The Customer Survey Thing That’s Telling Us Something’s Wrong

While waiting for a flight, I struck up a conversation with another traveler.  He said he was an executive with a well-known chain of retail department stores.   News about major problems for that chain had been featured in the press recently, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask him how it was going, and what he thought was the source of the problem.  To my surprise, he said “You’ve gotta understand, waiting on customers in a store is the worst job in the world.”  I asked whether he really meant that, and he said he did.

We got into a discussion about what it means to help a customer find something they’d like to buy — style, color, size — and then completing the transaction.  Didn’t he think that was a pretty time-honored and worthwhile way to make a living?  “No,” he said.  “Most people don’t respect the salesperson and they just view him or her as their servant.”  “Wait a minute,” said I, “Isn’t that the point of being in business — to serve customers?”  He shook his head.  “Not anymore, it isn’t.  People have become accustomed to buying things on line and when they go into a store they just view the salesperson as an obstacle standing between them and the product they want to buy.  There’s a we/they thing that’s an inherent part of the transaction.”

If that’s true, it’s bad news…for everyone.  Think about the main components of a successful business:  a product that meets customers’ needs, a way to make people aware of your product and what it can do and a distribution system to get it to those who want to buy it.  Technology has made much of that fungible — one is just about as good as all the others.  But the thing that distinguishes your product is the service you can provide.  Everyone seems to acknowledge that.  Why else would every company invite us to participate in an excruciatingly long and repetitious survey at the conclusion of even the simplest transaction?  An adequate survey could have just one question — a thumbs-up-or-down choice — but no, these want to know about the “customer experience” — an emotionally charged term that puts the customer in the role of someone who can “really mess up the salesperson’s day.”

I once got a letter from the Sales Manager of a car dealership after purchasing a car saying “You will soon be getting a survey form from the manufacturer.  If you are not prepared to give us a 5 on every question, please call my office immediately.”  What kind of carrot-and-stick system was in place in that company that would so terrify an employee into making that kind of hostile, pre-emptive strike?

The most important conversations in your business take place when your salespeople talk with customers about your product, and everybody else’s work is all about supporting those conversations.  Essentially, the rest of us – like the Sales Manager in my example – are all “Assistant Salespeople,” and we have to act that way — supporting and backing up, preparing, coaching, training, helping everyone who has any interactions with customers.

Shouldn’t it be everyone’s business to know — and share responsibility for — the way we serve customers?