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February 20, 2006
Napsterizing customer feedback scores
Here's a bold move in trust-building: Post the results of customer surveys on your website for anyone to read. And not just the good stuff. The full, 1-10 scores.
That's what DePaul University does. Each faculty member's profile on the university's website includes links to students' evaluations of their courses. Want to know how the students of professor Alan Burns rate his course "The Internet and the Web?" All of the survey results are here. You can read how students rate his organizational skills, course difficulty, meeting of objectives and course recommendability, which is buried far too low in the results. (His course gets strong recommendation marks.)
This level of transparency, of course, is highly beneficial to prospective students trying to decide on courses and professors. For the instructor and the institution, it raises the stakes on improving teaching skills.
I asked Alan via email what he thought about his students' evaluations available for anyone to see.
"It definitely drives a need for improved quality," he said.
Washington, D.C. t-shirt maker Customink.com takes this idea to a new level. The company prominently features a composite customer satisfaction score on its front page.
But wait, there's more: The company stores all of its real-time customer feedback entries into a publicly searchable database.
Displaying the results of customer surveys conducted for anyone is a pretty powerful dashboard item for everyone in the company -- and its fans, investors and prospects -- to track service quality day-to-day, even hour-to-hour.
What a great antidote to marketing pretense. A frank presentation of customer report cards removes any patina of spin, making them pretty trustworthy. Trust is a dependent variable in evangelism.
And we're all too aware that trust and transparency are in short supply in Washington, D.C.
Technorati tags: Transparency, Marketing, DePaul, Customink, Trust, Reputation
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Here's a way to build trust with your customers, current and future: Share with the public on your website a composite customer satisfaction score on its front page. Ben McConnell, over at Church of the Customer, writes about Napsterizing Customer [Read More]
Wow - this kind of transparency is extremely forward-thinking. I wish that more businesses would embrace it.
It is an interesting direction for market honesty. For those companies who do post their scores it is away to differentiate them from their competitors.
In a customer service perspective it is allowing others to see a numerical testimonial of customer experiences. This is true providing that the businesses that use them are honest and post real numbers.
For those businesses that use this approach the rewards should be significant. It will keep them focused on their customers and force them to face the reality of the customer response.
http://customerdevelopmentcenter.com
Now I love the content of this blog, but I have one problem. This use of the word "napsterizing/napsterization"..
Napster is such an old example and metaphor on the web that comparisons are far too belated to be relevant.
Napster was a client server model, not even real p2p, so I don't think it's even a shining star of transparency--just an efficient hub and spoke distribution network of copyrighted data files.
For a good point of comparison, I would look to the community-data supported sites of this "web 2.0" era as better comparison points: del.icio.us, flickr, and wikipedia for instance.
Pete and Tim -- I think it's an idea so outlandish that it can only be attempted by the most courageous organizations. And it's so rare that it would certainly stand out and cause people to talk.
Paul -- We use the term not as an equation to the (old) Napter distribution model -- even though it did grow to 58 million users in 18 months! -- but as a metaphor for the disruption that Napster caused among the control-oriented industrial-entertainment complex.
Napter was such a disruptive phenomenon that it has nearly universal awareness.
That's the point, too. Web 2.0 is a similar metaphor but it seems more like a development platform for techies, and not as a locus for overthrowing command-and-control data dictators.
It's probably the limitations of our own addled brains here, but Jackie and I can think of no better distribution-disruption metaphor than Napster.
I've had a BizRate.com score box at the bottom of American Frame's (www.americanframe.com) web site for years. Click through to see ratings and comments. Fortunately it's usually good, but not always. For the most part it is a stand in for testimonials, probably more real.
Thanks for passing that along, Mike. I had not previously seen how BizRate makes it possible for merchants to share their customer feedback scores. Good stuff.
Good work on your great scores, too.
I strongly disagree with the use of customer feedback for non-tangible items, such as course evaluations, as these are subject to personal opinion and judgment, rather than objective evaluation of services rendered or product transactions.
As someone who as facilitated hundreds of classes each year, reading instructor evaluation and course feedback gives me little insight on the instructor, curriculum delivery and curriculum content. These evaluations are purely biased opinions, based on student attitudes, pre-conceived notions of classroom instruction and expectations (or lack thereof). Each student has a different idea of what is "too much" work performed for the course. Each student has a different idea about the "difficult[y]" of the course material. Each student reacts differently to an instructor's style and methodology. Attempting to quantify these answers is immaterial to the quality of the course and/or the instructor. When hiring instructors, I never ask for (or look at) previous course evaluations that they may have.
This is not eBay -- we are not rating a transaction. This is not BizRate -- we are not rating tangible business services provided.
I think this method of course evaluations sets a dangerous precedent. I see no connection between these evaluations and "rais[ing] the stakes on improving teaching skills." Instead, we are forced to ask instructors to "play" to the students' level for the sake of popularity and public opinion to avoid negative ratings. Just as standardized testing scores are not an accurate assessment of student ability, these types of course and instructor evaluations are also not an accurate (or even truthful) assessment.
