“Let’s find out what customers think about our service, without having to talk to them”

Who are the greatest experts on the service your company gives? Those you give it to, of course, so why don’t more organisations talk with customers on a regular basis?

The truth of the matter is, very sadly, that by far the majority of managers do not want to be involved with customers. They want revenue form customers, but not a relationship, except that is for the kind of relationship the company’s staff must have with customers. Evidence of this management malaise is everywhere you look, starting with hotels.

Most hotels have the same kind of service surveys, in terms of design, layout and the number and type of questions. A remarkable coincidence? Not at all; hotels for years have been stealing from each other in the desperate hope that those they steal from have done their homework. They haven’t. This then becomes an exercise equivalent to stealing counterfeit money; a complete waste of time! You may have noticed that the average service survey consists of more than 50 questions. In one sense this is a good move because the guests have to stay an extra night just to fill out the survey!

The fact is that less than 3% of hotel guests respond to the surveys, and those that do will find that in most cases their survey will go first to a scanning company…and eventually to the very concerned hotel management. Does this mean that hotel management believes that if customers do not offer ideas and complaints that they don’t have ideas and complaints? If hotel management received only 3% feedback on occupancy rates and revenues they would cringe with abject fear, but 3% feedback from guests is apparently OK.

Car manufacturers operate in a very similar manner, offering the most absurd surveys that go for many pages. On an Ansett flight once from Sydney to Melbourne I was asked to respond to a ‘survey’ that contained more than 100 questions. I had to fly on to Hobart. By the way, the 100 survey questions were about the ‘seat’. I for one will not stand for that.

My advice to any business that insists on asking customers to experience service and then report on it, is to ask just two good questions:

• What, if anything, was pleasing or distinctive about the service you received?
• What, if anything, do you believe we should change to improve service to people like you?

If they have anything to say this will make it easier for them to say it. It is worthwhile remembering that customers do not see service in the same, complex ways that management does. To customers, service is one continuous form of contact and service providers are either adding to or subtracting from the expectations of customers. And customers do not expect perfection. For example, if a customer is checking into a hotel and the reception staff are slow to give attention, that’s bad. But then if the young man who takes the luggage to the room is friendly and helpful, that cancels out the problem at reception.

For those businesses that are actually willing to talk to customers, there are some very valuable rewards down the track. I spent several years at the marketing helm of the Schwarzkopf organisation, and the best thing I ever did was to create a ‘board of customers’. I met with the ‘boards’ three times each year, for we had a board in NZ too, the board members comprised progressive salon owners from around the two nations, and most members were customers of our company and all the other suppliers too. The membership of the boards hardly changed over 10 years! Our ‘board’ meetings lasted all day Sunday and part of Monday.

Several very important aspects of information came to light through our continuing contact with the customer boards:

• We were never left in any doubt as to what the customers thought about every aspect of our ‘contact’ with them – including product performance, sales reps, service staff, technical support, deliveries, marketing input, admin processing, etc. This was absolute agony for me. The reason for the pain was that the few board members were telling us what thousands of customers were experiencing and not telling us. This made me so mad I actually made it my business to supervise the fixing of the problems. Imagine what would have happened at subsequent board meetings if I didn’t fix the problems. Survey results do not have this ‘in your face’ effect on management. This is why customer boards are far, far more dynamic than focus groups. We did get some good feedback of course, but while this was nice the good things were supposed to happen so this meant very little.

• We began to learn about the ‘unstated needs’ of our customers, through discussions with them about their own business direction, performance and problems. We learned that the greatest problems facing our customers had nothing to do with good and bad suppliers. Their greatest problems related to …

• How they could attract and retain the number and quality of customers they needed each week
• How they could best serve and sell to their customers
• How they could develop their staff into a team of creative, productive professionals
• How they could learn to manage their businesses and plan for improved performance
• How they could become better at marketing and sales development

This was the ecstasy for me, for now we had found needs or gaps in our customers’ businesses that virtually no one was attending to. Our customers were small to medium size businesses, totally under-serviced by their own accountants, ignored by training companies and of no interest to ‘consultants’. The customers themselves could hardly articulate their own needs, but they certainly spoke about the symptoms of wanting to avoid serious problems and somehow find ways to improve their image and performance.

Gradually, modestly but consistently, our company began to help with these unstated needs; needs that were as critical to our success as to their success.

We created salon management systems, tested by the ‘board’ and then released to the market. We created service and selling platforms, tested by the board and then released to the market. We created staff training programmes, tested by the board and released to the market. All of these ‘contributions’ were charged for, but not with any profit motive. We also created a marketing association (the pH Club) for our progressive customers to belong to, for an annual fee, and this entitled them to attend one national conference and two regional meetings, at which times they would encounter and learn from excellent speakers and eminent business leaders.

Slowly but surely our new ‘beyond product services’ helped our customers to improve their business results (and their purchases), and our company was perceived to be the ‘preferred supplier’. The special services in question were constantly updated and new services were always being introduced, Throughout this ‘new’, ecstatic period of our development as a supplier, the agony of learning about ‘the service basics’ via the board continued.

To summarise the period in question, Schwarzkopf made the move from distribution (selling products) to contribution (selling productivity).

So the question is ‘What must you know about your customers, and how far are you willing to go to get the information you need?’



“Let’s find out what customers think about our service, without having to talk to them” - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.

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