Have you asked yourself if your employees are rigging your customer feedback?
When your employees administer your customer feedback surveys, you may save money, but you sacrifice accuracy.
Ask employees what they want from a customer feedback survey, and all too often you’ll hear, “The top score!” When it comes to their conduct, that’s great, but when it comes to you getting accurate survey data, it’s a disaster.
What’s Going On?
Employees skew customer satisfaction survey results in a variety of ways. The main problem is that, explicitly and implicitly, managers often encourage employees to reach for the highest possible scores. While this is especially true when bonuses and promotions are tied to customer feedback, it happens even without a financial motivation.
Service staff who have a personal investment in receiving favorable feedback are often the ones in charge of distributing, administering, and collecting customer feedback surveys. This incentivizes staff to choose customers for the survey who appear pleased and to avoid surveying customers who seem dissatisfied.
The most egregious example we’ve heard of with self-administered surveys is when, at the conclusion of a patient’s exam, a doctor turned to the patient, while still in his paper gown, and questioned him about how his appointment went. Talk about forcing a perfect score!
In this case, the clinic knows even less about the customer experience post-survey than it did pre-survey. Before, the clinic had no information; now, it has bad information.
Because employees have strong incentives for high scores, they may skew results in their favor, making you less likely to uncover true customer insights. Employees can skew the customer feedback in a variety of ways. They can:
- Choose pleased customers for the survey.
- Fill out the survey for customers.
- Toss out surveys with negative feedback.
With that in mind, here are a few ways to improve your customer feedback approach.
4 Tips To Improve Your Customer Feedback Approach
1. Explain to staff that you are truly interested in assessing the customer experience. Tell them that all surveys regardless of their scores are valuable.
2. Keep staff out of it. Don’t let your frontline staff decide who takes your survey. Use an independent third-party to make these judgments, or at the very least use employees from a different department.
3. Show customers that you don’t tamper with the evidence. For example, customer feedback cards and paper surveys can be turned in using a sealed envelope and a drop-box.
4. Proactively tell customers that you’re interested in hearing their honest opinion of you, good or bad.
Interested in more tips on how to improve? Let’s talk!
