Has skink thinking infested your customer experience program?
Where I come from, a type of lizard known as Skinks are common. And so is the sight of them fleeing a farmhouse kitchen inches ahead of a broom.
Now Mr. Skink doesn’t have time to contemplate the size of Aunt Em’s broom or whether she has murderous intent. His brain says run, and he darts away.
Our business world often values and relies on similar instinctive, intuitive, decisive, decision-making skills. Why? Because those attributes are tied to our survival. Immediate reaction – fight or flight – kept our early ancestors alive when avoiding snakes or becoming an unwilling dish in Yogi Bear’s picnic basket.
We share that propensity for abrupt, emotional decision-making with our friend Mr. Skink. It’s hard-wired into the limbic system of our brains. We call it a “Lizard Brain” because that’s about all a lizard has for a brain. In humans, this part of our brain is the seat of emotion and rules fight, flight, feeding, and fear.
Unlike lizards, we’re blessed with a brain that can do more. We move beyond our lizard impulses for both rational and creative thinking. This means that – unlike lizards – we have the creativity to paint an animal on our cave wall, then rationally engineer a spear thrower to hunt it more effectively.
And that brings us to customer satisfaction or experience programs.
First, let’s sort out the various names for customer-centric programs.
Whether you call it customer experience management, customer journeys, user experience, or just plain old customer satisfaction, there’s not a lot new except for the phraseology.
The bookcase in my office testifies to generations of customer-focused insight that sounds strikingly familiar to our modern dialogue. However, contemporary discussion has given us some great new ways of describing and refining these concepts.
There’s much debate on whether you should use overall satisfaction questions, net promotor scores, or likelihood to recommend targets. These are tactical questions involving the structure of a survey. If they are not part of a strategic system, they simply don’t matter.
Tactical approaches often emanate from our limbic Skink brains’ need for quick, simple rules. Always dart under a rock when the cat shows up. Consistently use a specific question on your surveys.
From a strategic perspective, the tactically-constructed voice of the customer system risks overlooking a true understanding of what matters. What specific elements of service drive your net promotor, overall satisfaction, or likelihood to recommend scores? This answer should be statistically supported, not one of intuitive opinion.
To be effective, your customer satisfaction surveying must be part of an overall listening program. And that system must feed a customer experience process that considers the many components invisible to the customer, such as the back-office business processes that allow your front-line team to deliver excellent service.
Customer satisfaction is often measured following a specific transaction or interaction. For instance, a retirement plan participant phones a call center to change their asset allocation. Or, they use a website to update their beneficiary.
In both cases, they have a level of satisfaction with the interaction. Customer satisfaction surveys seek to measure that satisfaction, then understand the components of that satisfaction. Was the customer service rep knowledgeable? Was the website easy to use?
Low survey scores can result in frenzied darting about, with brainstorming teams scribbling intuitive, off-the-cuff solutions on a rainbow of Post-it Notes.
You can avoid this high-emotion wasted effort with a strategically constructed survey system and, most importantly, knowledgeable data analysis. There’s a definite place for intuition, but data-driven insights must, at minimum, test it.
And that’s where our frontal lobe comes in. This part of our brain can suppress those lizard impulses, so we can logically plan, organize, and solve problems.
In excellent customer satisfaction or experience programs, the evidence of this critical thinking is data-driven insights that go far deeper than simple pie charts, trend lines, or item scores.
Want to know why your customers are likely to recommend your service, or why ten percent aren’t satisfied with your call center? The data can tell you. But only if your survey grows beyond the checkbox, tactical reporting of a prescribed question such as Overall Satisfaction or Net Promotor.
In short, if continuous improvement is your goal, measuring and understanding the often-subtle influences on these bellwether questions is essential.
If statistical insights are not driving your customer satisfaction efforts, you may be sunning yourself on a warm rock. Watch out for the cat, or Aunt Em’s broom.
Image of Five-Lined Skink | Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
