Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 8:28 am

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You know the feeling don’t you? You go on a site (often a big company, Sky, O2 and the like) and before your eyes have even attuned to what you’re looking at…. ping!

There it is. A grey or white box, flush bang in the middle of your screen asking for your thoughts on the web experience.

Allow me a little Victor Meldrewness here, but wouldn’t it be ever so nice if they’d let you get into the actual site and experience it before they pestered you and disrupted you from what you were trying to do in the first place?!?!?!

“Please tell us your experience of….” I can’t… you won’t let me get to that bit yet!!!

Ahem, beg my pardon but I do feel better now!

It all boils down to purpose though doesn’t it? What it is you want to know, how you want to find it out and how you engage with the audience to understand their views and feelings.

Web surveys are just the wrong solution but the right intent.

Trying to capture views at the time of experience while the user is on their website and “engaged” with that company. The slight problem, they aren’t there to complete a survey, certainly not one that is clearly based on lipservice for a few nominal tick box questions to keep the ISO bods happy.

The customer is there to do their business, find some information out or try and contact the company. The company needs to know what the browser is thinking and experiencing but it’s the wrong time to do it.

A little time needs to pass, the customer needs to be uninterrupted, otherwise the survey process will be an irritant and actually skew the message you’ll receive back.

Our suggestion. if you want to understand what your customers think of your website. Don’t go down the pop up survey route. It’s up there in terms of irritation with spam mail, traffic wardens and people in shops with a clipboard who say “Can I ask you a question?” (No I’m here to shop, not handle stupid transparent sales pitches).

Think of the impact on your customers and clients before you survey them.

The point of a survey is to understand, not to sell and certainly not to alienate.

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Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 8:22 am

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We’re not ones to kiss and tell. Sometimes you just have to get something off your chest and to clear the mind don’t you?

Well just the other day we had a call come in.

We thought it odd as it seemed to be a competitor (and they usually just nosey on the website and then run for cover).

Now we’re always happy to collaborate and share ideas and look at ways we can improve what we do for the good of our clients. So having missed the call initially, we called back.

In the meantime we had a nosey at their website, got a grip of what they did and could see they offered very similar services to ours without the consultative value and cherry on top.

So the call back went something like this…

*ring ring… ring ring* (that went on for a bit with lines tripping to other lines)

“Yeah?”

We then said who we were trying to get in touch with.

“Who?… Oh yeah. Errrr….oh ok” *click* (we guessed we were on hold… but that didn’t happen for 20 seconds or so in which time we heard a grunt, a shuffling of paper and general movement!)

*click*… international dial tone, long dial out, through to mobile voicemail.

I spy, with my little eyes, an online survey company that didnt make a very good impression beginning with…… Q

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Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 9:09 am

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Every month we are in the position of going over this topic of what the starting point of a client survey is, so we thought we’d explore the logic of setting up such a survey that is all about canvassing a client or customer audience.

Simply, the people who are paying money to you for what you have to offer, whether it’s a product or a service.

So what is the starting point?

It’s got to be the questions hasn’t it? I mean a survey has to have questions?

So the starting point must be asking questions. Sitting in a room, maybe with another person, probably in marketing or sales and coming up with a capped number of questions (6 to 10 should be enough is what we often hear) and there you go, job done… we have ourselves a survey! Ping it out, get the results…. happy days.

Now before you go out there and do just that… stop. Pin your lug ‘oles (that’s ears by the way) back and listen.

The worst thing you can do is start with questions. Actually no. The worst thing you can do is get your sales and marketing people to come up with survey questions.

Think about it. What sort of questions are most likely to come from the sales and marketing department/s? Sales questions. I’ve seen some companies be so blunt as to ask when a customer when they are next going to buy from them! (And a survey sent en masse without much thought isn’t going to differentiate between a customer who spent yesterday or one that spent two years ago).

Tangent back on track… so why is sitting down and coming up with a list of questions the wrong approach?

What happens if you just write down questions? Do it now… see what happens.

Ok…. for those who haven’t (yes we … know who you are!) this is what happens.

You look at a blank word document or piece of paper. You put the first question. A second quickly follows. You haven’t thought about scoring scale so you think of a survey you’ve completed and before you know it you’re using the age old strongly agree to strongly disagree scale. You’ve maybe asked about the quality of your products and services.

Maybe you’ve phrased a question or two around price (not value for money) and more than likely the word satisfied is in there a few times as to whether your customer would use you again.

The list gets longer, page 2 or a new sheet beckons and you start to get worried about how many questions you’re asking. You think about customers getting bored rather than what they have to say.

And the process is curtailed.

You have a survey with a fixed length, asking questions with a poor scoring scale, a survey that has a poor flow and doesn’t quite fit or feel right.

It’s tinkered with. Questions are slightly tweaked but nothing with real substance and you have yourself a customer survey.

What’s missing? A purpose? An objective? Why are you doing the survey?

Let’s say the answer is… “to understand our customers compared to the experience they’ve had with our competitors”… surely you’d ask very specific questions. The answers would highlight how you rate against your nearest competitors and would provide you with specific oportunity to market your strength against them, or give you sopme work to gain ground on them.

If it was to understand client views of how they perceive your company… surely it makes sense to deliver a specific survey that allows them to rate the journey they take with you from the moment you first spoke, to the signing up of them as a client and the transactions they have gone through from order to payment.

After all… doesn’t that allow you to understand which areas of your business can be improved and how a customer actually sees you?

There are so many reasons for taking a step back before launching into question writing.

Yet sadly the common practice for creating a client survey, online, phone or paper based… is to get feather and inkpot out and starting to craft words.

Seriously… save yourself the time and pain of a poor response rate or pointless results that dont really mean anything and don’t bother delivering a survey at all.

Of course…. you could take the professional approach instead… maybe…?

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Thursday, July 14th, 2011 at 1:32 pm

A couple of discussions with potential clients and a few exchanges through social media made me think the other day.

Samples

The context was about sampling a customer audience.  And in one case, the company we were talking to were sampling a customer audience by telephone.

Now of course sampling has its place and telephone research and feedback also has its place.

But let me ask you something.

If you were a customer, and you’d been wronged or felt agrieved about something but hadn’t felt compelled to say something… how would you feel if you later found out a feedback exercise had been conducted but on a sample basis?  A sample basis that meant you didn’t get the chance to have a voice?

A sample that might discriminate in some way, however inadvertently?

It may be based on spend, on profit, on service/ product, on age, on a mix as is often used in pure research “Nat Rep” and you might find a typical “statistically representative” audience may be somewhere between 3% and 10% of the overall customer base.

Now forgive me in advance if you disagree with me and believe that asking just 3% of your customers is good practice… but I have to say we’d never be in a position to tell a client to survey such a small percentage.

The reason is simple.  Understanding customers isn’t research, not really.  Every customer is important.  Every customer has an opinion and an experience and every customer should therefore have an opportunity to have their say.

Sampling may work to a degree for polling and research projects, but we’d strongly recommend a more inclusive method to understand how your customers perceive you and how you could improve the way you deliver your services and products for them.

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Thursday, July 7th, 2011 at 9:33 am

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I’ve been involved in some interesting LinkedIn discussions with Accountants of late and how they see clients and how they canvas them.

Coupling that with seeing numerous examples of client feedback (almost always very cheap and hardly ever cheerful)… well, here is the result, a blog post specifically for Accountants and hopefully some valuable advice.

Firstly, if you want to survey your clients but don’t want to hear negatives, don’t want to commit to doing it properly, don’t want to action changes from the insight you gain… please, save yourself time and don’t survey your clients.  It’s much easier and much less painful.

Secondly… “Are you happy?”  Please don’t send a postcard to your clients with that question on.  What do you expect to get back?  It’s a waste of trees, your clients don’t have chance to tell it like it is and the cost of deploying something like that is expensive for very little return.  And does it really send a signal to your clients that you care?

Think about it… a one question survey is the feedback equivalent of you delivering a single sheet of paper to your clients with just their sales figure on and nothing else.  It’s incomplete and gives no insight at all. 

Thirdly… Shy away from ready made surveys and questionnaires.  Yes they may be easier and yes they may be quicker.  But they don’t reflect your practice.  They don’t account for your decision making processes, your management structure, the services and style with which you work with your clients.  Take a little time and do it right.  You help your clients plan don’t you?  You tell them planning is important.  The same applies for client surveys.

Fourthly… Don’t just do it once and never again.  The value of management accounts is that you understand in a fairly timely fashion what is going on and you can change things accordingly.  Well before cash is received, before invoices are sent, before services and products are delivered, and before orders are placed, some considerable time before… a client is forming opinion.  Every day.  Every day their views change for the worse and for the better.

A client survey gives you just as much, if not more actionable business information that can be acted on in a timely fashion before its too late.  Use it to follow trends, to test ideas, to benchmark service.  Can you really do that with a simple one question postcard?

Fifthly… take the time to be different.  Since the advent of AVN, Ranone, 2020, UK200 and all of the myriad of accounting umbrella groups supporting accountants the order of the day has been template driven programmes with a token logo.

I wish it wasn’t the case (and as a previous life in Accountancy and consulting I’m qualified to say this), but the differentiation in the Accountancy sector is borderline nil.  Yes there are buzzwords of adding value and being proactive, but everyone uses them and difference is something you feel and experience, not a buzzword thats rolled out when appropriate.

Be different.  Ask your clients how to be different.  What they want in their business, what their challenges are, how you can best support them.  You might just find yourself enhancing your reputation and unlocking new revenues in the process delivering just what your clients need.

And finally… please, please, please… if you do a survey, if you ask your clients what they really think, it’s imperative you take the good and the bad squarely on the chin and you act.  Not only do you act, but you communicate.

Tell your clients you’ve heard them, tell your clients you’re devising projects to change based on what they’ve shared with you and tell them thank you.

And in due course they will thank you for it.

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Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 8:58 am

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Survey fatigue.

You’ve maybe heard the term?

If not, let us fill you in.  Survey fatigue is the term used when an audience gets tired of taking part in giving feedback through a survey.

Now forgive me for talking aloud and shaping a few thoughts as I type, but survey fatigue…. I wonder, does it actually exist?

Because if it does, on the face of it, you could argue that if an individual gets to a point of seeing, and being asked to complete the xth number survey in their lifetime that they may just break down, turn into a gibbering wreck and become a recluse, never to see a flipboard or computer screen ever again.

I can’t talk for others obviously, but I’ve never seen that happen in all my years so far.  And I doubt I ever will.

Let’s consider more established forms of communication.  An e-mail for example.

Everyday we have our inboxes filled.  Some spam, some interesting stuff, some not so interesting stuff.  Some e-mails from known sources, some from unknown sources.

A mishmash of information, content and topics.  If survey fatigue is a real manifest of too many surveys in an inbox, surely it would have been seen in e-mail communications by now?  Why isn’t there a term “e-mail fatigue”?

And if the survey is to a known audience, would you unsubscribe? 

Let us consider facts of survey results we’ve seen.  We have clients where we deliver surveys as regularly as monthly or quarterly to the same audience.

If survey fatigue was true, would it be expected to receive requests to unsubscribe or not be included in the survey audience any more?   To date, we’ve not had one request as such.

And to compound that, historical long term averages rarely change considerably from the starting level of the first survey delivered.

So.. we say “pah” to survey fatigue. 

If a survey is delivered to the right audience, with the right intent, with the right tone and asking valid questions that can benefit the participant, the survey plays an important part irrespective of it’s frequency of delivery.

The key though is this.  If a survey isn’t well designed and delivered to the right audience for the right purpose, it won’t be a successful exercise.

Moreso, if a survey captures responses and a lack of communication ensues with the surveyed audience… why would that audience have trust?  After all, there is only so much we can give without receiving something in return.  And don’t confuse receiving something with a monetary or prize incentive (don’t start us on those!).

Engaging with your audience after a survey is more important than at the point of survey.  Especially if a survey is to be delivered periodically.

We don’t think there is such a thing as survey fatigue.  If the purpose of a survey is to understand a groups view towards a company, product, service, employer and the like, then a survey will be delivered and responses gained.

The reason someone may not take a survey is bound by parameters away from the survey process.

Apathy towards the company because of being treated badly, not listening, not acting and making false promises.  It isn’t the survey that causes fatigue… it’s a company paying lip service to it’s customers, staff and markets.

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Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 10:13 am

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A few weeks back I was in the midst of shopping for my girlfriend’s birthday and, as can often be the case, my mind wandered.  Not to what I was going to get her (I was well planned for a change!) but instead about the organisations I was frequenting and then onto service in general.

The scene then… firstly, Paul A Young chocolatiers near Angel.  A little shop, a more bespoke gift than the mainstream chocolate shops.  I won’t bore you with the details.  But the upshot was an amazing buying experience.

Genuine help, genuine support, intuitive questioning about the individual and their likes.  Fantastic presentation, assistance to find the nearest cashpoint, conversation to make several minutes of wrapping and selection easy.  Great product, great service, great experience.

The benefit for Paul A Young chocolatiers in this instance.  An increase in individual spend of about 40%.  So worth it for them to go the extra mile.

Next… Albert Dinny jewellers.  Further along Angel, a fair walk along Upper Street.  Again, a small intimate shop.  Nobody else in.  Questions, genuine conversation, gaining some insight as to why I found myself there and how I’d gotten there and subtle hints for the next landmark of birthday or Christmas.  Not pushy…easy, again putting the male shopper at ease.

So two shops, both small, neither well known in the main and both getting it absolutely spot on.  The small touches executed perfectly.

So contrast that…. Paperchase.  The shop for wrapping paper and a card.  A shop that should know what the customer is coming in for and is often going to be the finishing touch for a gift or present.  A large company. 

So contrast the experience.  No smile at the counter.  A bag that wasn’t suitable.  No eye contact just awkward silence during the transaction as the card machine kicked in and an apathetic gesture of holding the bag out to urge the customer out of its doors after the parting of money.

A huge contrast.

And that got me thinking.  Not that Paperchase is a company that doesn’t care about it’s customers as such…. but instead… do small companies have a distinct advantage of being customer orientated than large companies?

Large companies have bigger budget but more resource to manage and orchestrate the service offering.

Small companies are more intimate, maybe owner managed and perhaps service is seen as a genuine strategy to drive sales as pricing and efficiency options are harder to pursue because of a lack of buying power.

Just a thought… what do you think?

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Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 6:15 pm

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It’s not so often people benefit from free advice, but that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Provide advice about online surveys, shaped around a survey we’ve just received.  Good eh?

First of all… we’ve received the survey from streetcar, a company we use and like… so streetcar, if you’re reading, sorry if the advice is a little much to take.  For the rest of you, consider the points and lessons there to learn.

Ok… here we go.  The first no no.  Delivery.  The survey link was in a newsletter, tucked away right at the bottom.  So the liklihood of the survey being taken is low.  Most people will see the newsletter drop into their inbox and it will get deleted, slide down outlook, or will be viewed, but not with the intention of sharing views.

The other thing.  It landed  in my inbox at 16:18 on the Thursday before Easter.  Heard of POETS day?  Well it applies on the Thursday before Easter too.  That means the first chance many corporates will pick up that e-mail is Tuesday after Easter Monday.  It’s going to be competing with all that other e-mail from clients, suppliers, marketers and spam galore.  That reduces the liklihood of being seen even more.

Right… lets say we click on the link.  A very poorly branded page opens up.  My PC blocked the image so we had a nice red cross in the top left corner.  A colour not quite matching streetcars brand colour wraps around the image.

A font that doesn’t quite fit as the header.  Sorry…. but the free/ cheap online survey companies don’t offer amazing editing facilities so its always going to be a fudge and will look like something that you wouldnt publish on your printed material or your website.  Shame really.

Next booboo. 

The text near the survey link in the newsletter says they want to understand about customers views to improve service.  Now streetcar (remember we’re a customer and we like you)… what impression do you think you give when the first question you ask is “Which of the following cars does your business use regularly?”

Now I can share that we receive a statement every month that lists cars, mileage, time used… its all very clever.  So we know you have exact precise information of what cars we’ve used and probably where we’ve driven and when.

So what do I think that you’re asking us a question you know the answer to?  Think about it…hmm… not great eh?

Have we heard of streetvan… thats not going to improve the service we receive is it?  No… hmm… going from bad to worse this.

Has your business used a streetvan in the last 12 months?  So…. I’m asked if I’ve heard of streetvan.  If I answer no, I’m now being asked if I’ve used it!  And… you know if I have or haven’t because of your internal booking systems.

The survey goes on to ask how often we use streetvans, what we use them for, if we’re planning on using them in the next 6 months, what we might want to use them for, have we hired a traditional van, what did we use a traditional van for and then some pretty pictures of vans and which we like the look of most.

Standing back.  Looking at that through independent eyes.  What strikes you about it?

To us, the flow of questions doesn’t fit, it’s not in a logical order, and each question is dependent on the one before.  But whats more… it has absolutely nothing to do with customer service at all.  It sounds sales driven and aimed at data gathering for prospecting.  That’s not a survey, and it certainly isn’t a survey to improve the service we receive.

Branching would help massively so only relevant questions are asked, but the whole basis of the survey is flawed from the outset.

But worst of all, the only question that streetcar probably don’t know the answer to already is if someone has used a traditional van instead of a street van.

Now remember streetcar, we’re customers and friends and we like you.

You’re not alone in sending a marketing or sales led survey through a cheap or free provider and have really make a right pigs ear of it.  It’s ok… many big companies have done just that, so provided you listen to the problems and resolve them… no damage done.

So next time… think.  What’s the purpose?  Does the survey meet that purpose?  Have you got the information to hand already?  Is the survey easy to take and matches your brand identity to a high standard?

Is the time you’re sending it right?  Do you need advice from someone who does this all the time?  And what do you expect to gain from the results?

We don’t want to sound harsh.  You can imagine we see surveys all the time.  Sadly, many aren’t up to scratch and just by a bit of guidance and tapping into someones knowledge… it could have provided so much value and useful insight.

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Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 10:31 am

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Ok… hands up everyone who made a resolution coming into 2011.

Let’s shelve the personal ones about gym memberships and the like and let’s take a business perspective.

How many of you made a business resolution?  You don’t have to share it with me, you can keep that to yourself.  But I’ll have a guess about the general angle.

*puts on thinking cap, and reaches for the clarity crystal ball*

I can see something….. it’s…… it’s…..hmm, I’ll try again….

Sales?  Right?

Speaking with people through December as 2010 came to a close, and already in the formative weeks of 2011, the agenda, the ambititon, the hopes and objectives are all about sales.  Getting more, keeping more and driving higher volumes of transactions and activity.

But a goal, an objective, a resolution is nothing without a strategy, and worth even less without a plan to make it stick.

So here’s a little bit of Clarity help to make a sales ambition a strategy, then a plan… and well… the making it stick is over to you unless you line our pockets with a little silver too.

FIRST

You have your sales ambition.  Make it specific.  Give it a number or a percentage so you can measure progress.  And that’s vital from the off.  Record your progress and you can tinker along the way.

SECOND

Exhaust every means and thought you have (and feel free to talk to your team, clients, business contacts and anyone else who you trust and might have a view).  Write them all down.  Look at what you’ve written and keep adding.  Give yourself about 30 mins and write til there isn’t any more to come.

And a tip here.  Don’t simply write out ways of generating interest and awareness.  It’s so easy to write or type “set up a twitter account” or “get more referrals”… but is that going to work?  Let’s be frank.  It’s not is it?

Who are your customers and clients?  Where are they?  Why would they buy from you?  Why would they buy from someone else?  (And *psst*…. if you don’t know…. ask them… surveys, you know?)  What niggles them about businesses like yours?  What industry sectors could you generate more from, what sectors do you think you have good coverage but actually have a poor market share?

THIRD

You should now have a good list of rough strategies.  Simply go through and rank them.  How easy are they to implement, what impact would they have on your business, what time and resource do they need to get them off the ground?

FOURTH

Simply look at the top 2 or 3 that are the easiest and most worthwhile and give them a whirl.  Monitor whats working and what isn’t and persist.

The key message in all of this… is devise strategy well.

And to devise strategy well you need insight.  And insight means talking to people and canvassing their views.  We’ve seen many a company fail because they assumed something which their customers, staff or prospects all disagreed with vehemently.

So before you go building a new website.  Before you go chucking money at advertising, or a huge marketing campaign.  Do yourself a favour.  Stop.  Take a breath.  Understand the audience better.  Maybe even spend a tiny percentage of your budget on that before you start trying to drum up more sales.

And once you’re armed with the full picture…. go and generate some sales.

You might find you save more money in the long run and have greater success just by taking the time to do it properly from the outset.

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Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 at 10:23 am

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Bodie picked up the phone.  Made an overly expressive facial gesture that signified horror as a BBC elecutioned newsreader style voice offered little clue where the latest terrorist activity was due to take place.  Zoom in on the 1970’s style cassette recorder.  An evil cackle.  Dramatic pause and cut to a grainy film of a speedboat chugging through a stagnated undeveloped London Docklands.

Yes, this is the Clarity Blog.  You are in the right place.  This was channel one (or 121) on sky and the programme was “The Professionals”… remember?  Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw?

I reckon the programme was late 70’s or early 80’s so we’re talking 30 years or more since it graced our screens on a mainstream channel.

It’s funny how you watch things after the passage of such time and suddenly you realise something.  The programme you thought you remembered is completely different to the reality.

Looking at a short passage and you noted how all the accents were very pronounced and very much of the Queen’s English and out of the BBC newsreader old school.  The acting was over egged.  Movements too extreme and unnatural.  Expressions, actors lines… all left much to be desired.

Then there was the quality of the editing.  The special effects.  Explosions that wouldn’t convince even the most naive and car stunts that looked mild and safe compared to the modern games generation of today.

And perhaps finally, the one thing that stood out more than the rest for me.  How much London had changed.

Scenes taken from areas that couldn’t be recognised, but then the dawning realisation that it was London Docklands.  Dereliction and stagnation.  Nothing close to the skyscraping shining metropolis that it is today.  Phone boxes, cars, high street signs.

So what’s the point of this ramble?  The professionals?  Am I really telling you to go away and take a lesson from a 70’s/80’s british TV show?

Of course not.  But let’s take the topic and shift the angle.  Imagine being back then.  The makers and actors of that programme.  It would have been normal wouldn’t it?  That was the way it was done and it fit for the time.  And it’s only years on that the exageration is now markedly pronounced.  Suddenly fast forward 30 years.  Contrast the two.  People, cities, behaviours, trends and styles have all radically changed.

So take the way you look at your business.  Look at your customers.  Are you 30 years ahead, or are you 30 years behind?  Are you of your time or ahead of it?  Are you lagging behind like an ancient channel one rerun?  Have practices and processes embraced the future, or are you stuck doing it the way it’s always been done?

And how do you know?  Who do you ask?  Who tells you how it is brutally and honestly?

You see the point is this.

Change happens.  The views and expectations of customers and clients shape daily.  Technology moves forward at breakneck speed.  New ways of doing business form constantly.  Marketing, systems, communication, managing people, utilising assets.  All have radically shifted since Bodie and Doyle graced our screens on mainstream telly.

Unless you harness change, proactively use it for the benefit of your business, customers and staff… you’re being left behind.  And just to clarify…. if someone refers to your business as being “a bit Bodie”…. that’s not a compliment… anymore!

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