For years it seemed companies didn’t care what their customers thought about their goods and services. Along came foreign competition and American companies began becoming more customer conscious.

But with the widespread proliferation of the Internet the game really changed. With a few clicks you could find out how people who already consumed the product liked or disliked it.

Even as recently as a few years ago, I really felt that companies cared about my customer experience. But that has changed. Now it seems that some companies concentrate more on getting high customer scores than focusing on the kinds of service that really deserve high customer praise.

Here are some examples you might have noticed yourself:

* you are dropping off a product for service and before the job has even begun the service writer asks that you give his company “perfect 10’s” – the “score” seems more important than your opinion of the work done (the work hadn’t even started)

* you are at a restaurant, your food has just been served and the waiter asks if you are enjoying your meal – the obligatory question has been posed but the action is to show they care by asking but since you haven’t eaten anything yet there isn’t a true interest in your dining experience

Do surveys and informal inquiries have their place for improving customer service experiences? Absolutely! But let’s not let measurement of the experience substitute for true customer satisfaction. Nor should we think that a robotic asking of a customer satisfaction question implies that we are really taking an interest in whether your customer is satisfied.

Customers know when a “supplier” is genuinely interested in their customer experience, and when the “supplier” is just trying to get a high grade or satisfy a requirement.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 12:11 am and is filed under Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.