Customer Surveys and Social Media

In which Jill maintains that “Who Were You in a Past Life?” isn’t the only survey on Facebook. At least, it shouldn’t be.

I just bought a car. And I just saw my doctor. In the spirit of their respective customer-focus initiatives—of course I don’t know whether either has a customer-focus strategy, but it’s a good bet—both the automobile company and the HMO surveyed me about my experience.

The automobile company called me a week after I bought my car. After leaving several voicemail messages, an agent finally reached me and asked me a series of shockingly banal and uncreative questions. “Was the showroom clean and well appointed?”  Look, I was there to buy a car, not to eat off the floor. “Was your salesman knowledgeable about the car?” Well, he couldn’t get the navigation to work but that’s only because it had never been installed. “Would you buy a car from this dealer again?” I don’t ever want to buy a car again, from this dealer or any other, so that one’s a loaded question.

The truth is: I didn’t particularly enjoy my car-buying experience—who does?—but I love my car. Did the automaker inquire about their new customer’s initial impressions with the product? No. Did they even ask what I thought of their brand before and after my purchase? Nope. Did they ask if I’d tell my friends about the car? Well, if you read this blog you’re my friend. Do you know what kind of car I bought? You get my point.

The HMO’s survey was more structured, and their questions were more relevant. Do you feel like your doctor spent enough time with you? Do you feel she really listened to you? Did she offer useful information? Were the nurses courteous? Did they pronounce your name right? Were all your questions answered by the time you left?  These factors really do contribute to the patient’s care experience, and I appreciate how deliberate and well thought-out they were. Trouble is, the form was two pages long and I had to return it via snail mail.

The surveys were completely different in almost every way, save for one. There was no attempt to cultivate an on-line relationship. I’ve had automobile and healthcare clients, and both industries are extremely focused on-line customer interactions. Many have invested in building on-line communities, encouraging their customers to contribute to an ongoing dialog and gathering important data in the process.

So what gives? Why not ask me for my e-mail address, and have me fill in an on-line form so I could share the fact that I spent more time waiting around for my sales guy than I did talking to him? (Amazingly, this was not true of my physician.)

Better yet, what if one of the questions was:

Would you share your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn accounts in the space below? This way we can send you periodic updates and service reminders. Plus, we’d be happy to give you access to our site, which compares your responses to people who bought cars at the same dealership [saw the same doctor].

Sure, you could do this via e-mail (neither survey requested an e-mail address), but social media communications are generally more engaging, more interactive. I would really like to know whether I was hyper-critical of my car dealership, or whether other car buyers, like me, are repressing the memory of the purchase process and are now enjoying their new cars as much as I am. I’d be interested in understanding whether my doctor spends the same amount of time with all her patients, or whether I truly was special. In the process, these companies could not only learn more about themselves, but learn more about me. By opting in, I could receive tweets like:

@jilldyche We’ve received your completed survey! Here’s a link to how your answers stack up with some of Dr. X’s other patients. Tweet us @hmo if you have any follow-up questions.  Meantime, don’t forget your 5000 IUs of Vitamin D!

Customer feedback via social media not only personalizes the message, it reflects my preferred way of communicating. After all, differentiating customer treatment based on the customer’s history and preferences is the very definition of CRM. So what’s taking so long?

Comments

[John Moore]

Jilly, great post as always.

For many products and services the number of potential customer touchpoints is very limited, it is critical that we focus on using every customer interaction as a relationship building opportunity.

This is another key aspect of Social CRM that we do not discuss nearly enough, but one that is critical as well.

Too often the surveys are done as a means to meet some corporate metric vs. meeting some corporate goal. Yes, we surveyed 100% of customers. Did we learn anything? No, but we did survey them. :-)

John
http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore

[Jill Dyche]

Hi John:

Exactly. Most social media efforts I've seen so far the same old "ready, shoot, aim" approach that CRM projects did a few years ago. "We have a tool! Yay! Now what?" Nothing holistic, strategic, or deliberate. To your point, we can sabotage relationships or even lose customers if we're not careful. So: Yikes. We need to treat social CRM in a requirements-driven way.

Thanks for the comment.

[Ajay]

Terrific post. We have all gone through these surveys which are as badly designed as a first year management student. In many cases survey questions are not updated from year to year. The end result is some presentation where the head honchos say last year customer satisfaction was 65.2 and now it is 66.1 so it is moving up. Completely accurate and completely useless waste of time and money. Online surveys sound like so much common sense- I hope some auto company sees this.

[Gregory Y]

Excellent point - this fixation with technology, that immediately translates into "efficiencies" and cost cutting, instead of opportunity to re-focus your business, holistic review of processes, practices, and compensation plans. The end result - tools improve, but customer relations deteriorate. When will we start to focus on effectiveness?
@piplzchoice

[Steve Sarsfield]

Jill,
I see this when I bring the car in for service, too. After I pay for service, the service manager usually pulls me aside to tell me that I should give all 5 out of 5's on the survey, otherwise they'll suffer some kind of punitive action from corporate. I refuse to answer such a meaningless survey.

It's a broken business practice. Since so much importance is put on getting a perfect score, the dealers have figured out a way to shortcut corporate mandates without actually accepting the criticism that could help them improve service or build a better relationship with the customer.

You are correct that on the topic of surveys, the car companies are misguided.

[Tim Wilson]

I like the idea! A point that's left out is that, if the survey is used as a jumping off point for future engagement, there is likely going to be someone in the marketing organization who is tempted to break the very trust you're trying to build up.

I know of one extreme example where a bunch of people were asked to participate in a survey...and the responses they gave were used to score them as leads and trigger sales calls. This was a little different from the situations you describe, in that these were prospects (rather than existing customers), and the survey was promoted as being market research as opposed to customer satisfaction data. It was a case where the survey was purported to be serving one purpose, when, in reality, it was designed to do something entirely different.

That doesn't mean this isn't a great idea. But, I would add on that, if asking for this information, there *must* also be a clear statement of how the company plans to use it (how they will interact with the customer in a way that the customer benefits) *and* assure the customer that they will be able to opt out of that interaction at any time (I can imagine that, if I find myself having to block a company's Twitter presence on my profile that that would inherently leave a bad taste in my mouth).

Great post, as always!