"Bingo cards" are those
customer survey forms with which we have all become bombarded
over the last few years.
They ask us to rate the hotel/store/airline/copier company /restaurant/
etc.etc.
on various components of their product or service delivery. Usually
on a scale of "Poor" to "Excellent" or "dis-satisfied"
to "very satisfied."
This "customer score carding" mechanism flooded the
market during the late 80's as everybody scrambled to get their
service up to a competitive level. (Today, I think we're in danger
of having so many needles in the patient that they may not survive
the diagnosis!)
These devices serve triple purpose:
-
identification of problem areas, which can then be fixed.
-
measurement of performance which can be tracked-and even
rewarded.
-
benchmarking against internal targets or external competitors
(a prerequisite for "best-in-class", Baldridge, or
IS09000 drives).
And they are very popular in boardrooms across the land. Their
information fits neatly on colored graphs and pie-chart slides.
They can show weekly deviances to the 3rd decimal place, and
provide head-to-head comparisons across products, branches, and
shifts that can be crunched sixteen ways from Sunday.
What they won't-and can't-do is help you succeed in the second
half of the 1990's.
Make no mistake, I still believe that customer feedback is the
breakfast of business champions. But customer scorecards of this
kind can be dangerous to the point of lethal in today's environment.
There are two sides to the customer score carding issue. One
is "how well do we execute what's on our customer's scorecard!"
Bingo cards do well at this.
The other-trickier and more critical-part is "finding out
what's on the customers scorecard." And that's where the
Bingo cards can kill you.
Because these cards list factors we think are important (or that
our customers should think critical) it's easy to get lulled
into a false sense of security. The folks who make these things
up know that executives like to see high numbers. There is a
natural subconscious tendency to structure them to produce great
ratings.
But what if you've got the wrong stuff on the scorecard! What
if you're scoring yourself on things your customers consider
trivial, or a standard "given" in your industry!
If you're looking at sky high customer satisfaction ratings and
diminishing sales revenue, one of these numbers is lying to you
(and odds are the sales people aren't lowballing!).
A classic case in point. A year or so ago I was forced to fly
AirChaos (the People's Airline) from Toronto to Montreal. (A
relevant point of digression: I belong to what I've discovered
in casual conversations is a small legion of business travelers
who have become committed Canadian Airlines customers partly
because they were disgusted that Air Canada chose to do it's
competitive battle on the basis of who's got the deepest legal
pockets and can keep things in court the longest," instead
of an open field of value and service. And this was before they
compounded this PR fiasco with the appallingly stupid decision
to spend $20 million repainting their planes, while firing hundreds
of people who could shorten lines, speed baggage, and deliver
service.) At the conclusion of this flight we were all handed
a "Quality of Service Questionnaire, self-addressed to a
VP. It had 54 bingo questions including:
-
were the flight attendant's announcements
-
made in a pleasant manner!
-
concise!
-
informative!
-
was the boarding music satisfactory!
-
was the headrest comfortable!
-
please rate the wine selection, and the wine quality, and
the comfort of the headphones!
No where on the form did it ask... "Was the flight on time!" (It was 60 minutes late on a 50 minute flight!) I'm sure somebody
was able to report to the brass that they scored a 97.6532% satisfaction
rating, but it sure didn't sound that way going up the gangway!
There is a fourth purpose leading edge companies are discovering
feedback mechanisms can serve. And it is probably the most powerful
of all. One of the things smart customer scorecards can do is
give you "innovation information" that can help you
keep your customers and scoop your competitors. To do this you
must ask open ended questions.
A couple of years ago, working in Galveston, Texas, I was taken
to a local institution called Luthers Bar B Que. This place serves
ribs - by the box-car load. There was a short line-up to get
in. (There always is apparently.) Nothing fancy; but clean, friendly,
and the ribs were great. With the check we were each handed a
customer scorecard to drop in a box at the front door. On first
glance I thought this was the silliest, most shallow specimen
I'd ever seen. I looked around and several people at other tables
were filling theirs out. I've since decided this may be the most
brilliant and insightful scorecard I've ever come across. It
only had 3 questions on it:
1.What did you like!
2.What didn't you like!
3.What would you like!
I've learned that if any organization knows the answers to these
3 questions, they can design themselves one heck of a customer
pleasing operation! These wide open "what should we do differently"
kinds of scorecards are a gold-mine of innovative ideas. They
move us from "preventing wrong" to "inventing
right."
They are messy. Somebody has to decipher handwriting. And the
results don't fit on graphs. But they are powerful way to help
find out what's on your customers scorecards. Here's a few other
questions some of our clients have used with success.
-
What do we do you wish we didn't!
-
If you were put in charge here tomorrow, what's the 1st
change you'd make!
-
What do we have to do to justify raising our price 10%!
-
What does nobody in our business do, that you think everybody
should!
Everyone we know who's tried this approach has come up with some
surprises.
It is always to your advantage that your surprises come from
your customers-not your competitors!
This article is adapted from the presentation, Service Excellence:
Everybody's Business.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warren Evans is one of North America's leading authorities in
the field of Service Management. He can be reached at
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(c) Canlink Interactive Technologies and Words of Mouth.
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