Commentary – Customer Surveys/Feedback Steve Reynolds Vice President, Sales and Business Operations Who has time to participate in customer surveys these days? Sometimes an incentive is even offered – a $5 gift card for your efforts. For the most part, those who take the time to share their opinions are customers who have had an extremely satisfactory or unsatisfactory experience. The middle-of-the-road, happy customer will rarely take the time to provide feedback. There have long been two methods of assessing an organization’s performance in its delivery of customer service - customer surveys, mentioned above, and mystery shopping. While both methods provide valuable data, they are inherently different measures of an organization’s service delivery.

Steve Reynolds

While it is impossible to substitute one method for another, perhaps mystery shopping may be preferable over customer feedback in certain situations. Mystery shopping programs gather data in the form of directed observations. Trained observers, posing as customers under tightly controlled parameters, follow predetermined questionnaires. Mystery shoppers are objective in the sense that the shopper observes without the emotional involvement that is often present during an actual associate/customer interaction. Unlike customer survey results which are only meaningful when taken collectively, mystery shopping results can be utilized individually to create training opportunities or aggregately to assess trends across geographical or product boundaries.

Mystery shopping is a proactive approach to gathering data while customer surveys are dependent upon customers taking the initiative to provide feedback. As in mystery shopping, a survey questionnaire is designed, touching on specific points; this questionnaire is then given to participating customers in one of a variety of ways, including IVR (Interactive Voice Response), web, comment cards, or intercept interviews. Extremes in satisfaction levels are not the only issue with customer surveys. Other issues may include:

• Results being taken as meaningful only when they are cumulative, never singly
• Correlation does not equate to a cause
• Impressions are undirected and usually non-specific
• External events can influence a customer’s feelings

Customer surveys alone are not the solution to assessing the effectiveness of an organization’s performance. The key is a balanced approach of customer feedback and mystery shopping to capture all parts of the spectrum. In implementing a combination of both, an organization is making an intelligent decision that will allow it to gain the comprehensive customer perspective and enable tactics to manage the consistency and quality of the customer experience.