The good news is, it’s easy and cheap. The bad news is, it’s easy and cheap.

Let’s start with the good news. There are now dozens of vendors that allow you to create, distribute and analyze surveys using on-line tools. Most offer inexpensive or free versions, with more robust options available at somewhat higher prices. Provided the people you want to survey have email addresses, you can have a questionnaire written and sent out in a few hours, and you can see the results real-time as they come back. This is a vast improvement from the old days, when surveys could cost thousands of dollars and reports wouldn’t be ready for weeks.

Now for the bad news. With almost no cost and few barriers to sending out surveys, just about anyone can do it. And just about everyone does.

Customers and employees – that’s you and me – are continuously deluged with survey requests. Everywhere we turn, someone is begging us to stop what we’re doing and give away our information, our opinions, our feedback. After awhile it seems less like research and more like panhandling. And the result, predictably, is widespread respondent fatigue.

Even as the quantity of survey requests has been going up, the quality of survey design has been going down. Now that research professionals are taken out of the process, it is more likely that the surveys we receive will include ambiguous, double-barreled, redundant or illogical questions. It isn’t that the people writing the questions are thoughtless; they just don’t have the time, training or experience to produce a really effective survey instrument.

It gets worse. Large organizations with many departments and project teams generate innumerable surveys to elicit feedback from their employees. But few have developed company-wide design standards, distribution rules or information sharing capabilities. That means a lot of lost synergy. Data aren’t shared; rating scales don’t match; similar questions are worded differently on different questionnaires. The same employees show up on multiple survey distribution lists and get asked the same questions over and over.

What’s the solution? Well, we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Cheap, easy survey tools are here to stay. But we can be more thoughtful about how we use surveys.

For example:

• Check with colleagues in other departments to see if the information has already been collected.
• Create approved survey templates and a library of questions with standardized wording.
• Keep surveys short and focused. No “questionnaires by committee” and no “nice-to-know” questions.
• Pre-test all surveys with a small sample to make sure the questions are clear and appropriate.
• Keep a central database of respondents to make sure the same people aren’t over-surveyed.

So what do you think of these ideas? Please give us your rating on a one-to-five scale, where “1″ means “Excellent” and “5″ means “Fantastic”.

We promise to send you a report.

Peter Gurney and Christine Frishholz

We have heard this claim made dozens of times over the years, from managers in many lines of business. Companies set out to raise the bar on their service quality, and then decide that incremental improvement isn’t enough – they want to be “The Nordstrom”.

It’s a fine ambition. But what does it mean?

In a general sense, what these managers probably mean is that they would like a reputation like Nordstrom’s. They want their company to be synonymous with service excellence –  to deliver service that is not just great, but iconic, where customers tell starry-eyed stories about their experiences.

It’s certainly good to aim high, but from a practical standpoint being The Nordstrom is a bit problematic. Nordstrom does not approach service quality as a corporate program or initiative. There isn’t a formula to follow, just four generations of building a nearly ideal service culture.

There are, however, some useful observations to be made about how Nordstrom supports its culture. Three points in particular stand out:

A relentless and unabashed focus on selling. Yes, selling. Go behind the scenes at a Nordstrom store and you will find the hallways plastered with sales statistics, showing goals and performance figures down to the level of the individual employee. And not just monthly or weekly figures, but daily results as well. Many employees can even tell you what their hourly sales goals are.

But the difference between Nordstrom and many other organizations is that the Nordstrom sales ethic is inextricably linked with the desire to delight customers. Nordstrom employees reason that customers want nothing more than to buy Nordstrom’s merchandise.  Why else would they come into the store? It is every employee’s job to make sure that customers are thrilled with their purchase choices and their shopping experience. That’s the reason the company’s return policy is so liberal, and why employees will go the extra mile – or 10 miles if necessary – to make sure that nothing stands in the way of the customers’ desire to come back and buy more.

Compare that approach with the dreary, gratuitous up-selling and cross-selling that consumers encounter so often at stores, restaurants, banks and car rental agencies.  Does that waiter really care if you’re delighted with the supersized soda? Does the salesperson truly think you’ll be thrilled with the extended warranty? Does the car rental agent agonize over whether it’s in your best interest to purchase the full tank of gas? Probably not. But until they do, they will never be The Nordstrom.

A willingness to trust employees. Nordstrom’s golden rule for employees is well-known: “Use good judgment in all situations”.  (Actually, we were informed by a senior Nordstrom executive that that there are two other rules: “Don’t chew gum on the floor” and “Don’t steal the merchandise”. We’re not quite sure if he was pulling our leg.) Companies are forever talking about employee empowerment and debating how far to take it, but Nordstrom is one of the few large companies that truly trusts its employees to do the right thing for the customer. This creates a culture in which workers feel free to take the initiative and be creative when interacting with customers and solving problems. Those tales of heroic service that Nordstrom is so justly famous for (see below) are only possible in an environment where employees are trusted to use their best judgment.

A culture of story-telling. In daily pre-shift meetings at Nordstrom stores, employees share detailed stories about their recent interactions with customers. In the hallways of Nordstrom’s executive offices, letters from customers are mounted on the walls, enlarged and framed so they can’t possibly be ignored by the people who run the company. On the desk of Pete Nordstrom, the company’s President of Merchandising, sit books full of letters from customers and employees, each telling a story about a memorable experience they had with Nordstrom.

Nordstrom employees do not just repeat customer stories, they constantly look for opportunities to create their own. They know that most customer interactions will be fairly routine, but that from time to time exceptional circumstances will arise. Those circumstances can lead to memorable tales, and those tales are more powerful than any advertising the company can buy.

Which brings us back to a relentless and unabashed focus on selling.

In a recent study of 140 large firms by The Tempkin Group, 11% of respondents said their firm is currently a customer experience leader – but 65% say they aspire to be a leader. Emulating Nordstrom’s practices may not be enough make these companies The Nordstrom, but it’s certainly worth looking into.

If you’d like to learn more about Nordstrom’s history and service practices, we recommend you check out the website of Robert Spector, author of The Nordstrom Way: http://www.robertspector.com/.

by Peter Gurney and Christine Frishholz

The Tire Story

Among all the many stories about Nordstrom’s service, there is one that is particularly iconic among the company’s employees: A customer came in to a newly opened Nordstrom store in Alaska and demanded to return two truck tires. It seems the store location was previously occupied by an auto parts supplier. Even though Nordstrom does not sell tires, the manager gave the man a refund, no questions asked.

This is known in within Nordstrom as “The Tire Story”, and employees are always looking for opportunities to create a comparably memorable tale.

Here’s a recent one: A security worker at a Nordstrom store noticed a customer on her hands and knees. When he asked what was wrong, the customer informed him that she may have lost a diamond from her ring when she was shopping the day before. The employee helped the customer look, but they could not find the diamond. He then when into the maintenance area and proceeded to empty out the bags from all the vacuum cleaners that had been used to clean the store the previous evening. He found the diamond, and created his own “tire story”.

Here’s another, also recent: A customer called a Nordstrom store and said she had lost a hubcap while driving away. Would someone see if it was near the store? An employee immediately ran out to the road and found the hubcap. But she didn’t simply call the customer to return it. First she washed and polished the hubcap so it would look presentable for the customer.

Do you have a Tire Story from your company? Let us know. We’d love to hear it.

The Cicerone Group recently teamed up with two market research companies, NetReflector and GMI, to conduct the first nationwide consumer survey to rank US cities by the quality of their service. We wanted to find out what travelers thought about the service they received when they visited different areas – service from all sources, including hotels, restaurants, stores, banks, taxis, etc .

Results from the survey show that 85% of travelers to US cities consider customer service to be very important to the overall quality of their visit. That’s because customers interact with a wide range of companies and government agencies when they travel, and those interactions help shape the memories of their visit and their opinion of the area. Cities that provide consistently friendly and efficient service to travelers can increase their attractiveness as a destination, bringing much-needed revenue to the area. On the other hand, poor service experiences, particularly when they result in long waits, added expense or disrupted plans, can harm a city’s reputation and unfavorably influence a visitor’s intention to come back for future visits.

So where can travelers find the best service? Our survey shows that among the 30 largest US cities, the top three for customer service are all in the South. Charlotte came in as number one, closely followed by Nashville and Austin. Tied for fourth place are three Western cities: Seattle, Portland and Las Vegas. Among the top ten, none are located in the East, and only one – Columbus, which comes in tenth place – is in the Midwest.

While Charlotte gets top honors for overall customer service, Seattle is rated number one for the knowledge of its service providers. We included a rating for knowledge because the ability to offer reliable information and efficient service is a major part of satisfying customers. This is particularly true when people are traveling in unfamiliar areas. It makes a great impression if service providers are not only knowledgeable about their own business, but are also informed about the region and can act as good-will ambassadors.

Not surprisingly, travelers reported that hotels and restaurants generally give the best customer service. Their worst experiences tend to involve transportation providers, with taxis, car rental companies and airlines receiving the lowest ratings.

There are plenty of actions that cities can take to improve their quality of service, not only for visitors, but for residents as well. They can raise awareness of the importance of good service among local companies and government agencies, provide service training, develop regional service standards, and offer recognition to top service providers in their area. And city governments don’t need to act alone. They can enlist the help of a variety of organizations with a vested interest in attracting visitors, such as Convention and Visitors Bureaus, Chambers of Commerce and Economic Development Councils.

How does your city rank? Click on this link and you can read the entire report summary: US Cities Customer Service Rankings.

By Christine Frishholz and Peter Gurney

I love bad service. Rude clerks, pushy salespeople, incompetent call agents, convoluted phone systems – I like them all. It isn’t the actual service experiences that I enjoy, but the fact that they increase my value as a conversationalist.

This is because bad service makes a good story. Any time I’m with a group of people and the conversation starts to drag, I just bring up my latest service horror story and the energy instantly picks up. Everyone starts competing to tell the best “worst” story, delighting each other with their tales of woe and indignation.

Good service isn’t nearly as interesting as bad service, of course. It simply doesn’t have the same dramatic punch.  And because bad service is more interesting, people talk about it more.

We’ve all heard the claim than customers will tell 10 times more people about a negative experience than a positive one. My own research supports this proposition, although the actual ratio of negative to positive tales tends to vary by industry. In the late ‘90’s the company I worked for had a web site that collected service hero and horror stories from across industries, and we regularly found that the negative examples outnumbered the positive by about four to one. More recently, while working for a large financial institution, I analyzed several years’ worth of comments about retail banks from a consumer feedback site. The ratio of complaints to compliments was a little more than 10 to 1 overall, but it varied considerably by bank, from about 7 to 1 to more than 26 to 1 (I won’t name names, but based on their customer satisfaction ratings there were no surprises as to which banks had the most complaints relative to compliments).

But it isn’t simply that customers talk about bad service more often than good service. They also tell their stories in more detail. In the banking analysis I mentioned above, we discovered that the complaints contained about 46% more content than the compliments. More text characters, more words, more information.

So – bad service results in both more stories and longer stories than good service. But that’s not all. There are also differences in the way these stories are constructed. Tales of bad service tend to have an epic form, with a valiant hero (the customer) battling an evil villain (the company). There is often lots of dialog, in which the narrator gets all the best lines, and a plenty of action, in which every thrust and parry of the battle is described in detail. The whole thing is exciting and memorable for both the narrator and the audience.

Tales of good service are much different. They also have a hero, but the hero tends to be the company or the service employee rather than the narrator. If you’re the one telling the story, this isn’t nearly as interesting as talking about yourself.

Conspicuously missing from these tales of good service is a convincing villain. If you’re telling a story and you want to engage your audience, this is a serious weakness. As every actor and writer knows, villains make more interesting characters than heroes. Dudley Do-Right may be a great guy, but it’s Snidley Whiplash who always steals the scene.

Not all stories about good service are bland; some are more memorable and repeatable than others. Stories that include a surprise or an extraordinary act can generate plenty of interest and re-telling. And even when tales of good service are not particularly exciting, there is no question that good service builds trust and leads to referrals and retention. But realistically, it is bad service that is likely to generate the most story-telling “buzz”.

The question is, what do companies do about that?

One thing they can do is to begin building a culture of story-telling and story-listening within their organization. Many companies have become over-reliant on survey results and traditional customer feedback methods. By listening more carefully to what customers are telling each other, and to the type of language and structure they use in their stories, a much richer picture of their experience emerges.

Customer stories can be woven into training sessions, team meetings, and internal communications. Through constant story-telling and listening, it becomes easier for employees to cast themselves as characters in a narrative rather than as ratings on a survey. By better understanding their role in customer stories and how they might be portrayed, they begin to take control of the narrative and promote the kind of customer conversations that build loyalty and attract new business.

We’d love to hear how your organization approaches this topic. How do you capture word-of-mouth and what do you do with the information?  How have you made story-telling part of your employee culture?

Leave a comment or drop us a line. We’ll share responses in a future post.

Peter Gurney

In fact, the organization already exists. It’s called the National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE). Unfortunately, it isn’t in the US. NISE is an agency in Barbados, a lovely island in the Caribbean that has decided to take service quality seriously.

Among NISE’s many activities is to organize benchmarking tours to service-leading companies around the world. Last September, a Barbadian delegation traveled to Seattle, where they visited a variety of organizations known for innovative service practices. My colleague, Christine Frishholz, and I had the honor to host the delegation.

The selection of Seattle as a destination makes perfect sense.  The Pacific Northwest is known for technology, airplanes and coffee shops, but it has also earned a reputation as a center of excellence for customer service. The area is home to an impressive list of companies that regularly earn top rankings in national customer satisfaction surveys, including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Costco, Amazon, Alaska Airlines and REI. Over the course of a week, Christine and I introduced the delegates to a number of these Seattle-area companies, where they received presentations, tours and demonstrations from both executives and front-line service workers.

Many of the showcased companies have developed distinctive approaches to service delivery, and some have created novel technology and management practices to further their service strategies. We’ll discuss some of these innovations in later posts, but for now I’d like to point out a few of the common threads that became evident as our tour progressed.

First, and most important, was the focus on employees. We were impressed to learn how many of the service leaders we visited are also listed among Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Over and over, we heard executives speak passionately about their company’s loyalty to its employees. Particularly interesting were revelations into the way that new hires are trained and initiated into these organizations. In many cases, technical “job training” is considered secondary, to be introduced only after employees are thoroughly immersed in the company’s culture, history and values. Because of their emphasis on the employee experience, these companies have been able to attract and retain the best candidates, and to create a culture of pride that is evident to their customers.

Second, nearly every company we visited emphasized community service, at both a corporate and an individual employee level. For these organizations, customer service and community service were seen as two sides of the same coin. Most of them provide a substantial amount of paid time off for employees to do volunteer work, and many use community service activities as an integral part of their training and team-building programs. The result is that they establish a genuine connection with their neighbors and customers, which effectively differentiates them in the marketplace.

The third common message we heard is that sales and service are interchangeable. We were invited to a pre-shift meeting at a Nordstrom store, where the department managers shared their daily sales targets and talked about how superior service would enable them to achieve their financial goals. Sales wasn’t seen as a dirty word – they recognized that customers wanted nothing more than to make purchases, so long as they were making the best purchases from the most trusted source. Even at REI, a co-op that returns its profits to its members at the end of the year, effective selling is seen as a way to serve customers well. Their CEO’s mantra: “No mission without margin.”

Finally, these companies are genuinely modest about their achievements. As we listened to their representatives describe their approach to serving customers, we heard the same phrases over and over: “We’re still far from perfect”, “We have a long way to go”, “We’re always working at getting better”. It seemed that the companies with the best service were the most reluctant to take credit for it. Pete Nordstrom, President of Merchandising at – yes, Nordstrom – invited the delegates to his company’s corporate offices and talked at length about the organization his family built over four generations. He was humble about the company’s reputation for service, and claimed that their principle strategy was to trust employees to do the best thing for customers.

Of course, being a service leader isn’t solely a result of culture, values and good intentions. Superior service also requires lots hard work and significant investment in technology, training, incentives, process standardization, etc. All of the companies we met with have made these investments, although their specific strategies and choices have varied considerably.  Nevertheless, when the delegation from Barbados met at the end of the tour to discuss their observations, it was these common lessons about focusing on employees and the community, service as a sales strategy and continuous service improvement, that made the strongest impressions.

Peter Gurney

Click here to see a list of the companies on the Service Benchmarking Tour . . .

Can Nordstrom Make Barbados Nicer?. . .

Peter Gurney