A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
Customer comment tools provide financial institutions a valuable tool to identify and reply to customers who have had a negative service experience and may be at risk for attrition or spreading negative word of mouth.
Beyond randomly surveying customers who have recently conducted a service interaction at a branch or call center, banks should also provide an avenue for self-selected customer feedback, feedback from customers who have not been selected to participate in a survey, but want to comment on the experience.
In the past, this vehicle for collecting this unsolicited feedback would be the good old fashioned comment card. Today, the Internet offers a much more efficient means of collecting this feedback. For the branch channel, invitations to provide feedback with a URL to an online comment form can be printed on transaction receipts. For call centers, customers can be directed to IVR systems to capture voice feedback from customers. Website and mobile users can be offered online comment forms as well.
Unsolicited feedback tools are not surveys, and should not be used as surveys. In fact, they make terrible customer satisfaction surveys. Many institutions try to turn them into surveys by asking customers to rate such things as service, convenience and product selection. But these comment channels do not give reliable information because they do not come from typical customers. The people who fill out the cards tend to fall into one of four groups:
- Extremely happy customers
- Extremely unhappy customers
- Extremely bored customers
- Customers with requests (for products, new store locations, etc.)
Notice the operative word in the first three categories: extreme. If a customer is satisfied with the product or service, why bother to give feedback? Customers expect to be satisfied. Having your expectations met is not something to write about. In research parlance, the sample is self-selected, and the people who provide such feedback are not likely to be representative of the general population of customers. It therefore makes no sense to ask these people to provide ratings that are going to be tabulated and averaged. The results will be useless at best and completely misleading at worst.
A better approach is to design them as letters to the bank president. They look something like,
“Dear [President’s name]:
Here is something I would like you to know . . .
[Lots of white space]
Sincerely yours,”
[Space for name, address and phone number]
Additionally, the check box can be included asking the customer if they would like someone to contact them as a result of their feedback.
This type of feedback tool will deliver valuable qualitative data about the experience that prompted the customer to provide the feedback.
It is essential that a system for analyzing and responding to the feedback be put into place. First, sort the comments according to if the customer wants a reply to their feedback. There are ways to streamline this process, but to ignore it is to make matters worse, because customers (the angry ones, at least) will expect a reply. On the other hand, responding to customer concerns makes comment tools exceptionally valuable. First, they provide a method to identify and reply to customers who have had a negative service experience and may be at risk for attrition or undermine the brand with negative word of mouth, and even worse social media commentary. Second, they Minimize negative word-of-mouth advertising that would undermine marketing efforts; and increase positive word-of-mouth advertising (customers who have had a problem fixed are famous for becoming vocal advocates of a company). The flip-side is that customers who have had a positive experience can be thanked for their feedback, which encourages customer loyalty.
The next step in acting on the qualitative feedback is to reduce it into quantifiable themes through the process of coding, where comments are grouped by theme. For instance, 18% of comments may have referred to “slow service” and 14% to “lack of job knowledge”. Now, we can monitor the frequency of various themes by business unit and over time.
Comment tools are not new, but with modern technology can be employed as a valuable feedback tool to identify at risk customers and mitigate the causes of their dissatisfaction.
Finally, the unsolicited nature of customer comments offer a unique opportunity to feed themes identified in customer comments back into customer survey design, allowing managers to determine if issues uncovered are broadly present across all customers.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Customer Surveys: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Mystery Shopping: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
Kinesis CEM 
Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
The question was simple enough… If you owned customer experience measurement for one of your bank clients, what would you do?
Through the years, I developed a point of view of how to best measure the customer experience, and shared it with a number of clients, however, never put it down to writing.
So here it is…
Best practices in customer experience measurement use multiple inputs in a coordinated fashion to give managers a 360-degree view of the customer experience. Just like tools in a tool box, different research methodologies have different uses for specific needs. It is not a best practice to use a hammer to drive a screw, nor the butt end of a screwdriver to pound a nail. Each tool is designed for a specific purpose, but used in concert can build a house. The same is true for research tools. Individually they are designed for specific purposes, but used in concert they can help build a more whole and complex structure.
Generally, Kinesis believes in measuring the customer experience with three broad classifications of research methodologies, each providing a unique perspective:
These research methodologies are employed in concert to build a 360-degree view of the customer experience.
The key to building a 360-degree view of the customer experience is to understand the bank-customer interface. At the center of the customer experience are the various channels which form the interface between the customer and institution. Together these channels define the brand more than any external messaging. Best in class customer experience research programs monitor this interface from multiple directions across all channels to form a comprehensive view of the customer experience.
Customer and front-line employees are the two stakeholders who interact most commonly with each other in the customer-institution interface. As a result, a best practice in understanding this interface is to monitor it directly from each direction.
Tools to measure the experience from the customer side of interface include:
Post-Transaction Surveys: Post-transaction surveys provide intelligence from the other side of customer-employee interface. These surveys are targeted, event-driven, collecting feedback from customers about specific service encounters soon after the interaction occurs. They provide valuable insight into both customer impressions of the customer experience, and if properly designed, insight into customer expectations. This creates a learning feedback loop, where customer expectations can be used to inform service standards measured through mystery shopping. Thus two different research tools can be used to inform each other. Click here for a broader discussion of post-transaction surveys.
Customer Comments: Beyond surveying customers who have recently conducted a service interaction, a best practice is to provide an avenue for customers who want to comment on the experience. Comment tools are not new (in the past they were the good old fashioned comment card), but with modern Internet-based technology they can be used as a valuable feedback tool to identify at risk customers and mitigate the causes of their dissatisfaction. Additionally, comment tools can be used to inform the post transaction surveys. If common themes develop in customer comments, they can be added to the post-transaction surveys for a more scientific measurement of the issue. Click here for a broader discussion of comment tools.
Social Monitoring: Increasingly social media is “the media”; prospective customers assign far more weight to social media then any external messaging. A social listening system that analyzes and responds to social indirect feedback is increasingly becoming essential. As with comment tools, social listening can be used to inform the post transaction surveys. Click here for a broader discussion of social listening tools.
Directing our attention to the bank side of the interface, tools to measure the experience from the bank side of bank-customer interface include:
Mystery Shopping: In today’s increasing connected world, one bad experience could be shared hundreds if not thousands of times over. As in-person delivery models shift to a universal associate model with the branch serving as more of a sales center, monitoring and motivating selling skills is becoming increasingly essential. Mystery shopping is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand. Unlike the various customer feedback tools designed to inform managers about how customers feel about the bank, mystery shopping focuses on the behavioral side of the equation, answering the question: are our employees exhibiting appropriate sales and service behaviors? Click here for a broader discussion of mystery shopping tools.
Employee Surveys: Employee surveys often measure employee satisfaction and engagement. However, in terms of understanding the customer experience, a best practice is to move employee surveys beyond employee engagement and to understand what is going on at the customer-employee interface by leveraging employees as a valuable and inexpensive resource of customer experience information. This information comes directly out one side of the customer-employee interface, and provides not only intelligence into the customer experience, but also evaluates the level of support within the organization, solicit recommendations, and compares perceptions by position (frontline vs. management) to identify perceptual gaps which typically exist within organizations. Click here for a broader discussion of employee surveys.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links: