If you have ever read a Lean book, blog or article, youâll know that âvalueâ is defined by the customer. While often referenced, we donât spend enough time thinking about what this really means.
What Do Customers Truly Want?
Henry Ford reportedly once said, âIf Iâd asked my customers what they wanted; theyâd have said a faster horse.â While perhaps not terribly empathetic, Henry had it right. Sometimes customers donât know what they truly want. They may be hampered by their own assumptions, not realizing that thereâs a better solution out there somewhere.
Or there may be different people or separate groups within one customer who want different things. Iâve been at several customer meetings where the Purchasing and Engineering representatives disagreed about our supplier performance. A perfect response or solution for one was awful for the other. Subsequently, one group loved dealing with us as a supplierâand the otherâĶnot so much.
Sometimes customers donât know what they truly want. They may be hampered by their own assumptions, not realizing that thereâs a better solution out there somewhere.
What Drives Customer Feedback?
In these instances, it doesnât take long to come to the conclusion that you canât please everybody all the time. As the adage goes: âCheap, fast or good. Pick two.â Inevitably, this leaves someone disappointed. When those disappointed people are the ones who fill out your Market Feedback Analysis (MFA), your QMS-complaint customer survey or your employee satisfaction survey, you can rest assured youâll be receiving some less-than-stellar feedback.
That feedback can be damaging; sometimes severely so. Companies can lose customers, people can lose jobs and, in some extreme cases, entire shops go out of business. Customer feedback is serious business, and should be treated that way.
Customer feedback is serious business, and should be treated that way.
As I write this, weâre in the thick of shopping for Christmas and, as a lot of people are doing, weâre completing the bulk of our shopping online. Not only is it more convenient than going out to stores, itâs way more efficient, much less aggravating, and often less expensive. So whatâs not to love?
Part of my process (being an engineer, I like to say that I canât help it) is to do a lot of research on products before I buy them, which I also do online. Part of that research is reading the reviews that people leave for products. If there seems to be an emerging patternâpoor workmanship, inferior packaging leading to damage, long delivery times, what have youâIâll move on and look elsewhere. No sense in following others down a path of inevitability, right?
The Trouble With Customer Reviews
Hereâs the issue: Reviews are suspect. Heck, lots of reviews arenât even real. Thereâs literally a whole industry built around writing and posting fake reviews (both positive and negative) on sites like Amazon and Google. My friend Mark Graban posts and tweets about this issue as it exists on Amazon Books, where it appears to be pretty rampant. This is more than just disheartening, itâs problematic. At an extreme, it undermines the trust within a social network and makes everything, no matter the source, questionable.
At our firm, we get these âoffersâ probably once a month. These folks claim that by posting many 5-star reviews, we will enjoy âhigher Google rankingsâ and âa guaranteed 50% increase in website traffic.â These reviews are all fake, of course, and we never take them up on their offers, but honestlyâif we did, how could anyone tell?
Another method some employ is to payâor offer rebates toâactual customers for good reviews. We recently had a roof repair done at our house by a local company. Iâd done my research (which included reading online reviews), and they checked out. They did the work satisfactorilyâthey were on time, did the work pretty quickly, and did an overall good job. I wasnât necessarily âwowed,â but I was certainly satisfied, and grateful that I didnât have to find time to perform the work myself.
When it came time to pay the bill, the owner offered me a $50 discount in exchange for a â5-star Google review.â I politely declined. I didnât challenge him on itâI was pretty sure I wasnât going to convince him that doing such a thing was mildly unethicalâbut I remember thinking, âWouldnât it be better to ask me how I actually felt about how the job went, then take that feedback and somehow incorporate it to make your processes better?â
Wouldnât it be better to ask me how I actually felt about how the job went, then take that feedback and somehow incorporate it to make your processes better?
True Customer Feedback Makes You Better
Thatâs the soul of Kaizen after all and, in the end, will only help his company to be better and thus provide consistent 5-star service. As consumers merely looking at online ratings, though, we canât tell the difference. As I write this, his company has 105 5-star reviews on Google, and an overall rating of 5/5. Undoubtedly, this helps him win more business when, as I did, people look him up and read the online reviews.
This example is notably less severe than having a bunch of flat-out fake reviews, and I believe that if his company were actually performing âbadâ work, those reviews would get posted with some regularity. My belief is that they do good work (I actually spoke to people I know personally before hiring him, so I felt confident that I was making a good choice), and that heâs just a local guy trying to build up his business.
While some reviews may not be fake or false, they may be incorrect. Consider this Google review of a local paving company (redacted):
As you can tell, âHeatherâ never removed her review as the owner requestedâsince I could still find it. Overall, this companyâs reviews are positiveâan average score of 4.6 out of 22 reviews is pretty good for a small, local company that only a smattering of people will use once in a lifetime. But what if the scores were different? With only a couple more 1-star reviews their overall score would drop quite a bit and, when viewed on the front page of Google, may cause potential customers to move past their company without any investigation.
In this particular case, itâs pretty clear that Heather either confused them with another company, or she was being duped by someone merely claiming to be from this company in and effort to steal her money (this has been known to happen around here with paving contractors). Either wayâthe real company is paying the price for this bad review, even though they havenât done anything wrong.
Whatâs the Story Behind the Data?
Donât get me wrong: data is important, but itâs only part of the story. The other, perhaps more important part, is whatâs behind the data. This is often hard to know, and can take a fair bit of investigation. For instance, an employment candidate may have poor reviews in his/her file, or receive a bad referral, but what is the data behind those? Is the employee really âbadâ or were they merely subject to the outcomes of bad processes? And what about the reviewer who gave the marks? Do they actually know what theyâre talking about and can we trust them and their report? What are their motivations?
Data is important, but itâs only part of the story. The other, perhaps more important part, is whatâs behind the data.
Different than metrics and KPIâs, ratings are subjective. They include all the conscious and unconscious biases from the rater, and canât be reliably treated as âabsolutes.â Theyâre inherently suspect for that reasonâeven more so when you consider that people purposely try to manipulate them on occasion (both positively and negatively).
Within the industry, we deal with ratings all the time. Customer survey feedback and employee satisfaction survey results can be skewed by bias and individual experiences. Maybe a purchasing agent at the customer was having a bad day, so instead of a bunch of â5âsâ they gave you all â4âsâ. Other times, motivations are pure, yet still yield uncertain results. What might be a â4â for me could be a â2â for someone else. Ultimately, itâs relative. Ratings can reveal patterns and shifts over time, but arenât necessarily finite.
Get the Story Behind the Data
What to do? Short answer: go to the Gemba. Go see things for yourself. Talk with the people there who are doing the work and ask them about it. They are the absolute best place to go to learn about what it is they doâafter all, they do it every day! They can describe the data behind the numbers on the chartânot the perception (which is a conclusion of data) but the data itself. Anyone can give feedback that says âyour on-time delivery needs to be betterâ without having any data, but it takes intimate knowledge of the process to know what is affecting the outcome.
Talk with the people there who are doing the work and ask them about it. They are the absolute best place to go to learn about what it is they do.
Staying in contact is key. We see marked differences at clients who take the time to work with their customers and suppliers versus those who keep everyone at armâs length. This difference is apparent in their feedback, and in their growth rates (spoilerâstaying in touch is better!).
In a world that moves fastâwhere data can be easy to come byâit still remains vitally important to stay connected on a personal level. Yes it takes more time than simply reviewing data, but the benefits far outweigh the investment.