Recently I took my seven month old to the doctor. A month later I received a bulky envelope in the mail from the hospital with 60 questions about my visit. I sat at my kitchen counter after opening this piece of mail wondering how many people with babies have time to fill out a 60 question document, stamp it and send it back to the place of business? This past weekend I again sat at my kitchen counter dumbfounded by the amount of effort was being requested by me, the customer.
This time it's from my car company. I see a large envelope with MaritzCX branded on it — but it was from my auto maker Mercedes. It was literally 77 questions! The best part is that they preface the survey with, “Because we appreciate and respect the time you have spent in returning your survey, you will be entered into the new Maritz CX New Vehicle Customer Study Sweepstakes for one of eight cash prizes." I feel like I am being tricked or duped. I value my time. I am a small business owner, with a new book out and a baby. I believe I will not actually be compensated for my time, and I feel bad for those that believe they will be. If I fill out the survey I can win a prize of 10,000 dollars or prizes around 1,000 to 2,500 dollars--but the odds of that happening are not very good. The survey covers a range of topics asking questions about vehicle usage, but also about self-driving cars. How much would you agree or disagree with the statement “I would buy a self-driving vehicle if one were available today”?
I wonder - would the people actually interested in self-driving cars fill out a 77 question survey, and make it to the end of the long survey where this self-driving car question is posed? I think about all the silicon valley people I know who are very busy, who like speedy customer experiences — who make their houses smart-homes and their lives as efficient as possible. I can’t imagine these busy people filling out this 77 questionnaire from Mercedes and sending it back through the mail. I think about my book "More Is More," the premise being you need to make life easier on your customers and harder on you — the business. But why is this so rare? Why do companies continue to take so much energy and so many resources from their customers? In the end it’s the company’s loss. Imagine the quantity and quality of responses the company would get if they were to make feedback easier to generate.
NPS On Steroids
Many companies today are using net promoter score — a feedback form that is very simple for the customer. Net promoter score, pioneered by Bain & Co, is essentially the question, “How likely are you to recommend this product?” It’s a simple question and one that is providing companies with valuable customer information. With one question, NPS asks recent customers how likely they are to refer the company to a friend on a scale of 0-10. The answers provide brands with invaluable information and gives them quick access to what customers are thinking. Scores in the 9 and 10 range are considered “promoters." Your customers that give you 0-6 score are detractors. Customers that have mediocre experiences will give you 7-8 and they are considered passives.
An interesting start-up out of the customer experience space wants to change that. A company called Cloud Cherry has a customer experience technology that seeks to make it easier to gather customer feedback. Co-founder Vinod Muthukrishnan told me over coffee in Pleasanton, California about his product that uses net promoter score and pulls data about the customer from multiple sources to accompany that customer survey, providing the company with a 360 degree view of the customer’s experience without much customer effort. Some call this master data, third party data that can link up data as well as clean up and supplement your data to provide a 360 degree view of the customer. Cloud Cherry's product pulls information about the customer from the various systems of record such as point of sale technology, the CRM and loyalty programs to provide feedback to the company so the customer doesn’t have to. You can set and automate your customer technology. Muthukrishnan says, “the brand owner can quickly click and drill down to find out what the product or order was and which shipper packaged that particular item. Our platform serves as the convergence point of customer data and offer the elusive one view of the customer.” He added that customer experience platforms need to provide an “open tech” stack and make seamless integrations table stakes.
This is something that I think about too. With the amount of customer data available today, why do companies continue to make customers put forth a massive amount of effort? Why doesn't the data do that for them?
Asking customers to send you feedback forms that include 60+ questions makes companies seem out of touch with customers and the busy lives they lead. Companies that want to remain relevant need to make life harder on themselves and easier on their customers. Those customers that laugh at your high-effort customer feedback forms will disappear overnight without a trace.
Blake Morgan is the author of More Is More. Sign up for her weekly customer experience newsletter here.
