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May 13, 2005
Asking for help, but not going overboard
I'm a steadfast QuickBooks customer. I couldn't work without it, and I upgrade every year to the most current version.
That's why I immediately opened an email from the company; it wanted my help by answering a questionnaire. After all, soliciting feedback is a central tenet to growing a community of customer evangelists.
"The survey should take you approximately 20 minutes to complete," the unsigned email said.
Oh lord. There's no way on this earth or any other that I can set aside 20 minutes (or more) to take a survey that I guess will be brimming with questions measuring my satisfaction levels. (Also a dumb idea.) I'm a devoted customer, but the company has not emotionally engaged me nor provided me with a person to whom I can focus my loyalty. Right now, loaning big, anonymous QuickBooks 20 minutes of my time is not in the cards.
However, a customer advisory board might. But a CAB requires more effort than throwing a net across all customers with an email request to complete a survey, praying for a 5 percent completion rate.
QuickBooks (and other companies of their size) would do well to pare their big customer surveys to a few questions, rely on call center to compile data on problems and opportunities and open itself up to customer advisory boards for shaping its strategic goals.
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Funny you should mention a CAB Ben. I have a major project going on right now trying to get one kicked off. In a customer focused company that yearns to provide value for it's customers, this is a no-brainer. The only barrier is ensuring that you're adding as much value for the customer and they're adding for you!
I felt I had deja vu when I just read your post. I am also a Quick Books user and received the same email - and I went through exactly the same thought process about filling in the survey. Too much thinking about touchy feely things I don't have time for right now. If it was 5 mins I would have done it.
Did they really need all that information or could they have pared it down to a few essential questions with an open ended question at the end for those who wanted to say more?
Having once been a telephone interviewer for a market research company (where we called business owners out of the blue and asked them to participate in phone surveys 20, 30, sometimes even 40 minutes long), I'm not surprised.
Most companies just don't get how to structure questionnaires so that they get the most feedback in the least amount of time. And too many market research companies are afraid to speak up to their clients who push to do these long surveys.
I like your suggestions... but I have to believe that a company that really cared about its customer would never have sent such a long survey in the first place.
Company committees are often the cause of excessive surveys.
A committee representing multiple company departments hires an outside company to develop the survey. Committee members all want data specific to their longer-range goals.
Quickly enough, the survey length grows to 20, 30 or 40 minutes as the survey company swallows hard, as Jim described.
As a member of a 50 person Microsoft customer advisory council for one of their products, this is an incredible experience.
Discussing your needs and issues directly with the people designing and building the solution is powerful. Your needs don't get filtered, diluted and interpreted by sales and other departments along the way. You get to tell the product managers directly what's great and what really sucks. You also get to hear from them directly how they plan to address your needs.
It breeds a level of candor you rarely see these days. We aren't there to tear each other down but to ensure we all deliver a better product.
The council members will tend to organize into subgroups as we find other members with similar needs. This allows us to collaborate and synthesize better feature requests with suggested answers to the product team.
We typically meet for 4 days in Seattle *at our expense* and do this twice a year. We also tend to meet from 7:30 to 5 with nightly activities. So you are eating, drinking and living this product all day for 4 days. Total immersion brings a clarity of thought that a survey would not.
Since the council has international members, we have people flying 20+ hours to attend because they feel it is that important. We also have an email list and a SharePoint site for ongoing collaboration and conversations. We can share best practices, problems, ideas, documentation, etc. The experience develops strong bonds between the participants since the face to face meetings are but a small part.
It's bred a network of strong product fans. We do customer references, speaking engagements, marketing studies and other work for the product team as part of our tenure.
We become the extended sales team. Also, because we actually use the product in the real world, we do a better job of explaining its benefits. We've committed, so we work hard to spread the word.
All of this builds ownership and trust in the product that you wouldn't normally see. It also builds excitement in your advisory group as new releases come out. People in the group can point to something in the new release and say, "I helped make that happen".
I would highly recommend this approach to anyone thinking about it.
Treb, thanks for the terrific write-up. Which product is it?
Microsoft has been making a lot of strides in the past two years about developing its core base of evangelists.
It's Microsoft Project Server 2003.
One thing I left out in the previous post. We were nominated to the council by third party vendors, support staff, sales, etc. MS didn't pick people at random. Instead, they looked for customers that had already demonstrated a heightened level of interest in the product.
I would also agree with your assessment of Microsoft. Microsoft is opening up and beginning to realize great gains from it. I expect great things to come from this openess in the coming years.
Hi Ben and Laura:
As Director of Customer Advocacy for QuickBooks, I have to say I winced at your posts. What you say is very true. We have a lot of people here who want to know all kinds of things about our customers, all with the best intentions, and yet in the process we lose sight of the fact that our customers are very busy people and frankly have a lot of other stuff on their mind besides QuickBooks! We recognized this issue, and we've made some strides in reducing the number and length of surveys, ensuring that we capture and actually read through open-ended feedback, and closing the loop back 1:1 with customers who have given us feedback. But we need to do better. Thanks for calling us on this. Your posts have made the rounds of our leadership and that's frankly helping us make progress toward our number one goal: creating great end-to-end experiences for our customers.
In the meantime, if you are interested in engaging further, take a look at our customer community and blogs at www.quickbooksgroup.com.
Thanks for being such great customers of QuickBooks, and caring enough to call us on the carpet as needed ;)
Eleanor
Eleanor: Thanks for commenting.
I'm happy to hear that Intuit is listening; now I'll look forward to seeing how the QuickBooks group reaches out to its customer evangelists.
If you're really looking for a simple measure of customer satisfaction, then you need to check out Frederick Reichheld's 'The One Number You Need to Grow,' an HBR article you can get at Amazon. (http://tinyurl.com/aeo9f)
The philosophy is surprising simple and poignant. Customer satisfaction, as measured by willingness to recommend your product or service, is the single key measurement to growth as company. It is only by finding and growing customers who are willing to risk their own reputation by promoting your brand (i.e., customer evangelists) will you achieve consistent growth.
If you care about your product, read the article.
Interesting that you should mention the "Net Promoter" concept Jeffrey. We've been working with Fred and measuring our business using this concept for the past couple of years.
It's been very eye-opening for the team, and has helped us focus our efforts on things that matter most to customers. It's been a great journey so far, although we still have a long way to go!
I'd be interested to hear from others who have worked with this approach...
Eleanor
