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Welcome
Welcome to the June 2008 edition of the FT
Word. FT Works turns 10 this month! How far we’ve come…
Many thanks to all of you FT Word readers,
clients, and especially repeat clients who have brought us to the ten-year
mark. Help spread the word by forwarding this newsletter to your colleagues.
(To subscribe,
click here.)
This month’s topics:
- Taking a fresh look at your customer
satisfaction survey
- News and numbers from the May, 2008 SSPA
conference
Taking a Fresh Look at your Customer
Satisfaction Survey
Feeling smug that your customer satisfaction
survey is in place, working well, and giving you accurate information? It’s
awfully difficult to revamp something that works well (if it ain’t broke…) but
chances are you can improve it, and improve overall customer satisfaction
while you’re at it.
To improve the survey itself watch for:
- Length. While there’s no magic
maximum number of questions on a transactional survey, fewer is almost
always better, in particular because it makes for higher return rates, which
in turn increase the reliability of the survey. Hint: if you have 10
questions that’s too many.
- Focus. Yes, it’s tempting to ask just
one little question about items other than the support interaction at hand –
and perhaps you’re getting plenty of pressure from other groups in the
company to do just that— but keep a strict focus on support. This will help
keep the length reasonable.
- Timing. Surveys should go out
immediately after the case is resolved. How accurate would your recollection
be for a service interaction that occurred two days ago?
- Scale. Large tomes are produced by
statisticians on how the choice of the scale influences the results. Don’t
sweat it but be aware that the shorter the scale the more difficult it is to
score very high. So if you are using the popular 1-5 scale, many customers
will hesitate giving a 5 rating since they feel they can’t say the
interaction was absolutely perfect. If you used a 1-10 scale instead the
same customers would not hesitate to give a 9 rating for a very good case.
- Important areas for customers. You
may be surveying customers on speed of response, speed of answer,
professionalism of the support rep, perhaps a slew of other items. You think
there’re important, but what do your customers think? Have you ever asked
them? It’s relatively easy: just gather a few customers (20-30 would do) and
ask them to rate the importance of each aspect of a support interaction. If
you find that no one cares much about the “attitude” of the support rep,
remove the question.
- Wording. Do your customers understand
the questions you are posing? Do they interpret them the way you intend them
to be? Again, with a small customer survey you can find out. Common issues
include using double-headed questions (“Did the rep listen to you and
understand your problem?” well, perhaps he listened but did not understand…)
and using jargon (“Are you satisfied with response time?”, which most
customers will interpret as resolution time, that is time to an answer.)
Reword the questions so they are clear and unambiguous.
- Comments. Comments are wonderful! I
don’t believe you should mandate comments. (I’ve seen surveys that mandate
comments with low ratings, guaranteeing that some percentage of dissatisfied
respondents won’t bother. Wait! There was a strategy there, perhaps not the
one you should be using though…) Do encourage comments without mandating
them.
And now for the fun part: how to use the survey
to deliver better service to customers.
- Focus on the important items. From
your customer survey you will know what items are most important for
customers. Plot importance against ratings and you will get a quadrant chart
(more important/less important vs. more satisfied/less satisfied.) Focus on
the more important/less satisfied quadrant. It contains those items where
performing better will make a difference. And don’t worry so much about the
less important/more satisfied quadrant: you are over-performing in that area
already.
- Analyze the dissatisfiers. Analyze
the questions with the lowest ratings (e.g. 1-5 if using a 10-point scale).
What areas create the most problems? Focus on those areas to raise
satisfaction; don’t bother with areas where you are already performing well.
- Focus on the low scores. What’s
killing your customer satisfaction ratings are not the customers with the
middle scores, but the ones that are giving out the 1s and 2s (and 3s and
4sif you’re using a 10-point scale). Train all managers to specifically
focus on the low-rated surveys. Are they associated with any particular
product? Any particular support rep (probably yes)? Focus on those products
or those reps.
- Read the comments. Much can be
learned from reading comments (also called “verbatim”). They can often
illuminate not just where the problems lie but also potential solutions. So
perhaps you can go from a low score in the customer empathy question
(problem, no solution) to “we need to show reps how to express concern for
the customer’s problem before starting the resolution process” (well-defined
and relatively easy task.)
- Share the analysis with all the managers.
Not all support managers are comfortable creating quadrant charts, nor do
they have the time to identify dissatisfiers. Make it easy for each manager
to pinpoint the weaknesses for his or her group.
- Make it stick. Are you allowing staff
(reps or managers) to “suspend” surveys for individual cases without
constraints? Chances are that surveys are lifted for the most painful cases.
Make surveys automatic and place them out of the control of the line
managers. And everyone should carry the survey ratings for the cases s/he is
responsible for as part of their objectives.
Tweak your satisfaction survey to make it work
harder for you.
News and numbers from the May, 2008 SSPA
conference
I spent a lot of time at the conference
reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, but also managed to jot down a
few notes I thought would be useful to share.
Organizational Structure
- Offshoring is real. SSPA members report 20%
of their support staff is offshore for hardware support and 14% for software
support.
- Most Professional services organizations
report into the Sales team, while most Tech Support organizations report
into a centralized Support team. While we may all wish for a global services
team that’s not a common model these days.
Tools
- Wikis are hot: 25% of members use wikis (in
my experience, much of the usage is internal, but still that’s a big
number!)
- 39% of members have customer forums versus
36% last year. Since 18% of members said they would purchase forum
technology last year a few are still mulling it over…
- 30% of members use their CRM tool for
knowledge management rather than a purpose-built tool. So if you are
suffering with a less-than-stellar tool you are not alone.
Customer Forums
- 1 in 10 invitee to a customer forum will
access it within the first month. The number climbs to 3:10 in 3 months.
- 1 in 10 visitors registers to post in a
forum.
- The average thread depth is 2.5 posts.
- Target 5 new posts per day per forum or the
forum will look dead (so don’t create too many sub-forums)
Knowledge Management
- To minimize and eliminate duplicates: make
internal solutions visible immediately (to avoid two people unknowingly
working on the same issue); ease off on productivity quotas that encourage
thoughtless writing; and leverage case reviews and quality reviews to
highlight duplicates and coach reps
- Search idea: as customers type search
keywords offer searches performed by other customers so that customers can
reuse them and avoid free-form searches that may not work as well
- Most organizations create a knowledge base
article to match each bug, updating the knowledge base when the bug is
updated. Customers can subscribe to the article and get automatic updates as
the status changes
FT Works in the News
Last month was a busy month with 4 articles or
presentations:
- I presented A KCS Voyage: Achieving KCS
with Limited Resources with Don Frye of The MathWorks at the SSPA
Conference. If you’d like a copy of the presentation
just ask.
- Customer Management Insight published an
article I wrote entitled Preventing Agent Burnout: A Manager’s Handbook.
Click here
if you’d like a copy.
- Sbusiness published an article I wrote about
defining support processes entitled Doing it Right – From Process Design
to Implementation. It’s in their Spring issue and I’m happy to email it
to you if you’d like.
- And SSPA News published an article entitled
The Seven Skills of Highly Effective Support Staffers. You can read
it at
http://www.thesspa.com/sspanews/May08/article4.asp.
Also, the ASP Web Awards winners for which I
was a judge were announced. You can see the list at
http://www.asponline.com/awards.html. Congratulations to Mentor Graphics
(FT Works customer for self-service) and the other winners.
The first session of Marketing Wise (everything
you always wanted to know about support marketing) went well and the workshop
is now available for delivery at your site.
More details here. Thank you to the hardy pioneers who attended the debut
session. You can also check out my
support marketing blog.
Curious about something?
Send me your
suggestions
for topics and your name will appear in future newsletters. I’m thinking of
doing a compilation of “tips and tricks about support metrics” in the coming
months so if you have favorites, horror stories, or questions about metrics,
please don’t be shy.
Regards,
Françoise Tourniaire
FT Works
www.ftworks.com
650 559 9826
About FT Works
FT Works helps technology companies create and improve their
support operations. Areas of expertise include designing support offerings,
creating hiring plans to recruit the right people quickly, training support
staff to deliver effective support, defining and implementing support
processes, selecting support tools, designing effective metrics, and support
center audits. See more details at
www.ftworks.com
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