CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AS THE NEW MARKETING

October 31, 2014

Sogeti Labs

Lately, I’ve been receiving an increasing number of customer satisfaction emails. Let me give you an example on how extensive this can get. After bringing my car to the dealer for maintenance I got three ‘small’ questionnaire requests via email to make sure I was satisfied. Initially, I only got one questionnaire from the dealer on how they performed, but soon after that I got one from the lease company too.  Finally the third email came in with another questionnaire request from the car brand. All three would just take a couple of minutes of my time.

Remember the times when this kind of performance feedback on satisfaction was extremely simple? The baker around the corner would bake all kinds of bread you would buy on a regular basis. He noticed you were buying a different kind one day and he was sincerely interested in knowing why. Genuine attention. Where did we let this slide away?more–>

Nowadays the companies seem to be interested in creating a questionnaire after every minor step: “keep on the phone to give your feedback about this call.” Where does this end? We all know that great customer satisfaction is the real marketing, but customer satisfaction like this feels like spam.

Meanwhile, I value opinions from others and share mine a lot online too. I love TripAdvisor for helping find great restaurants. I use Booking a lot because I value ratings of hotels more than their officially approved stars and app ratings help me filter quality out of the sheer quantity of mobile apps.

One more example I like to share. After a flight, I got an email questionnaire about satisfaction stating the questionnaire takes most people ten minutes. Ten minutes! This makes me wonder about two things: One, if I invest time to improve the service can I be paid for that time? Two, can we discuss a formula on how much time the questionnaires may take related to the action and my time involved?

Let’s start with a minimum time to qualify for a questionnaire and a maximum of say 2 to 3 minutes. What do you think? You like this post? Are you satisfied? How would you rate this post? Would you recommend it to others? How likely are you to share this with others? On a scale from 1 to 7. How did you find this post? Any other remarks? 🙂

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Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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