One Reason Not to Ask Your Customer

You have all seen me go on and on about how important it is to listen to the Voice of your Customer in order to define Value for your process.  I even recently simplified things by writing a blog that gave Two reasons to have customers define value.  In this blog I want to give a compelling reason NOT to listen to the voice of your customer.

As a passionate Lean practitioner I am always on the lookout for great examples of organizations applying Lean techniques.  In particular I am forever looking for great ideas to share on how to listen to the Voice of your Customer.  As a result I tend to complete a lot of on-line surveys that I usually find on the back of my (retail) sales receipts.  It is no surprise that folks in retail have a much greater sense of Customer and Value than people who never see their customers.

I see a disturbing trend in these on-line surveys, however and I am not sure if it is Sales or Marketing or both who are to blame.  But I certainly hope there are no Lean consultants behind this idea.  If there are then it is time to switch firms....or just read the first 28 pages of the book "Lean Thinking" by Womack and Jones.

The problem is this: most on-line customer surveys are poorly disguised tricks to solicit personal contact information from customers that will undoubtedly be used at a later date to spam respondents' Inboxes with deals and promotions.  This is wrong, wrong, wrong!

First of all how dare you waste your customers' time by making them go through a tedious process to set up a "feedback" account with your firm complete with mandatory fields and requests for everything but bank account numbers and PINs?  What can you possibly need that information for anyway?  And those of you in Marketing about to lecture me on customer profiling leave the process improvement to those who care about adding Value and go back to ordering the fancy display booth and brochures for your next trade show.

Second of all what's with the locked list of 20 attributes asking me to rank my "customer experience" on a scale of 0 to 10?"  Again that's great if you are the head of Marketing and you are trying to justify your existence by tracking "quantifiable and repeatable" metrics that no one pays attention to.  And how can you possibly know the only 20 attributes that completely define your product or service anyway?

Finally don't insult your customer by telling them that by completing this bogus survey they'll be entered into some random contest to win a trip to a fake holiday destination.  First of all everyone knows that no one ever wins those things.  And second of all....well the fact that no one ever wins is enough.

If you are serious about listening to the Voice of your Customer and you are going to use on-line surveys then do not farm it out to a 3rd party marketing group.  Do it the old fashioned way.  Pay your customers for their valuable time with a 5% off coupon.  Don't make them give personal contact information if they choose not to.  And allow them to be as open ended in their feedback as possible.  The following two simple questions with unlimited room to write free-form responses before printing off a 5% off coupon will suffice:

1. Please describe how our organization adds Value to you.
2. Please describe all aspects of your experience with us you feel is Waste.

To be sure it will take more time to sift through the written responses.  But your organization will have a much more objecive description of what you do that adds Value.  And you will have customers much more willing to help you along your Lean journey.

@leanmind