Customer Relationship Surveys
– Twelve Best Practices
Randall Brandt
Founder & Principal
Customer Relationship Surveys – Twelve
Best Practices
Relationship surveys are a key element in a majority of Voice of the Customer (VoC) Programs.
Nearly 8 of 10 organizations having formal VoC programs conduct relationship surveys regularly,1
Furthermore, about 1 in 4 indicate that their company’s relationship survey is the source of
customer feedback “most watched by senior management.”2
In contrast to transactional surveys, which tend to be triggered by and focused on a specific event
or transaction (e.g., a recent hotel stay, call with a customer service representative, or visit to a
bank branch), relationship surveys are designed to gauge a customer’s evaluation of his/her
cumulative experience with a brand or firm. Relationship surveys aim at capturing how a
customer feels about a brand or firm, “all things considered.”
Your organization probably conducts (or should be conducting) a relationship survey if any of the
following is true:
1. You provide products and services to the same customers on a frequent and
continuous basis (e.g., airlines or hotels serving frequent business travelers).
2. Your customers have subscribed or contracted with your organization to receive
products, services, and/or other benefits over a specified period of time (e.g.,
home security system providers serving residential customers).
3. The ownership/usage cycle of your product or service is relatively long, and
customers have periodic or regularly scheduled contacts with your
representatives (e.g., home heating and air conditioning services providers doing
annual inspections and maintenance).
4. You are a supplier or partner having representatives and/or teams who regularly
interact with and often work collaboratively with customers/clients (e.g., valueadded re-sellers of IT hardware, software, and support services).
In each of the preceding situations, customers have a chance to “keep track” of things gone well
(or not so well). They develop and/or revise expectations about what your organization can or
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cannot provide. They build an impression based on cumulative experience that has the potential
to drive their purchase decisions and behaviors over the longer-term.
So, what distinguishes really good relationship surveys from others?
No doubt, the quality of your organization’s relationship survey will require addressing issues
that are specific to your industry, and to the customers and markets your organization serves.
However, there are some characteristics and “best practices” that are built into nearly all
effective customer relationship surveys.
This paper attempts to describe twelve best practices connected to the design, administration,
and analysis of customer relationship surveys.
1 IDENTIFY AND CAPTURE THE “RIGHT” CORE CUSTOMER METRIC
Selecting the “right” core customer metric is a critical challenge in designing and administering a
customer relationship survey. Whether they choose to track overall customer satisfaction,
customer-perceived value, overall brand health, a Net Promoter Score (NPS®), or some other
measure, most organizations are trying to accomplish three common objectives:
1. They are looking for a measure that furnishes a clear overall indication of how
customers evaluate their experiences with the brand or firm.
2. They would like that measure to be a “leading indicator” of financial or other key
business results.
3. Building on the preceding two objectives, they want to understand and improve
their ability to manage the elements of the customer experience that “drive” this
metric in order to increase the odds of achieving desired business results.
Managers and executives often are tempted to pick an “off-the-shelf” measure, such as the Net
Promoter Score (NPS®). This is understandable. After all, the NPS® has been billed as the
“ultimate” measure of customer loyalty and advocacy. It is one of the most widely-used of all
core customer metrics. It is relatively easy to capture and calculate, and it has an intuitive appeal
that some managers and executives find irresistible.
There’s just one problem.
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The Net Promoter Score, like any one-size-fits-all measure, may not be the right core customer
metric for your organization. In fact, Fred Reichheld – the creator of the NPS® -- says so himself:
“Though the “would recommend” question is far and away the best singlequestion predictor of customer behavior across a range of industries, it’s not the
best for every industry.”3
My own research shows that, in some markets and industries, other measures out-perform NPS®
as predictors of business results, and with respect to identifying the elements of customer
experience that drive those results.4 Other studies have produced similar findings.5 Thus, what
works best for one company may not be best for another.
More often than not, the right core customer metric varies by industry, market characteristics,
type of customer, and/or product consumption/usage cycles. That means, as Reichheld says:
“Companies need to do their homework – they need to validate the empirical link
between survey answers and subsequent customer behavior for their own
business.”6
2 DEMONSTRATE HOW THE CORE METRIC ACTUALLY LINKS TO BUSINESS
RESULTS
Following Reichheld’s lead via the above quote, it is critical to establish how moving the needle
on your organization’s core customer metric impacts business results.
Being able to report, for example, that your company’s Net Promoter Score has increased 5
points during the past quarter probably will get senior management’s attention. However, being
able to specify what that increase means in terms of revenue growth, increased share of wallet,
or improved market share will be riveting, and will go a long way toward sustaining support for
investments made to manage and improve customer experience.
There are a variety of approaches that can be used to establish the linkage between cumulative
customer experience and business results. The key is make sure you do not skip this
step. Building the business case for managing and improving customer experiences and
relationships is critical to the success -- or even survival -- of a relationship survey program.
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3 COVER ALL KEY ASPECTS OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Now it's time to determine how different elements of the customer's cumulative experience
influence the core metric. This requires identifying and capturing data regarding all key phases
and elements of the customer experience “end-to-end.” Customer journey mapping is useful for
this purpose, as are focus groups and depth interviews that are organized around the customer
journey or experience cycle. In the end, you want to be able to use both structured and
unstructured survey data to craft a comprehensive perspective of customer perceptions and
evaluations of their total experience with your brand or firm.
Figure 1 displays hypothetical primary elements of the ongoing customer experience in an
information technology context. Also shown are three possible secondary elements related to
Support.
The idea is to generate a set of primary customer experience elements – and more granular
secondary elements for each primary element – that can be used to capture structured survey
ratings, and also be used to organize and analyze verbatims from open-ended questions. This
practice helps ensure that all relevant aspects of the customer experience are addressed in the
survey. It also provides a means of making structured and unstructured survey data “work
together.”7
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4 DON’T FORGET THE TOUCHPOINTS
Don’t forget incidental touchpoints that generate contacts and interactions between the
customer and your organization. Thus, in the example shown in Figure 1 above, Support is
included. Support frequently involves an interaction between a customer and a technical support
representative who is trying to assist the customer with a problem or question.
There is a very good chance that the technical support organization currently follows-up with
customers who contact it for help with “courtesy calls” or transactional surveys. Why then, do
we want to ask about Support in a customer relationship survey?
There are at least two reasons.
First, many customers may require support on a frequent, recurring basis. Those customers
probably have formed a cumulative impression about the quality of Support services based on
multiple contacts. No single transactional survey or courtesy call will capture this impression. It
is a product of multiple contacts and interactions, and as such, should be part of a survey that is
attempting to gauge the customer’s evaluation of his/her total, cumulative experience.
A second reason to include touchpoint or transactional elements in the customer relationship
survey centers on the need to determine how each of these elements impacts the customer’s
overall evaluation of his/her experience – and your organization – relative to all other primary
and secondary elements. For example, analysis of relationship survey responses gathered from
property and casualty insurance customers frequently reveals that the relative impact of CX
elements is different among customers who have filed a claim than among those who have not
filed a claim: Quite often, the impact or importance of the claims-related element(s) of their
experience increases substantially relative to other elements. This has the potential to change
which CX elements receive top priority for action planning and improvement. It may also become
a consideration in market/customer segmentation. Touchpoints, therefore, must be part of the
mix of experience elements in customer relationship surveys.
5 BUILD A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ROADMAP
Once all the key elements of the customer experience have been identified, you have the
foundation needed to build a Customer Experience (CX) Roadmap. A CX Roadmap will help make
customer relationship survey results more relevant, meaningful, and actionable.
CX roadmaps attempt to help managers visualize:
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


How what an organization does and delivers – how it presents itself in the
marketplace,
Translates into what customers experience and evaluate,
Leading to customer decisions and behaviors that drive financial and other key
business results
Thinking of the IT customer experience elements described earlier (and shown in Figure 1),
managers construct the “downstream” portion of a CX Roadmap by answering the question “If
the customer is happy with his/her experience with each of these elements, what happens as a
result? Figure 2 illustrates what we might expect to see as a result of managers’ efforts to answer
the preceding question.
Constructing a CX roadmap also requires managers to answer the question, “Who and what
shape the customer experience with regard to each of the key primary and secondary elements?”
Figure 3 illustrates what the “upstream” portion of the CX roadmap might look like as a result of
managers’ efforts to answer this question for first contact problem resolution, which is one of
the secondary elements of Support.
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A customer experience roadmap provides at least three key benefits to managers and
organizations:
1. A CX roadmap paints a picture of how various departments or functional areas in
an organization have a hand in shaping specific elements of the customer
experience. This enables managers to think outside their own silos, and to
coordinate with other departments and functions to deliver a better customer
experience.
2. The “downstream” portion of the CX roadmap provides direction for linking
customer data and metrics to other business data and metrics. This enables
managers to perform analyses that build the business case for managing customer
experience and relationships (more on that later).
3. The “upstream” portion of a CX roadmap will make an organization better
prepared to take actions to improve customer experience based on insights drawn
from the Voice of the Customer. It identifies the people and organizational
performance elements that should be included in improvement efforts targeted
at a specific customer experience element.8
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6 DETERMINE WHICH CX ELEMENTS DRIVE THE CORE METRIC, AND
ULTIMATELY, DESIRED BUSINESS RESULTS
Once they understand how the customer's overall evaluation of his/her cumulative experience
impacts business results, managers will want to know which elements have the greatest impact
on that overall evaluation -- which ones "drive" the core metric. Once again, there are a number
of different methods to identify and prioritize key drivers, using both structured and unstructured
data, including:


Asking customers to state which elements are most important to them
Deriving the impact of each element on the core metric through statistical analysis
Regardless of which approach your organization uses, determining what drives the core metric is
essential because it helps set the agenda for efforts to improve customer experience and
relationships.
7 IDENTIFY WHICH DRIVERS NEED IMPROVEMENT
This is the other half of the process that sets the agenda for action planning and
implementation: We are looking for key drivers on which customers perceive a need or
opportunity for improvement. In the case of relationship surveys, if both structured and
unstructured data tell a similar story regarding the need for improvement on a particular element,
a strong case can be built for giving that element top attention.
8 PERFORM KEY DRIVER ANALYSIS AND PRIORITIZE CX ELEMENTS FOR KEY
CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
Firms rarely sell to or serve homogeneous mass markets of buyers and users. More than likely,
your firm must address the needs of multiple market segments. Thus, key driver analyses, as well
as analyses aimed at defining priorities for improvement, must be done for each segment. This
frequently yields multiple (and potentially conflicting) priorities that ultimately must be
reconciled by deciding which segments your organization wants to and is able to serve, and which
it cannot or should not. Not all customer relationships are good ones, and this is a consideration
that should be reviewed regularly.
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9 LEAVE ROOM FOR WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO DISCUSS
Despite your best efforts to cover all critical aspects of the customer's cumulative experience,
there is a good chance that the customer will want to discuss something that you did not
anticipate and/or neglected to address in the survey as designed. Therefore, it is critical to give
a customer the opportunity to discuss such issues. In fact, there are at least two benefits to be
gained: (1) You are signaling to the customer that what is on his/her mind is just as important as
the topics and questions you were prepared to ask; and (2) This is a relatively easy way to discover
CX issues that you might have missed, so that they can be added/included in future waves of the
relationship survey.
10 IN B2B SETTINGS, CONSIDER USING RELATIONSHIP SURVEY FEEDBACK AS A
STARTING POINT FOR A FOLLOW-UP CONVERSATION
You have asked the customer to give you feedback regarding many aspects of his/her cumulative
experience with your firm. The customer has taken the time to provide that feedback. Why not
take the process one step further by using survey results to define the agenda for a follow-up
conversation? In B2B, account reviews are quite common. Make the relationship survey even
more relevant by integrating results into account reviews and conversations. Use the results to
pinpoint areas in which your firm is contributing to the customer's success. Do the same to
determine how your firm can align and collaborate with customers to make
improvements. Make the survey less about research and more about customer communication.
It is also a good idea to define ownership for specific elements of the relationship survey in
advance of having results. Determine who has a hand in shaping each of these elements of the
customer experience. The practice of building a customer experience roadmap, discussed earlier
in this paper, will give these individuals a say in the process of determining ownership. This will
improve your organizational readiness to take action in response to relationship survey results.
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11 BE PREPARED TO HELP MANAGERS UNDERSTAND AND USE RELATIONSHIP
SURVEY RESULTS
All of the practices described above will enable managers to understand and use relationship
survey results appropriately and effectively. However, there are additional things that can be
done toward this end. For example, relationship survey stewards should be prepared to help
managers understand how such surveys differ from other VoC tools and sources. It is not
uncommon, for instance, to see scores on core metrics from relationship surveys consistently
come in lower than scores for comparable metrics in transactional surveys. Survey stewards
should be prepared to explain why. They need to be knowledgeable about how longer-term
memory shapes survey responses. 9 They need to understand and be able to explain how
customers often use a so-called "availability heuristic" in answering relationship survey
questions.10
12 CONDUCT REGULAR REVIEW AND REFINEMENT CYCLES
Customer relationship surveys provide insights that can be used to drive continuous
improvement in your organization. That said, the customer relationship survey itself should be
the focus of continuous improvement through regular cycles of review and refinement. Survey
stewards should be asking “what is working well?” and “where are opportunities for
improvement?” in current survey content, administration, analysis, and results deployment.
These questions should be asked of managers who are trying to use and who are held
accountable to survey results. Also, customers should be asked to provide input regarding the
survey periodically. They should be asked if they survey is addressing the right topics. They
should be asked how the survey process can be made more “customer-friendly.”
Regular review and refinement cycles will help ensure that your customer relationship survey is
well-oiled and furnishes actionable insights that make for better customer experiences and
achievement of desired business results.
CONCLUSION
If your organization conducts relationship surveys, make sure you have embraced the basic best
practices described above. If you are thinking about starting a relationship survey process,
consider building it around these practices.
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End Notes
1
Temkin, B. (2013). State of Voice of the Customer Programs, 2013. Temkin Group Insight Report; p.7.
2
Brandt, D. R. (2012). “How Well Are You Capturing the Voice of the Customer?” Quality Progress (October); p.22.
3
Reichheld, Fred, with Rob Markey (2011). The Ultimate Question 2.0. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press;
pp.50-51.
4
Brandt, D. R. (2007). “For Good Measure.” Marketing Management. January/February; pp.21-25.
5
For example, see Morgan, N.A. and Rego, L.L. (2006). "The Value of Different Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Metrics in Predicting Business Performance." Marketing Science. 25(5); pp.426-439.
6
Reichheld (2011); p.51.
7
Additional details on how to build a taxonomy of primary and secondary customer experience elements can be
found in the Voice Crafter white paper entitled “Make All Your Customer Data “Work Together,” available at
www.thevoicecrafter.com.
8
Additional details on how CX roadmaps are constructed, along with a case illustration, can be found in the Voice
Crafter white paper entitled Building a Customer Experience Roadmap, available at www.thevoicecrafter.com.
9
Tourangeau, R., Rips, L.J., and K. Rasinski (2012). The Psychology of Survey Response. New York: Cambridge
University Press; pp.120-121.
10
Hayes,
B.
(2007).
Relationships,
Transactions,
and
Heuristics.
http://businessoverbroadway.com/relationships-transactions-and-heuristics.
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