Many organizations use waiting time and processing speed as key measures of service quality. This is fine – as long as they don’t become the only metrics that matter. An obsession with such ‘numbers’ can make you lose sight of what is really important: how your customers experience what you are doing for them rather than how efficient your systems and processes are.

Few leaders ‘meet employees where they are’ and effectively translate scores and targets into the ideas and actions employees care about.

To help your employees understand and care about quantitative measures, consider and then take these five steps:

Step One: Identify and quantify the changes you want to achieve
Step Two: Design and deliver effective communications
Step Three: Measure intent first, not outcomes
Step Four: Design effective systems and processes for support
Step Five: Realize your managers are more important than you

Businesses and communities for years have developed countless theories and ‘best practices’ to either Get Employees Who Care (Service Recruitment – Building Block #3) or to Get Employees To Care (Rewards and Recognition – Building Block #5)

Increasingly, compensations and appraisals are now being tied to % improvements in service indexes.

Here’s the problem:

Employees don’t live in the world of index improvements. Many may not even understand it.

Customer focused surveys frequently collect data that is customer-specific. This ensures a regular flow of insights that can lead to action. Common insights from frequent surveys may be “rolled up” to provide an aggregate view of a market or a high level view of systemic issues in an organization.

This is in contrast to an occasional (eg: annual) survey that starts at high level then “drills down”…

Idea #3:  Your survey must drive action, not settle for analysis only
Your customer survey must drive new action inside your organization. Don’t allow your survey process to become disconnected from the practical levers of power.
You have a problem if there is a long lag time after a survey and your people ask “So what did

Customer focused surveys and other feedback mechanisms are commonly used to assess customer satisfaction and loyalty. In some companies, however, surveys can become entrenched and self-sustaining, generating mountains of data without a corresponding volume of valuable actions…