Gartner, let\u2019s call him Mike for the sake of this post, shared a personal story about what happened when he recently called his bank\u2019s customer service facilities.<\/p>\n He started his story by saying that if he was to rank his relationship with his bank he would rate it, on average, as 5 out of 10.<\/p>\n On this occasion, when he called the bank, his call was answered quickly and his problem was solved without much fuss. So, at the end of the call, when asked to rated his experience he rated his experience as 9 out of 10. A near perfect result.<\/p>\n What happened next is the most interesting bit.<\/p>\n As a result of his rating of his recent call, the bank started sending messages to Mike believing that he is now \u20189 out of 10\u2019 customer, happy with his bank and is primed to recommend the bank to his friends, family and all people in between.<\/p>\n However, there is a problem with this. Mike, by his own admission, is still, on average, a \u20185 out of 10\u2019 customer when it comes to how he feels about his bank. And, the more messages that he receives from his bank about how he is a \u20189 out of 10\u2019 sort of guy, the more that they annoy him.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong. Surveying your customers and asking them to rate their experience with you is a good thing and a great way to gauge how you are doing. And, it\u2019s always exciting to achieve scores like 9 out of 10 when you are trying to deliver great customer and a great customer experience. But, we have to be careful not to jump to any conclusions when we achieve a big jump in positive customer feedback and we must remember to look at the result in it\u2019s wider context. Extrapolating a view of your customer based on one data point is dangerous, can back-fire and do more harm than good to your relationship with your customer.<\/p>\n Relationships can change dramatically overnight, as a result of one new experience, but it doesn\u2019t happen very often. Therefore, we need to be careful with the use and interpretation of data.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This post was originally published on my Forbes.com column<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Photo Credit: C_Knaus<\/a> via Compfight<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a short story about surveying your customers and how extrapolating too far and too fast from a limited data set can damage your relationships [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,13,14,15,18],"tags":[1806,141,1084,175,1564,158,2589],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}