How was it for you?

They say if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. I beg to differ.

Last week I received a text from my bank asking me to score by SMS my latest interaction with their call centre. Simple enough.

And, given everything else they’ve got on their plates,  you might find it refreshing news that banks were at last taking customer satisfaction seriously and tracking the service performance of their channels. It is unusual for a business in any category to track performance and customer satisfaction to this degree.

Hopefully they will not use the information provided by its customers to roast those of its service staff who failed to get a good score. I do hope they remember my belief that no one gets up in the morning to give bad service. Instead bad service is the result of poorly designed processes, poor systems and training. It is the infrastructure that leads to bad service not the people.

Is  this level of tracking really a good thing. And I take issue with the axiom that you need to measure to manage.

For in my case while the interaction I had on the phone was pleasant, efficient and helpful, my experience of the journey was awful. And I would hypothesise that it is perfectly possible to have a whole series of perfectly good individual interactions but still get an appalling experience.

And this is where I think my bank went wrong.

Having just done extensive research into how businesses develop their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, businesses, like my bank, which emphasise measuring and maximising satisfaction at touchpoint level are getting a distorted picture suggesting that customers might be happier than they actually are. For these businesses are failing to understand that customers view the experience as a whole and not by the organisational silos that must combine seamlessly to deliver the integrated service required through the journey and across the experience.

My bank lacked this understanding.

Instead if businesses truly feel that measurement is required to manage and to track its service performance, it is surely better that they take a more holistic and joined up view of the service they provide.

Firstly view the journey and experience as a whole. To address this we would encourage businesses to understand better their journeys as a whole, not just a single touchpoint or channel of communication.

Secondly, instead of dissipating their resources across a broad front of touchpoints and journeys, identify those that really matter to customers and those with most impact on business performance. And apply the measurement tools there.

And lastly and more importantly, measure satisfaction with the entire journey, the holistic experience. In my case it would have been considerably better and more accurate not to check out my level of happiness with my call centre call but my satisfaction with my bank’s ability to transfer an account.

This is checking satisfaction at customer level not channel level. And truly demonstrates an ability to walk in the customer’ shoes.

A business that seeks to measure and manage complete customer journeys will not only do its best at touchpoint level but will also gain a better understanding of the root causes of areas of dissatisfaction in the journey; and will discover more effective ways to collaborate and to break down organisational silos.  

And that is good news for the customer.

How do you measure and manage customer satisfaction? Any good tips to share and pass on?