This morning I’m sitting in front of a General Motors customer satisfaction survey. It makes me reflect on an interesting point – many companies go through the mechanics of conducting a customer satisfaction survey, but, let’s face it, they really don’t care. If they really cared about your customer experience they would notice that their survey methodology is flawed and incredibly biased by the actions of their dealerships. Auto companies happen to be the worst I’ve come across. But, there’s flawed and biased research in almost every industry.
Here’s my auto industry experience (and I’ll bet you’ve had a similar one). You buy a new car and the salesperson spends a significant amount of time telling you about how you would be taking food out of the mouths of their children if you didn’t give them the absolute highest marks on every question. They even go so far as to show you what a “correctly” filled out survey looks like! A few years ago our Mercedes salesman actually tried to bribe us with free merchandise if we would fill out the survey in his favor. They both have told us that if we couldn’t give them the highest marks to just not fill it out.
Here’s another example. A few years ago a colleague of mine returned to his hotel room to pick up a forgotten item and found the cleaning person filling in the “customer satisfaction” card.
I had a client a few years ago that wanted to make sure that his survey could conform with an industry benchmark study – and then he wanted to make sure he could only submit the best responses. Sorry, our ethics would not allow that!
My guess is that these organizations really couldn’t are less about improving the customer experience. Their surveys are motivated by something else – an industry measure, a misguided corporate initiative or poorly designed measurement structure, etc. They go through the mechanics without ever actually using the information to improve the customer experience. Which is a real shame! They have the ability to enter into a conversation with their customers and collect tons of information about how to improve the customer experience and instead they bastardize the process to “game” the system.
So, where are the flaws in your customer experience feedback? Do those whom you are measuring have influence over the survey? Do you have control over survey distribution and collection? Is your data collection and analysis method really effective? Is your feedback mechanism tied to real organizational imperatives? Have you set goals and measures – and created a culture that ensure that employees really try to get the best information and act on it? Do the questions really get to the heart of the customer experience? Or better stated, would responses to the questions really tell you what you need to know about the customer experience? Are you doing anything with the results?
The biggest question you have to ask yourself: Do you really care? Or are you just going through the motions?
Just as an aside…we refused the Mercedes guy’s offer and filled in the survey honestly (especially after they delivered our car with a faulty gas gauge).
I’d be interested to hear your experiences and your ideas about how to keep these biases from being introduced into your research. Be sure to leave a comment!


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