Customer Service Matters
I am Dr. Jeff Kingsley and this is another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers! We are completing our current discussion on balanced scorecards. Remember a balanced scorecard is that sweet spot between meeting all of the needs of your customers and the health of your company. I’m speaking to research sites in particular on what should be included in your balanced scorecard. I think fundamentally what our customers want of sites is what I refer to as EQTCS – Enrollment, Quality, Timelines, and Customer Service. Today we are talking about customer service. Now, obviously, in any business, customer service matters. But the reality is that most companies don’t measure it. Most companies go on the assumption that their customer service is good if not great. But the reality is that is not always the case. To paraphrase a famous quote – 50% of the companies you know are below average.
Net Promoter Score
You need to measure customer service. It will enable you then to implement process improvement to enhance your customer service. What’s the best way to measure customer service? There are plenty of complicated ways to do it, there are complicated surveys, there are companies you can hire to assist you, and there’s also a very simple way. It’s called NPS – Net Promoter Score. It’s very well adopted in the technology space, but surprisingly I’ve met very few people who have heard of the NPS. Two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies use the NPS. It’s one question…one very simple question. “How likely are you to recommend my company or my service to a friend or colleague?” That’s it – one question! It takes a solid 30 seconds for someone to fill out. You can ask this of your clinical research associates, your patients, team members, physicians, and the project managers on the research trials you are conducting. One question, rated zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend my company or my service to a friend or colleague?
Scoring Your Net Promoter Score
The score is calculated – 9’s and 10’s are your promoters. Those are people who genuinely would recommend you to someone else. 7’s and 8’s are passives. They don’t dislike you but they are not raving about you either. They are not bad, they are passives. Zero through 6 are your detractors. Anyone who gives you a 0 through 6 on that question would likely say something negative about you to a friend or colleague. So the NPS is the percent of 9’s and 10’s over the total number of respondents. The percent of promoters over the percent of detractors. You end up with a scale of negative 100 to positive 100. Generally speaking, any positive number on that calculation is deemed good and if you have a score above 50 that is deemed excellent. Very simple way for you to start measuring customer satisfaction.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is immensely important and yet it’s something that we seldom measure well. By making it very simple, you will get more respondents. By getting more respondents, you are getting more accuracy but you are also engaging your customers in a dialogue. You’re helping your customers understand that you genuinely care about the satisfaction and you are willing to invest time and effort into enhancing their satisfaction. It’s a super important aspect of your balanced scorecard.
Customer service – measure it. NPS is a great way! And then use that measurement to start implementing process improvement to further enhance what you are providing your customers.
Thanks for riding along!
Send me topics you want me to talk about at jeff.kingsley@centricityresearch.com!
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