Customer Survey Hall of Fame #2: Heathrow Airport T4

Where’s my bus?

Seen at Heathrow Airport T4. “Connect 2 Work – Staff Bus Service. If you should have any comments regarding this service please call 020 874 56261″

I bet no one dares call. Or if they do politely complain, you can bet the answer would “Tough! You can wait luv!”.

Lessons: 1. Invite people to call, don’t intimidate them! Also, make it so they can email or write – or SMS (getting popular now I think). A staff service is somewhat captive audience, so customers probably feel vulnerable anyway. 2. Who is at the end of the line? Tell people where your comments will go.

New Features on CustomerGauge: Upgraded Comments Classification

How can you prioritise where to improve your business first? And are you getting better or worse in specific areas?

CustomerGauge helps you by reviewing customer comments, and helping you organise them by assigning “reasons” why each customer was unhappy (or satisfied). The result is a “Voice of Customer” neatly organised.

Today, we released the latest version of our Customer Feedback Organiser which allows clients to assign up to 15 reasons in each of 5 stages of the sales cycle. Each of these can have the additional segmentation of “Negative/Positive/Neutral”. This gives 75 possible buckets for categorising customer feedback. Examples could be: “Call Centre Negative experience in Post Sales” or “Web Content/Navigation Positive Experience in Pre-Purchase”.

These are very specific reasons and reporting can be too granular, so we also give a method of sorting these by category. We recommend that clients define 5 or 6 categories that all the reasons fit into, so reporting can be done at a higher level (example: “Reasons for comments: Web 15%, Logistics 20%, Call Centre 37%…etc”). Each feedback can have as many reasons checked as needed, and graphs are provided to show actual distribution and trends of reasons.

An administration tool is available so that the Client super-user can add/delete/edit reasons as needed. Please contact us if you would like more details.

Customer Survey Hall of Fame #1: Schiphol Card

 

Number 1 in an occasional series of the best and worst of Satisfaction Questionnaires – or as we like to subtitle it: Customer Survey Idols.

Laugh and cry with us as we look at some good practices – basically to see what we can “borrow” and what to let go – as we work on client projects and CustomerGauge. I’ll add some pictures from my collection as we go on. Comments and new submissions welcome.

1 Dec 2007: Schiphol Airport: HMSHost (sponsored by SPA?). I stopped for a coffee early one morning en-route to catch a flight to the UK. Was served by the surliest attendant I have ever seen who served me with a scowl. I picked up a survey postcard: here it is.

Lovely graphics – you see what they did with the plates and cups? You have to fill them in. And some clip are of a plane. But for all the nice artwork, usability is not good. You can’t write on the glossy paper. Difficult to read the small print for me. Let alone a senior. Overdesigned I think.

But it is in two languages (EN + NL), if somewhat hard to read. And some space for a remark.

4/10

Full version here: WordDoc

Be proud of customer praise! CustomerGauge adds Automatic Testimonial Publisher

When I first started in marketing, we used to proudly publish the comments of satisfied customers in our monthly Tecno catalogue (or weekly Fox Talbot advertisement in the Amateur Photographer magazine), which would read something like “Thank you for your quick service, the camera filters arrived this morning – and I only ordered them yesterday. A Happy Customer – Mr S, Colchester, Essex”. We always kept the genuine letters from customers, and invited others to inspect them.

Looking through some comments in the CustomerGauge systems recently I was pleasantly surprised to see how complementary some customers are. They were really happy about the service – and not only that were happy to give that as feedback.

Then I noticed that not many direct sales websites are publishing testimonials or endorsements. From my own experience I think it’s for two reasons.

• One: Except in a small company, managers are a long way from customers – comments are hidden in the call centre or perhaps customers don’t know who to write to… (check the “Contact Page” of many sites if you want to see how hard it is to know who to congratulate).
• Two: Updating websites is hard and expensive enough without adding customer comments, and then keeping them current.

So it got us thinking about how we could help companies publish positive comments quickly and easily…

…and today we can announce that we have added a feature to CustomerGauge that allows clients to simply publish comments in seconds.

Simply go to the Organiser page and click in the box marked “Publish Comment as Testimonial”. The comment will then appear on a page served up from CustomerGauge to be integrated into a blank page on your site (using INCLUDE or iFrame method). Comments can be edited before publishing, and there is a small workflow that can check if a customer approves the publication (and any edits). You can specify how long the comments last, or how many you show (it will then just push the last comment off the bottom).

It’s in beta test now – you can see a sample of it on the Acme Testimonial Page.

More details? Contact us.