Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
I have previously commented on the overwhelming evidence that customer satisfaction surveys do not give an accurate picture of the opinion of the customer. This article will seek to establish why customer satisfaction surveys can be unreliable and how successful companies communicate with their customers to provide consistent reliable information about how best to support their customers, creating loyalty as well as real satisfaction.
Most service operations provide service level agreements which guarantee standards of service such as respond or restore same day, next day etc. Discussion with a customer to decide upon their requirements should elicit a number of different scenarios, configured in a variety of ways, with the result that the way a SLA is set up will vary enormously; consequently, its true relevance can vary significantly and is often open to misinterpretation.
If all the customer’s requirements are accurately assessed and fully documented and the measures and results of the SLA proceed as agreed, it does not necessarily mean the customer’s are being satisfied at all levels, and as requirements continually change may result in a shift away from the SLA. In the same way, satisfaction surveys may once have portrayed an accurate representation, however now, no longer perform as an operational tool but have been morphed into a marketing tool. The SLA and survey tool may be operational but they could have been established with the purchaser of the service and not the user; if communication between purchaser and user is poor, service expectations might vary significantly from service paid for.
Differences between expectation and delivery have led many suppliers into some very difficult discussions, with the service engineer/support engineer and the user effectively becoming scapegoats, and no one winning. The basis for this misunderstanding (different expectations of SLAs) generates from a lack of knowledge by all parties; unless there is effective dialogue, the situation can deteriorate to disagreement and a broken contract. The ultimate point is that, more often than not, it is the role of the supplier to deal with communication breakdown (as with the teacher spotting the pupil misbehaving – the teacher has seen it many times and knows what to look for – the pupil thinks no one has ever played such a clever trick before).
Not many companies put their performance on the line publicly, but recently the MD (Steve Ball) of a&o systems + services UK Ltd – one of the finalists of the National Customer Service Awards (NCSAs) – explained the value of the NCSAs assessment process and the importance of the need to have close dialogue with all levels of customers. Deputing staff at different levels of the organisation to speak and work with all relevant contact points in the customer organisation will ensure a constant input on issues, causes and solutions to enable rapid resolution and minimum fuss and frustration.
Figure 1
This article is accessible for registered visitors only.
You can register here
Registered users can tell Noventum about which subjects they would like to receive email.
Without previous permission data will not be used by others.
