Archive for the ‘Paul Hague’ Category
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Like London buses, you wait an age for the next installment of Questionnaire Design by Paul Hague and then two chapters come along at once!
Chapter Seven discusses "Interviewer Instructions", ranging from maintaining contact details properly to ensuring questions are asked in the intended manner. For instance, certain open-ended questions may require a good degree of detail, and thus further (possibly guided) prompting may be needed in such cases. Alternatively, instructions for randomisation, multiple choice options or scales may need specific instructions writing to ensure that both the interviewer and respondent complete the questionnaire as desired.
Chapter Eight, entitled "The Layout of the Questionnaire" deals with the essentials of properly laying out a questionnaire, such that data entry during the interview is aided rather than hindered. Also covered in this chapter are hints on how to structure the questionnaire in a logical manner and in a way that not only assists continuity, but also the likelihood of completion.
To download Chapters 7 and 8, please click on the appropriate links below:
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
We live in an age of information overload. There can hardly be an executive in the world who doesn’t regularly type a question into Google and obtain thousands of answers within milliseconds. Our computerised systems at work hold hundreds if not thousands of filing cabinets of data which we can access through word searches. And if this is not enough, we can turn to the market research community who will carry out a survey at a tenth of the cost in real terms of 30 years ago. In other words when it comes to market intelligence we have never had it so good.
So why therefore do we sometimes find it difficult to make business decisions?
One reason is that despite the enormous amount of information available to us, some of it is not clear and some of it is in conflict. This means that our judgement and interpretation of the data is still vital. Consider the following paradigm in which a decision maker may have a choice of internally collected data versus externally collected data and that which may be considered objective verses that which is subjective.
Most of us would intuitively believe that external data that is objective is to be trusted more than data that has come from opinions inside the company. However, the old guy with grey hair who has given an internal opinion may have synthesised years of data and his view could be worth far more than the number crunching survey that skimmed the surface. Of course, it could also be worthless as he could be a vacuous mouth with one year’s experience repeated 30 times.
So the difficulty in using market intelligence is fusing data together and working out which bits are to be trusted and which are not. It is for this reason that the workshop approach to delivering findings has become so popular. The research agency is able to put the findings from their survey on the table and invite all participants at the workshop to share their own knowledge and help in its interpretation. In this way disputes as to the meaning and value of data can be resolved and actions can be agreed.
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Monday, July 14th, 2008
You guessed it! It’s time for the latest chapter of our e-book: Questionnaire Design by Paul Hague!
This week’s chapter discusses “Framing the questions” and focuses on how questions are presented to respondents. The chapter also highlights the importance of how questions are worded, and the impact that their wordings have on a questionnaire.
To download Chapter 6, please click on the appropriate links below:
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Monday, July 7th, 2008
It’s a Monday, which can mean only one thing - Time for the next installment(s) of our e-book: Questionnaire Design by Paul Hague!
This week we’ve two chapters on offer: Chapter Four deals with the "Fundamental Principles of Questionnaire Design", and offers 8 golden rules to bear in mind when framing the questionnaire. The chapter concludes that above all else, it is the respondent that should be front-of-mind when crafting a questionnaire, since they are the ones who ultimately need to understand the questions being asked and the purpose of the study in the first place.
Chapter Five, entitled "Different Types of Questions" looks in further detail at the different question formats that can be utilised in a questionnaire. This section seeks to clarify where each question type is best used, according to the over-arching research objectives and the information that’s being sought.
To download Chapters 4 and 5, please click on the appropriate links below:
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Friday, July 4th, 2008
In his latest Thursday Night Insight post, Paul Hague points to a new book which, contrary to received wisdom, argues that those companies providing truly the best service often find little need to invest in extensive customer service resource.
We make quite a thing of service at B2B International and we certainly know how important it is in driving up customer satisfaction scores.
We also know that companies that offer good service will do well and build market share with premium prices. So it was good to read about a new book that focuses on this important subject. Its title is intriguing - The Best Service Is No Service.
The theme of the book is that a well run company, which is attuned to its customers needs, is likely to require virtually no service. Service requests are frequently to deal with complaints, or from people needing information, or from people wanting to find out how to do something - all of which could be unnecessary if the company was organised differently.
The review which we feature in this blog has been taken from the Financial Times. Read the review, buy the book and most important of all, get your service offering right.
If you want to be loved, just do it right
By Alan Mitchell
When was the last time you woke up one morning wanting to contact your mobile phone or utility provider? Probably never, and that is how it should be.
The premise behind this admirably straightforward book is disarmingly simple. We usually seek service from a company when something has gone wrong: the product doesn’t work, it wasn’t delivered on time, the bill is wrong. If companies can get those things right in the first place, most customers neither want nor need "customer service". Hence the title: The Best Service Is No Service.
Achieving "no service" status unleashes a hugely positive win-win. Customers don’t have to invest time and hassle trying to sort problems out. The company does not have to invest resources dealing with inquiries. This means less cost for both, greater value for both.
The authors - Bill Price, a former vice-president of global customer services at Amazon, and David Jaffe, a consultant - devote the rest of the book to showing how to make it happen, and they do so in a refreshingly no-nonsense, practical manner.
Once we accept the premise that, generally speaking, the size of a company’s customer service operations is in inverse proportion to the quality of its underlying operations, the way forward is obvious. Root out those underlying defects and improve operational quality so that, one by one, customers’ needs for particular areas of service melt away. That is why, for example, Amazon obsesses about a metric that most companies do not ever use: contacts per customer order (CPO). By working out why customers contact it and then eliminating the need for this contact to happen, Amazon has reduced its CPO by 90 per cent over the past five years.
According to the authors’ research, customer contacts have four broad causes. About one in seven is triggered by basic quality defects ("It doesn’t work"). These must be addressed by underlying quality improvements. About a quarter take the form of "How do I?" questions. Here, the company has failed to communicate properly or its processes are confusing to customers, so it must identify and deal with these defects.
About 40 per cent of customer contacts are "Where can I get?" queries. Customers should be able to answer most such questions for themselves via a website or other self-service option that is easy to use.
The final 20 per cent of contacts are from customers wanting to buy stuff. The more the first 80 per cent can be reduced, the more resources the company can invest in helping customers when they really do need service.
If there is one drawback to the book it is that the authors do their best to make tackling these issues sound simple, but what comes across is how hard and complex a slog it is. Their advice involves experiencing every step of the company’s processes from the customer’s point of view, identifying and tackling each and every quality defect at its source, designing each touchpoint to make using it as easy as possible and integrating all the touchpoints so that customers can move effortlessly between them. Then there comes recasting metrics, rewards and incentives away from "efficiency" - so that staff support all the above and manage to solve customer problems - and gathering all the information needed to drive these changes. In each area, the devil is in the detail. Take information gathering: most companies collect data about general categories such as "late delivery" but, at this level, the data is close to useless. We need to know why the delivery was late. Was the item out of stock? Delayed in the warehouse? Was there a problem with the shipper? Or unrealistic customer expectations? Responsibility for solving each of these problems lies with a different part of the company.
The next hurdle is getting the perpetrator of the problem to own up and do something about it. Here, the authors warn, you will meet all manner of resistance: denial, anger, stonewalling ("it’s not in our budget", "we haven’t got time to deal with this"). The "secret sauce" here, they suggest, is to charge the responsibility owners (including third-party organisations) for the full cost of the customer contacts they cause: "This final step brings most of the dividends - when owners get hit in the pocket, they pay more attention to customer issues."
Blindingly obvious, when you come to think of it, but still very difficult to do. Which is, presumably, why so many companies are still so bad at customer service.
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