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2009Sept.pdf

Quality or Quantity

Quality or quantity, are they mutually exclusive?

For a lot of training companies and departments there appears to be a measure based on either or, quality or quantity! It is not restricted to just training, we can also include service desks, call centres, customer services and many more departments and companies. Within some of the companies I have worked, there is a real need to measure success based purely on statistics. Training managers will show the number of people through training over a period of time, they may also show some statistics from the ‘happy sheets’ completed. Call centres may report on the number of calls answered, time to answer, missed calls and first time fixes. Customer services may report on number of complaints, number resolved, response time etc.

How many companies do you know ask the ultimate question on are we getting the service or produce right?

The question being “How likely is it that you would recommend this company/department to a friend or colleague?”

If the answer was to be yes, then surely you know you are on the right tracks (quality would fare in this) if the answer is no, you are doing something wrong (possibly choosing quantity over quality). I fully appreciate that there is more to this, however a yes or no does give you a good indication to the customer experience.

Whilst delivering a Customer Care workshop on customer site to a team of managers including a training manager, I posed the simple question “how do you know if your customer is delighted?” The responses was varied, “turnover, repeat business, and the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). I enquired if anyone ever thought to ask the customer the ultimate question and the response was “we don’t measure the customers delight”. “We measure statistics that we can report on” and the old faithful “if we can’t report it, we don’t measure it”.

So asking the team “what are your KPI’s?” one replied that “my team for most part answered all calls within the 10 seconds target”. I asked “what was the first time fix rate statistics” and he responded “that was not so great; however they (the service desk) did answer 98% of their calls within 10 seconds”. Is this a clear case of quantity over quality? What is the cost of choosing quantity? Too name but a few, bad reputation, increased call volume due to unhappy return callers and I would imagine very frustrated service desk engineers? Why were they on the Customer Care programme? The answer “to offer a better service”. How is it possible to offer a better customer experience and delight the customer when you don’t know what the customer thinks of your current service? For the training manager I asked her directly how did she measure customer delight, she measured the obvious including cost per head. Asking about return on investment, she found this difficult to answer. Asking about participants, their managers and the businesses take on the development provided she responded rather sheepishly “we don’t have time to ask; even if we did we would not have time to do anything different”. Is it possible that once again quantity outdoes quality?

What needs to change? Ask your customer the ultimate question “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” If the customer responds with a yes, find out what it is you are doing well and roll this out to all your customers. If the customer responds with a no, find out what it is you are doing wrong and what would be the right thing to do and do it.

We need to stop seeing a customer as a Service Level Agreement and KPI. Let’s start seeing them as individuals who have options and one of those are to go elsewhere for the service or product. Internal customers are voicing their options as well and one of those is to bring in external sourced providers. Why is it when our goal is to keep our business successful, that we don’t ask the all important question of the all important people our customers? Why do we continue to place more importance on quantity rather than quality? “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” is the question being asked in Fred Reichhelds’s book ‘The Ultimate Question’. Reichhelds’s book gives alternative ways of measuring customers’ loyalty to the company.

Richard Owen and Laura L Brooks book ‘Answering the Ultimate Question’ gives a practical how to guide to anyone looking to implement customer loyalty programmes.