Understanding metrics in 2020 - Part 1

Oscar Wilde wrote....a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

So what has that got to do with #NPS or #customerexperience or #contactcentres or #customerservice?

Ask yourself - Is it possible that price and value assumptions have changed since November and the start of this crisis?

Of course, they have. The value of this simple group of vegetables has changed dramatically. In my last post, I provided a small list of metrics that have significantly changed:

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1. The value of your product or service to customers

2. How and when it gets delivered

3. The feeling when buying

4. The feeling when using

5. The employee experience

6. The general feelings of your customer

7. The lives of your customers

Each one of these impacts needs a complete recalibration. For those who follow the Customer Experience Foundation then you will know that, what questions you ask, when, and how you ask them is a vital part of the puzzle of understanding.

But that's not what we regard as good customer insight. If you have trained with us over the last 10 years or so you learn that behaviour and conversation provide many more insights than millions of surveys because Survey Bias has a big impact. Today that bias has been dramatically impacted by the global pandemic.

A survey cannot tell you what customers and employees are really thinking. VOC is only as valuable as the way it is collected. The way VOC is used in most organisations it fails the conversation pattern test. If you ask someone a specific question at a specific point then they will answer in a standard pattern. The answers will have different words but the patterns will be the same. Most surveys are like what is known in sales as an assumptive close. (Shall I call you on Tuesday or would you prefer me to call Wednesday?) It skips reality and creates a false idea that these are the only choice.

This is because conversations is a series of patterns and routines. However, through conversation analysis and improvement strategies, when people use conversation as a tool they get massively more insight.

That is why we have been able to show clients that audits provide more insights in a single call while surveys provide corporate comfort for cognitive dissonance. What does that mean?

People survey to get the answers they want not the insight they need