How Not to Hire Customer Service People: Part 1
The Myth of Customer Satisfaction
Dr. David K. Barnett
After almost two decades of studying salespeople, I know what employers must look for in candidates for sales jobs. But the science is incredibly murky when it comes to predicting who will do well and who will do poorly in customer service. The reason? Few if any objective measurements of success.
In sales, it’s all about the numbers; gross sales, close ratios, contacts, etc. It’s a little less cut and dried in customer service, but the objective metric most businesses use to evaluate service effectiveness is customer retention. The fact that it usually costs up to five times more to attract a new customer than to keep a current buyer1 motivates businesses to take customer service seriously. But retention is a result of what service people do. Retention statistics don’t inform the hiring decision. What kind of people will help retain business? This is where the alchemy begins.
The single greatest myth of customer service is "satisfied customers don’t take their business elsewhere." So, customer service departments invest heavily in creating and conducting customer satisfaction surveys. Businesses ask their customers what they like and don’t like and use the feedback to guide the selection of service people.
But research has shown that 65-85% of customers will report being completely satisfied just days before taking their business elsewhere.2 Empirical studies show no connection between customer satisfaction and retention.3
I take my car to be serviced at a dealer. Several days later I get a telephone call from the customer service people wanting me to evaluate the service I received.
“Were your expectations met?”
It was only an oil change, for goodness sake. What expectations does someone have about getting their oil changed? Just remember to put the new oil in after you drain the old oil out and give the filter a nice tight turn, thank you very much.
“Where you greeted in a friendly manner?”
I don’t remember. I wasn’t welcomed with a flood of insults or I would have remembered that. So I repond, “Yea, everything was just great.” I do not intend this remark to be anything more than a cue that I just want to finish this conversation so I can get back to what I was doing. But my responses go into the company computer as a “satisfied customer” and “friendly greeting” is reinforced as a competency of effective service.
But the next time I needed my oil changed, I went to one of the local quick lube places. My “customer satisfaction” was completely unrelated to the retention of my auto service business.
Customer satisfaction surveys are not reliable predictors of business retention and are probably equally bogus as the basis for understanding customer service competencies.
1 Dr. John T. Self, (1997) Improving Customer Service.
2 Reichheld, F., and Kenny, D. (1990). The Hidden Advantages of Customer Retention. Journal of Retail Banking, XII(4), 19-23.)
3 Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and Alexander Klee, The impact of customer satisfaction and relationship quality on customer retention: A critical reassessment and model development, 1997.
