Why are your customer survey initiatives failing? — Part 3
Most companies regularly undertake customer surveys; however often find it difficult to realise value from them. Here’s our take on some of the big reasons why these initiatives can fail and some practical tips on what you could do about them:
1. Culture — discussed in our first part.
2. Lack of executive buy-in — discussed in our second part.
3. Organisational misalignment (focus of this story)
4. Not asking the right questions
5. Analysis paralysis
6. Undertaking surveys manually
In our first article we discussed how a lot of companies we’ve engaged with were frustrated with different departments working in silos and customer experience was seen as a front line problem only. Every company has silos to an extent…whether they are organisational, hierarchical or even channel based. These different silos may focus on different goals thereby creating internal roadblocks and unintended mistakes.
Very few companies actually organise themselves (successfully) around their customers and the reality is that customers interact with a brand across its silos and not vertically within a silo. Given the organisational constraints within your company, is your entire company (all execs and employees included) aligned around your customer?
Do you need to change your organisational structure to improve your customer experience?
We came across the concept of holocracy while reading “The Zappos Experience” and it was quite an intriguing concept of reducing bureacracy within organisations while encouraging innovation and collaboration.
Research shows that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15 percent. But when companies get bigger, innovation or productivity per employee generally goes down. So we’re trying to figure out how to structure Zappos more like a city, and less like a bureaucratic corporation. In a city, people and businesses are self-organizing. We’re trying to do the same thing by switching from a normal hierarchical structure to a system called Holacracy, which enables employees to act more like entrepreneurs and self-direct their work instead of reporting to a manager who tells them what to do. – Tony Hsieh
Using principles from agile and lean, holocracy aims to create a self-adapting and evolving organisation that organises itself around the work required as opposed to the people who work within the organisation. Teams (referred to as circles) can be organised around specific functions, projects, departments and even business lines; and as a result, people have clearly allocated roles as opposed to job descriptions. In this way, it is easier to embed customer accountability and embed a stronger customer focus via roles and circles as opposed to job descriptions (this does have to be coupled with a strong customer-centric culture to make it work).
You can read more about how holocracy works and some example case studies here.
There are other (less radical) ways in which you could re-organise to breakdown the hierarchical barriers and bring your employees closer to the customer. For example, you could reorganise on your customer journeys instead to instill an organisation-wide customer-journey focus. Read about how mapping customer journeys can help here.
What gets measured matters and what gets rewarded, gets repeated
Is every employee measured and rewarded on delivering successful customer outcomes within your organisation?
For example, at Lego, everyone is awarded bonuses on the NPS scores the company receives from the CEO to the customer service associates. Similarly, John Lewis in the UK awards bonuses, from the CEO to the employees washing dishes in the cafe, based on CSAT (source).
Given human nature, employees, functions and departments will tend to operate in how they will be best rewarded rather than what’s in the best interests of the customer or a company as a whole. The key to overcoming this is ensuring a consistent set of measures that are aligned with the customer.
Good organisations that do this start by identifying their top line customer experience measure and then cascade it downwards into key customer journeys and further into operational metrics and performance indicators. Many companies do however, miss out the key step on the customer journey cascade and jump directly into departmental/functional KPIs; which are then quite likely to be disjointed.
As an example, say one of the most emotive moments for a customer is speed of issue resolution. This would closely link to an operational KPI for time taken from when the customer first raised the problem to finally closing the issue across the journey. A customer may use multiple channels to contact the company and as a result monitoring a KPI such as length of time to close a call at a call centre will not necessarily improve your top line customer experience metric.
As always we’re keen to hear your thoughts — what challenges are you facing, what have you tried to overcome them and what’s worked for you?
