CVA Pitfalls

We have observed many companies as they institute customer satisfaction programs.  After all, customer satisfaction surveying is an expected part of measuring performance in the business world today.

We have also heard from many managers and executives that customer satisfaction programs fail to provide any actionable information and are not linked to any internal metrics that are the real driving forces with their departments or job functions.

Below we present what we have seen over our years of experience that derail efforts to turn customer satisfaction surveying into CVA programs.

1) Relying on transactional surveys alone.

In our experience, it is very common for companies to survey customers who have touched a contact point, such as phoning a call center, visiting a website or having made a purchase.  Transaction surveys are an important part of CVA measurement, but they are no substitute for systematic measurement of customer perceptions of all aspects of your business that are important to them. Moreover, transaction surveys frequently ignore the competitive component of customer satisfaction.

2) Ignoring the competitive component.

Ignoring the competition is a frequent mistake we see in companies’ customer satisfaction programs. Certainly, measuring customer perceptions and attitudes toward your business is essential. But all too often, we have seen companies do this alone, only to see revenue decline and customers attrite simply to wonder why? This can happen even when the customer satisfaction results looked good. Yes, they did, but only in a context that excludes competitors.  To understand your market, you must know how your customers perceive the competition.  And to win competitors’ customers you must understand how they perceive both the competitors and yourself.  Without this key information, customer satisfaction measurement is, at most, self-serving.

3) Insufficient transactional surveying.

CVA surveying is generally done on a quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis. It surveys across all your customers.

Transactional surveying, on the other hand, is usually a continual process. Customers are surveyed, using key questions from the main CVA study (and other specific questions) to assess performance on key customer touch points. In a robust CVA program, the results of transactional surveys are correlated and analyzed in comparison to the main CVA survey results to provide early warnings of issues with customer-facing processes and to signal changes in customer perceptions.

However, transactional surveying must be done consistently and randomly.

You may have encountered a tent card in a restaurant or hotel inviting you to take a survey (always on the web) or at the bottom on a sales receipt.  How often have you responded to such survey requests? Probably not at all. Or if you have, you were either delighted with the product or service you received or you had an abysmal experience of which you wanted to complain.

Relying on such transactional surveys provides a highly inaccurate picture of customer perceptions.

CIR will help you design and execute a transaction-based survey program that captures the true voice of all the customers with touch point experiences.

4)      Not linking customer metrics with corporate metrics, either operational or financial.

Linking your corporate metrics with your customer metrics is vital to success. Without these links, customer satisfaction will be just another research project, nice to know, but rarely, if ever, providing actionable information.

A CVA program links appropriate customer measures with key internal measures, most notably revenue. With the linkage, you know the value of improving satisfaction and can make intelligent, reasoned decisions about which processes require improvement and how they need to be improved and which do not. Moreover, you know the potential payoff of your improvement efforts.

Another crucial reason to linking is employee and management engagement. With the links, improvements in internal processes can be seen in the context of clear improvements in customer ratings and, most importantly, in revenue.