Mr. Ely

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

How to Create an Evaluation Program from an Outsider's Point of View

By John Ely, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Signature Worldwide

I’ve often been asked about the value of external evaluation programs, especially in the world of customer service and sales. I believe there’s no better way to truly understand your customer’s experience than to pretend to be one. There are many reasons why, so let me share them in the following story.

Back in the early ’90s, I was working for a communications company and we had recently spent a lot of money trying to improve our perception of customer service. As you know, communications (phone) companies were notoriously lacking in these skills, especially in the previous decade. The majority of the money and energy was spent on a customer tracking or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. At the time, it seemed like the panacea for all of our customer service ills, but of course it was not.

The system came with a lot of bells and whistles and promised to finally integrate all of our existing systems while also managing the customer experience from beginning to end. While it did that from a technology standpoint, we didn’t account for the human factor. The greatest customer relationship software in the world is useless unless everyone using it understands the way it works and its relation to the important fundamentals of customer service.

As marketing manager, what I found was that our customers were still not having a good experience with us, and that customer service had actually deteriorated after installing the system. Management wasn’t necessarily interested to hear that the multi-million dollar investment in customer service had actually worsened our reputation. But our marketing team couldn’t stop discussing our customer service index scores (from surveys) and the fact that they were still declining!

“What do we do now?” was the question asked by a regional vice president. My suggestion was that we install a mystery shopping system to experience exactly what our customers were experiencing. I felt this was the only way to truly identify where and how we were falling short. We all had heard of these types of services, but his view (like most executives with this company) was of retail mystery shoppers and had trouble understanding the value to our firm (even though we did operate some retail outlets). We finally got the OK and began working with a company to map out the program. We started by identifying all customer touchpoints.

In this assessment process, we looked at every way a customer could interact with our company. To my amazement, we had hundreds of touchpoints and many thousands of interactions every day. Each one presented an opportunity to either demonstrate the best of our company or to fall short of customer expectations. We developed customer scenarios for each type of touchpoint, created shopper reporting tools, and began the mystery shopping process.

What we learned was eye-opening. The new system did allow for better tracking of customer activity on paper, but our associates were not comfortable with it. We recorded conversations where we could hear the associate on the other end of the phone struggling to work the new system, sometimes ending in total frustration. Other times we heard associates that had no business talking with customers on the phone because of a lack of basic customer service skills. They were rude, uncaring, or not able to solve a basic problem using the available tools.

We also did on-site and video shopping in our outlet locations and found many of the same problems. We went back to the drawing board and enlisted a firm to help train our staff on the basics of customer service, and another third-party firm to further train on the new system.

So, what were the lessons learned? First, we learned that even though we had spent a lot of money, time and energy on a customer relationship system, we still had fallen short of our customers’ expectations. The feeling at corporate was that simply installing a CRM system was all we needed, but company leaders soon found out that wasn’t enough. We didn’t evaluate the problem effectively from the start. Without a proper diagnosis, it’s tough to prescribe a cure. After experiencing firsthand the true customer experience, we were able to create specific training and shopping programs aimed at solving our service shortcomings.

Next, we learned that we had many more consumer touchpoints than we planned for with the initial CRM system rollout. We originally looked at the customer service issue only from the viewpoint of the customer service call center, not realizing we spoke directly to the consumer at retail points, both via phone and in person, through technical services, field services and at many more occasions. And, this was all before the advent of the Internet. Just imagine all the customer interactions you may have at your hotel or within your management company.

Finally, we learned that we did not include the “customer experience” in our strategic plan. We included improving customer service, but only from our corporate vantage point. We had no idea what a customer was truly experiencing when communicating with us. Yes, we did have satisfaction surveys, but they didn’t uncover the root of our problems. This can often happen to organizations because customers sometimes answer surveys they way they “think” they should or the structure of the survey is built around the company’s perception of customer service, and not the customer’s actual experience.

All our findings led us to create customer service training and systems training in parallel with the mystery shopping program. We mystery shopped what we trained and then subsequently continued training on areas where issues or knowledge gaps were uncovered.

Good mystery shopping programs contain the following elements:

• A robust evaluation and assessment of the current situation(s) involving all customer touchpoints.
• A consensus among the corporate stakeholders of what the ideal or branded experience should be; what is to be measured; and which work groups are to be included in the measurements.
• A development plan that accurately measures and identifies all “gaps” between the current experience and the ideal.
• An ongoing improvement program aimed at closing every gap.
• A commitment from senior management to frontline supervisors that actively engages staff members in the improvement program through coaching and mentoring — ultimately leading to full accountability at every level.
• A powerful reporting structure that allots for tactical assessment as well as strategic planning.

These external evaluation systems are crucial to delivering a consistent, legendary customer experience. There are many firms who specialize in external evaluations and will help you analyze your situation; develop a robust mystery shopping program; align that with training and other branded initiatives; and evaluate or report the overall results. Like I said, the best way to truly understand your guests’ experience is pretend to be one!

John Ely is senior VP of marketing for Signature Worldwide. He is responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating strategic marketing and corporate growth plans, and has industrial and consumer marketing experience. He has an associate degree in electrical engineering, a bachelor's in technical management and a master's in marketing and communications. He is a member of the American Marketing Association and Product Development Management Association. Mr. Ely has served as a professor at Franklin University and is certified as a "Teaching at a Distance" (TAD) online educator. Mr. Ely can be contacted at 614-766-5101 or johnely@signatureworldwide.com Extended Bio...

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