While enjoying my 3 hour wait in Cancun International Airport recently, I daydreamed about the vacation from which I was returning.\u00a0 The beaches, the ruins, the unseasonal monsoons (who would have guessed that all the bars would become \u201cswim up\u201d with just a few feet of rain?), and my check-out process.\u00a0 I thought of the order of the last two things the desk clerk said:<\/p>\n
\u201cCan I please have your credit card?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you please fill out a quick survey about our customer service?\u201d<\/p>\n
Why do we have to fill out the surveys?\u00a0 Do they really care what we think?\u00a0 How do they use that information?<\/p>\n
And then my mind wandered a little deeper\u2026<\/p>\n
How does the hotel know whether a 3 in the \u201cFacilities\u201d category means \u201cEverything was ok\u201d or \u201cThere were some really good and some really bad, so I\u2019m putting the average\u201d?\u00a0 If this is so important, why are they asking only when I\u2019m leaving?<\/p>\n
There are a lot of marketing and ops people who might quickly jump in and provide answers like this:<\/p>\n
\u201cUser surveys are a very important tool to quantitatively analyze a large sample of responses from the select target user groups in order to provide management with information about its customer base preferences\u2026blah blah blah\u2026and over time the large numbers will wash out outliers and individual idiosyncratic responses\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, they add all the numbers to scrub out any one individual\u2019s response.\u00a0 Academics and systems analysts love this because it gives them nice roundable numbers on reports that they can give to executives.\u00a0 Execs love this because they can spin the numerical results to validate what they need to sell.\u00a0 Unfortunately it does nothing to help improve the experience of the customer who has already paid his bill and now filled out his survey.<\/p>\n
How and when do you measure your customer service?<\/p>\n
This is the beginning of a series of discussions about how we as salespeople, business owners, and employees approach, measure, and use customer service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While enjoying my 3 hour wait in Cancun International Airport recently, I daydreamed about the vacation from which I was returning.\u00a0 The beaches, the ruins, the unseasonal monsoons (who would have guessed that all the bars would become \u201cswim up\u201d with just a few feet of rain?), and my check-out process.\u00a0 I thought of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1451,3521,6101,6801,8881,9441,10121,10561,13821,25391,25781,30711,36541,37721,38921,41871,41891],"class_list":["post-4956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brokerage-operations","tag-airport","tag-beaches","tag-business","tag-cancun","tag-communications","tag-consumers","tag-credit-card","tag-customers","tag-executives","tag-management","tag-marketing-branding","tag-owners","tag-response","tag-salespeople","tag-service","tag-support","tag-survey"],"yoast_head":"\n