The Keynote Speaker at this year’s KANA Summit is Ross Shafer. Ross comes from one of those backgrounds that shouts “only in America.” He grew up on a Reservation, opened a restaurant, transformed himself into a game and talk show host, morphed into a motivational speaker and now is a best-selling author on what motivates consumers. His perspective is truly unique, and what’s better, his perspective is defined by humor.

Ross’ talk is filled with the insight peculiar to folks with a keen sense of comedy; he cuts to the nub of what drives our actions and reactions as customers. For example, he uses a bit of slap-stick video to illustrate the binary gap in the way women and men think. Confronted with a horribly violent but obviously phony video, men chuckle and women wince. Ross’ summary: “Women actually care about people.” Touche.

Generally, there is little reason for me to blog on Ross’ wit and wisdom, because he’s the author of five books you can just read. Much of Ross’ gift lies in crystallizing what those of us in the customer service world already know. Like so many talented humorists, Ross helps us to see the world not so much in a new way, but in a sharper way. But, as I’ve thought about his presentation, one insight  caught me totally by surprise. Ross argues that one of the best ways to destroy a good service experience is to ask the customer to provide feedback about that experience. He calls out the Emperor of Enterprise Feedback Management with some absolutely hilariously, horrible Feedback Forms. How is it possible that great companies, in the name of provding great experiences, subject their customers to the nastiness of filling out surveys like these?

Just Bad Execution, I said to myself: “Ross is half right: collecting feedback is fundamental. He’s just caught out some examples of a good idea gone bad”. But, with more contemplation, the more he’s 100% right. Study after study shows that our last impression of an experience is the lasting impression. We don’t fall in love at first sight, instead we remember the end of the date. Ross cites a wonderful example of this truth at work in the structure of local newscasts. After pounding the viewer with murder, mayhem and disaster, the last bit of ‘news’ is inevitably entertaining fluff: a leprechaun sighting or an investigation into sagging pants. So, if the Emotion we create at the end of a service experience is the emotion that remains, aren’t we obligated to take our ‘closing act’ hyper-seriously?

Ross points out that there can be little more annoying to any customer than to be presented with a survey to fill out. The offer itself is a nuisance. Rejecting the offer induces mild guilt: “they want my help, and I’m refusing”. Accepting the offer requires expending sometimes considerable time and always considerable energy, and there is no compensation for that expenditure. Feedback surveys invert the wisdom of the newscast: we do a bang-up job and then sour the soup with an annoying and mildly depressing closing segment.

For advocates of metrics and feedback, the imperative to finish strong is a significant dilemma. If eliciting feedback leaves a bad aftertaste on an otherwise positive elixir, how do we listen? How can we collect the data needed to get better? As painful as the now ubiquitous feedback form is for customers, it’s an essential ingredient in service experience management.

But, we can’t say: sure this sucks as an experience, but WE need to know. So, how can we make the next experience better without making this experience worse?

Best practices for obtaining feedback with the lightest possible impact on the experience:

1.)  Sample – Political pollsters obtain highly accurate feedback by surveying 2000 citizens in a population of 300 million. Relatively small random samples are scientifically precise ways to measure the opinions of a much broader population. Instead of ruining every experience, ruin 1 in a 100 or even 1 in a thousand. The impulse to survey universally is mathematically absurd.

2.) Experience Manage the Survey – Once we accept the fact that the survey is PART of the experience, logic tells us we should apply Service Experience Management (SEM) principles to the feedback process. Surveys should be short. They should focus on the bottom line. They should be simple.

3.) Be Customer-centric - Ross’ “worst surveys ever” had an obvious and common root cause. The prime driver of bad experiential choices is a focus on enterprise process instead of customer experience. When a survey is designed for easy scanning or machine tabulation, it isn’t designed for humans.

4.) Converse - A survey is not a legal document. It’s the final step in your customer conversation. Ross put his finger on one reason feedback forms are just no fun: they employ a vocabulary far removed from our normal frame of reference. We say “that sucked”, not “I am somewhat dissatisfied”. We say “that was painless”, not “on a scale of 1 to 10, my ease of use was a 3”. The formal language, awkward rating systems, and just plain stiffness of surveys not only makes them an ordeal, it undermines their very mission.

5.) Rely More on Organic Feedback - Do we truly need to know how many people like us?  The purpose of listening is to get better. While there are few willing to expend the energy to proactively praise us, unhappy customers complain without prompting.  By monitoring social media and encouraging opt-in complaints, we can get what we need without impacting those who had a great experience and want to go happily into the night. Sure, creating a feedback system designed to emphasize the negative isn’t satisfying. But, if we can use small random surveys to fix overall net promoter scores, and use systematic monitoring and opt-in complaint forms to understand what’s going wrong, haven’t we accomplished our mission?

6.) Ask Once - Nothing is worse than being nagged and spammed to provide feedback, a la the real life example below.

Agents work hard to create good experiences. We need to stop wasting that good work with poorly executed feedback process.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

Related posts:

1. Who owns Customer Experience?