Your company probably collects feedback about customers’ experiences. You take those responses, analyze them, and act on them. But think about when someone asked you a question and the question did not fit with how you thought about the issue. You may have said “yes, I agree” just because you did not know what else to say. That person took your response as meaningful and well-thought out, but it might not have been. Customers are often in this situation when they get surveys and it highlights two important shortcomings of customer feedback programs: 1) companies assume their questions fit how customers think about the experience and 2) companies trust that customer responses are fully thought out.
Let’s explore this further. Someone at the office asks you “Would you recommend John for this new project?” You might say “Yes”, “No”, or “I’m not sure“ (sounds like a Net Promoter Score). If I dig deeper and ask “What is the reason for your answer?” you might say “I feel he’s pushy” or maybe “He’s a real team player.” I might then ask “What makes you think he was a team player?” Now, three questions in, you will share specific experiences to support your view.
This type of experience probably feels familiar. A person is asked something and it takes a series of questions to get to the details. Psychologists know why this happens. When people have multiple similar experiences over time, cognitive processes synthesize a generalized belief/feeling. A collection of experiences becomes “he is pushy” or “he is a team player.” Having a synthesized belief is very useful and efficient when you need to answer a question very quickly, like when responding to a survey.
This strategy involves two well documented psychological processes: 1) abstraction and 2) heuristics. The first is how people aggregate experiences to create a generalized belief/feeling and the second is how they use these beliefs/feelings. It happens across all aspects of human thinking and is critical to produce fast decisions without recalling many detailed experiences.
A consequence is that when asked about a relationship with a person or a company, customers don’t think through the details of their experiences but use these synthesized beliefs to answer the question. The beliefs also affect how experiences are remembered; it is easier to remember details when they are consistent with your beliefs. Pressing people to “think about your most recent experience” will not avoid these effects as this is how our brain is wired.
Does your survey design and analysis consider these cognitive processes? Probably not. Typically, customers are asked about specific experiences—usually their most recent one—in the context of their overall relationship with the company. Placed in a situation where their natural response is short circuited customers provide generalized beliefs which are generally weak for identifying tactical improvements.
How can things be improved? First, recognize that narrowly scoped questions (e.g., most recent experience) are inconsistent with how people naturally answer questions and the quality of information is poor. Imagine if in the example above the question was “Would you recommend John for this new project based on your most recent interaction with him?” That would feel awkward because you’d want to aggregate your feelings over many experiences.
Second, ask questions about the generalized beliefs people have about companies and then use operational data to identify specific CX priorities that should influence the generalized beliefs. A recent study by The Customer Obsession Advantage (COA) adopted this approach, which uses concepts consistent with how people abstract and talk about relationships.
At first it seems like a typical feedback survey asking respondents familiar overall questions about a company they have used in the past year: 1) likely to recommend, 2) have you recommended the company, 3) have you placed online reviews, and 4) will you re-purchase. Next, people are asked about nine customer obsession differentiators, as defined in Marbue Brown’s book “Blueprint for Customer Obsession.” These questions are not detailed questions about specific experiences. They ask about higher level beliefs about the overall relationship with the company and represent the layer of abstraction natural to customers, similar to the example above where we would call John pushy, a team-player, self-motivated, etc. rather than immediately recall details.
Customers’ responses on the nine differentiators were combined into an index representing the sum of their beliefs about the company and then their index scores were used to classify customers’ views of the company as 1) Customer Obsessed, 2) Customer Centric/Focused, 3) Customer Aware, and 4) Customer Indifferent. Then their index scores were compared across the overall responses and the differentiation is remarkable!
When a company is viewed overall as Customer Obsessed, performance is leaps and bounds better than when the company is viewed as Indifferent. For example, 98% of customers that believe a company is “Obsessed” say the company empowers employees to make things right for customers when there is a problem vs. 10% for “Indifferent.” Also, 75% of obsessed customers say their favored company minimizes customer effort vs. 1% for indifferent customers. Customer obsessed companies significantly outperform Customer Indifferent companies on all nine differentiators.
| Customer Obsession Differentiator | Customer Obsessed (1) | Customer Indifferent (4) |
| Deliver excellently and in the moment | 99% | 1% |
| Empower employees to make it right when things go wrong | 98% | 10% |
| Enable customers to engage when, where and how they want | 89% | 18% |
| Fix problems at the source | 78% | 1% |
| Minimize Customer Effort | 75% | 1% |
| Raise the bar and innovate relentlessly | 67% | 2% |
| Create wow moments and connections | 58% | 3% |
| Personalize touchpoints with customers | 56% | 4% |
| Give customers what they want before they know they need it | 54% | 4% |
Obsessed companies have mastered two things: 1) Deliver excellently and in the moment and 2) Empower employees to make it right. But, even in the best relationships there are some things that almost half of the customers still want: Create Wow moments, Personalize touch points, and Give customers what they want before they know they need it. The worst relationships fail on all these principles.
How do you benefit from being “Obsessed”? You get a vocal sales force for free. The top and bottom groups are very different on how they plan to act in the relationship (see below). When a customer believes a company is customer obsessed they are loud and proud and come back to purchase; at the other end few recommend the company, place online reviews (probably best), and re-purchase.
| Overall Question | Customer Obsessed (1) | Customer Indifferent (4) |
| Likely to Recommend to Others | 82% | 5% |
| Already Recommended 5+ times in past year | 42% | 15% |
| Have placed On-line Reviews | 26% | 8% |
| Absolutely will repurchase | 88% | 19% |
These insights are based on responses from 1228 customers who rated 22 companies on the nine customer obsession differentiators defined in the book “Blueprint for Customer Obsession” authored by Marbue Brown.
Dr. John Hughes is Chief Data & Analytics Officer at The Customer Obsession Advantage. He has been a trusted advisor to C-suite executives regarding CX data, analytics, and insights at some of the most iconic companies on the planet, including JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft Corporation, Verizon, PNC, Citibank, A&E, BET, Expedia, and Kodak. He helped them solve challenges such as: 1) Connecting CX to customer value and financial return, 2) Establishing the bottom-line benefit of improving CX and when it will be realized, 3) Balancing customer acquisition and retention programs to ensure they’re optimizing spend, 4) Developing KPIs that are based on VOC and meaningful to managers making decisions, and 5) Deciding how to use KPIs to compensate employees.
John is a respected thought leader for CX data and analytics within industry circles. His CX innovations have enabled businesses to reprioritize resources to 1) Achieve CX improvement targets with 80% fewer initiatives than originally planned, 2) Adopt customer acquisition and retention strategies that delivered a 30% increase in profits, and 3) Optimize staffing at peak periods and heavy traffic locations to deliver a CX boost of X points, among other significant results.
Marbue Brown is the author of the book “Blueprint for Customer Obsession” and founder of The Customer Obsession Advantage (customerobsession.net), a firm dedicated to helping companies achieve extraordinary business results through Customer Obsession. He is an accomplished customer experience executive with a track record of signature results at JP Morgan Chase, Amazon.com, Microsoft Corporation, and Cisco Systems.
