We are all aware that how you make any person feel, rather than just what is said, read or recorded in statistics, stays with them forever. To help improve any customer experience, some of the secret, in my experience, have been found in that individual persons’ expectation. Part of that expectation is more to do with their own background and upbringing, which of course varies by their country of birth as well as their social environment. Overlay that with their personality traits, and then add the impact of expectations set subliminally or otherwise through marketing promises, the customer has a perception of service delivery in their mind, and that's where their bar is set.
When the customer meets the employee (who also has a perception of experience based on their own life story) can you guarantee that the two expectations of what is going to happen will be the same and therefore hopefully a successful story? To
know if their expectation has been met is found in their tone of voice, facial expression, between the written words and certainly hardly ever in the numbers. So does that mean that surveys are meaningless?
Certainly not, but number collection is not sufficient to help give the people who need to work on the customers view enough indication of what to do, put right, applaud and celebrate.
At Avis, I found that collating customer service data with survey results provided a far richer picture than either in isolation, and served as a great basis to devise and test improvement initatitves. In customers service analysis, levels of dissatisfaction manifest themselves in steep, specific peaks; these are often missed in rolling scores of survey results. Together, they start to build up a picture of how well customer expectations are being met.
The real value is found in the verbatim customer comments. Here you really see how you made that customer
feel. By adding comment boxes along with the ‘tick out of 10’ asking very simply ‘what influenced your score?’ gives the insight needed to pin point corrective actions and drivers of scores.
In my experience, customer expectations vary significantly by geography. This was certainly the case at Avis, where tolerance levels differed greatly by country as therefore did expectations on service delivery. What may be recorded 10 out of 10 by an American or even a British person is vastly different when recorded by, for example, an Italian where a 10 is rarely reported. As for recommending to a friend – well that’s another fascinating mix and certainly requires very specific training techniques to help identify the differences, which would take up more pages than this paper allows. In short, verbatim customer comments can the insight that's missing in an isolated number.
However, collecting this information is useless unless the relevant (emphasis on relevant to the different parts of the organisation) information is fed back and acted upon to drive improvement. You need, in the words of Tom Peters – a fellow freak. I was lucky in Avis because my career background included operations, fulfilment and training (in addition to customer service), so with all those years at the ‘coal face’ I instinctively knew exactly what could really happen at those touch-points, rather than second guess what the customer was trying to say. I worked closely with Customer Champions (my fellow freaks) in those operating countries, who shared the same passion for customer excellence, and had roles in the organisation which allowed them to influence their regional organisation across all functional areas. Of course, it also helps to have a flat management structure to make changes quickly – and that’s another element to be covered at a later date.
Angie recently left Avis Europe Plc after 30 years in the car rental industry and for the last 10 years as Director of Customer Service for Avis EMEA.
Her responsibilities included customer service delivery and recovery at the customer facing points, utilising the solicited and unsolicited customer voice collected about their Avis rent a car experiences.
If you have a passion and need to find out more to help you and your organisation make the most of your customer voice, whether that be through collection, interpretation of, more tips or specific training – Angie now works freelance and can be contacted on
angie@angiecourt.com