Services
What would it feel like to know what those around us think and feel? We probably wouldn’t like everything we found out but would it mean that longer term we could afford to be more honest about our own short comings and get something done about them?
So the first top question to ask customers, and indeed those around us is based on how they are thinking and feeling. You may know about the “think, feel, behave” cycle but it in case not; someone thinks something, this makes them feel a particular way and this is likely to be followed by a behaviour. In services what we are looking for is for the customer to think something good about the service they have received, to then feel warm and fuzzy and therefore to buy more, recommend the service etc. So the question we ask to tap in to this think, feel space is: How well did we understand your needs and respond to them?
Integrity
Once we understand how people are feeling we need to dig a little further into why they are feeling like that. We have a question which we use in pretty much every survey we do to understand this and it gives us a set of answers which allows our clients to weed out the stuff they do which makes little difference to the customer and concentrate on the things which matter. It is about the integrity of the service offer in its purest sense. We ask: Do we do what we say we are going to do?
I would love for this to be the key measurement across the board in services because if everyone focused on doing what they said they were going to life would be so much easier. Very often the reasons for low scores here have nothing to do with the team responsible for delivering services on the ground. It can be lack of the right tools, focus on the wrong measures, which mean that other things are prioritised or any number of issues which have got in the way of service delivery. We find that just by asking this question service users will tell us about the things which are going wrong, making it much easier to fix. Once organisations know what the problem is it is half way to fixing it, given the will and the right measures.
Facing Forwards
Our work with Halo over the last ten years has shown that organisations follow their measures so it is vital that those measures face forwards. Retrospective measures mean there is too much time looking back and not enough focus on where the organisation is going. Which is why the way we measure looks at the respondents’ view of the future. The question we ask is: How confident are you that your next experience with … will be good? This allows the respondent to project forward, which is a positive experience for anyone and visualise using the service provider again. This is not about recommending the service to some imaginary person but using it themselves, just what our clients would like to happen. The verbatim responses we get from our surveys are excellent. Detailed and mainly positive, usable for the client and possibly even cathartic for the respondent, just like the best conversations