Quick Tip
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CLF Notesfrom the Customer Loyalty Forum &
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Survey Design Bootcamp
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 In the heat of the summer, my thoughts turn to the expected cool fall,
but also to a special delivery of Great Brook's survey workshop
content. As part of the Voice of the Customer Conference, Great Brook
will be delivering a special, one-day Survey Design Bootcamp on Monday October
25 at The International Golf Club in Bolton, Mass.
The
Bootcamp will focus on the most critical aspect of a survey program: the
questionnaire design. Without a properly constructed survey
instrument, we won't learn what we hope to learn from our survey
research project. Worse yet, we may get misleading data from flaws in
our instrument that we don't even see.
Topics covered in this workshop include:
· The steps in the
questionnaire design process
· How to figure out what questions to
ask
· Elements of a well-designed questionnaire
· How to
write good questions that avoid introducing bias
· The types of
questions used in most surveys
· Question formats - and their
impact upon reporting results
· How to generate more actionable
data
All attendees will receive a copy of my book, Customer
Surveying.
When registering, use discount code EFV2 for a $50 on my
Bootcamp. That code also entitles you to a $50 discount for the Voice
of the Customer Conference the following day.
And, if you're a
golfer, you can make arrangements to play this world-renowned course!
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An Insulting Survey Design - Yahoo Merchant Surveys
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 When training people on how to design better surveys in my survey workshops, I train these prospective surveyors on the process for putting together a survey with the elements of a survey instrument. There's good and bad practices in piecing together the different elements. I try to develop a sense of good practice in part by looking at bad examples. But sometimes helping people design better surveys is simple a matter of applying basic common sense - and The Golden Rule.
In this new article I review the Yahoo Merchant Survey, which I received after buying an item from a Yahoo merchant. I've taken a lot of surveys and never have I been insulted the way the designers of this survey insulted me. And the survey's failures are entirely the designers. Read the full article, and you'll see what I mean.
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Survey Workshop Webinar Series
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This August, Great Brook will again be delivering our survey workshop via webinar format in conjunction with The Call Center School. If travel budgets restrict attending one of our live sessions, this is the way to go. We cover most all the same content.
The series will consist of 8, 90-minute sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays in August at 11 AM ET. Sign up for as many classes as you want or for all of them and get a $400 discount. Note the registration price is for one web session at which multiple people in your organization could attend.
Follow the link for more information on each session and to register.
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Voice the Customer Conference
| Great Brook is a co-producer of the Voice of the Customer Conference, scheduled for October 25-27 at the beautiful International Golf Club in Bolton, Mass.
This conference focuses on creating conversations with our customers to engage and learn from them, creating a more loyal customer base. This year the focus from our service industry speakers will be on the techniques for dealing with all those "customer voices" that are out there. The style of the conference mirrors the content; our format engages the audience to interact with the speakers who are all support industry practitioners.
The main conference is Tuesday October 26. October 25 will be Great Brook's Survey Design Bootcamp, and October 27 will feature a series of half-day workshops. Follow the link for more information and to register. When registering, use discount code EFV2 for a $50 discount for the main Conference and for my Bootcamp.
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Washington DC Survey Workshop Classes
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Great Brook will be delivering its acclaimed Survey Design & Data Analysis Workshops in the Embassy Suites in Old Town Alexandria VA, October 5 to 7. These workshops provide the background needed to confidently conduct a survey project or be a knowledgeable partner with a surveying firm.
The above links have descriptions of the workshop and here you'll find event details. Remember to use our secure registration form, and remember that Great Brook has a GSA contract, GS-02F-0126U.
Future class schedule:
- Kuala Lumpur, October 2010
- Dubai, November 2010
- Phoenix, AZ, February 2011
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From the Bookshelf
| Singapore Airline's Balancing Act, by Loizos Heracleous and Jochen Wirtz, Harvard Business Review, August 2010.
Singapore Air (SIA) is renowned as the best airline in customer service, but did you know they are also the low-cost airline? We normally think that high levels of service require a higher cost structure, but SIA shows that higher quality can result in a lower cost structure. The article gives many examples of how SIA executes the dual strategy of
delivering high value while driving down costs. These lessons can go
beyond the airline industry.
The authors contend the company does this "by managing four paradoxes: pro viding service excellence cost-effectively; innovating in both a centralized and a decentralized manner; being a technology leader and a follower; and achieving standardization and personalization in its processes."
The first and last paradoxes are most interesting for those of us in services. In manufacturing the "Cost of Quality" model, where a dollar invested in prevention reduces many dollars of failures, has been well established empirically. But does the same relationship hold for labor-intensive services? The authors argue SIA shows it can.
SIA invests in new planes to drastically reduce repair costs, fewer delayed takeoffs, and increased revenue from higher plane uptime. Employees undergo constant rigorous training, imbuing them in the culture of the company, which includes delivering returns to shareholders. "It [SIA] instills in employees a certain pride in working for the company, and they come to identify with its reputation. SIA's crew members and managers alike say that ser vice is in their blood."
Crews are always looking for areas to reduce costs without affecting the service experience, in part because employees get bonuses based upon profitability. Money spent that defines SIA's premium positioning, and thus premium fares, is valued, but if it doesn't support that positioning, the expense will be questioned. For example, headquarters operates in a lean fashion and support functions get outsourced. SIA is also a hard negotiator with its suppliers. The result is that SIA's cost structure is well below industry average. Cost per available seat-kilometer was 4.58 cents versus 5 to 6 cents for US budget carriers.
So how do they deliver a high level of service? Like most repeatable service processes, SIA standardizes process where possible to achieve efficiencies, but the "wow" factor comes from personalization. The standardized tasks give the well-trained crews the time to be perceptive of customer's unspoken needs. In fact, SIA has a higher crew to passenger ratio to give the crew time to personalize the service.
Oddly, I've flown SIA once coming home from Singapore and wasn't impressed. The plane was an old, tired 747 with a broken entertainment system. The seat foam had long been compressed by a thousand butts, and I found the crew to be standoffish. In contrast I have found All Nippon Air to be a more positive experience. On my next SIA trip I'll be looking for the promised experience.
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New Arrivals
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Remember the song Muskrat Love? (okay, I'm dating myself...) Well, here's the result of muskrat love. Our offices are on the edge of what was once a cranberry bog, but is now a beaver pond. Muskrats Susie and Muskrat Sam have made a home here and 3 young kits come out and feed on the clover in our grass. Cute beyond words... Thankfully, they don't want to get into the gardens. |
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Thanks for perusing our newsletter. We hope you found it interesting and valuable.
Sincerely,
Fred Van Bennekom
Great Brook
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