#9 - What is the ultimate question? Annoying Microsoft survey, and more

Welcome to my 9th Customer Strategy newsletter on LinkedIn. Here are the topics this time:

• I want to clarify what 'the ‘Ultimate Question’ actually is. You may be surprised. In any case, I would like to understand your views on what I set out below.
• An annoying pop-up survey from Microsoft. I am sure you can all do better than this pitiful attempt.
• OCX Cognition content on the power of operational data in CX.
• Links to two articles from other sites. The first is about the use of operational data to improve customer empathy. The second is about the evolution of Customer Success as a generally accepted function for some types of business.

What is the ‘Ultimate Question?’

Good question! (I'll wait for that to sink in for a moment...)

You may be surprised to learn that the ultimate question is not necessarily the recommendation question. Simply put, the ultimate survey question is whatever single question best predicts your revenue or market share trends. The research done by Reichheld, Satmetrix, and Bain shows that this question is indeed the recommendation question for most businesses. It's a safe default but it is easy for me to provide examples of situations where it is not appropriate.

The most obvious case is where recommending a product would essentially be recommending more competition in your market. eBay is a good example. During the early days of NPS? implementation, eBay focused on people who make their living by selling products on eBay. When the asked how likely such people were to recommend eBay to a friend they got lots of answers like, “Of course I would never recommend eBay to a friend. Why would I want a new competitor?"

At a more sophisticated level, the same is true for B2B2C companies where the middle B is a reseller of products that a company makes. Why on earth would they want to recommend the company's products to another reseller? That would make no sense at all. A far better ultimate question would be asking customers to rate rating “Knowing what I know now, I would still choose to sell Acme products." At least it is a better default choice, and it is a lot closer to your ultimate intent of understanding customer retention. Use it until your AI software or manual analysis of operational data suggest an appropriate alternative.

Annoying survey from Microsoft

I received a really annoying survey a few days ago. It was from Microsoft; a pop up survey about PowerPoint. It was a classic two-question survey asking me to rate how likely I am to recommend PowerPoint and why. I have been using PowerPoint non-stop ever since version 1.0 came on for Mac in 1987. To the best of my recollection, I have never recommended it to anyone. There simply is no practical alternative. And for consumers in 2021, I don't believe there is any way of purchasing it separately from Excel and the rest of the Office 365 suite.

So why bother with this sort of survey? I suspect it is used to build an internal scorecard. Probably not for improvement purposes, since they don't ask what new features users would like to see, for example. That would have been interesting, as when software companies ask the question, the majority of users ask for features the product already has, but users have not yet found. And yes, I replied to the survey offering my views. Since they did not ask for contact information I presume they have no intention of telling me what they learned from the survey. What a waste of time! Grumble grumble.

Insights from OCX Cognition

The Untapped Power of Operational Data in CX: You might not like to admit it, but customer surveys deliver too little insight, too late in the game. But it’s now possible to get beyond the inadequacy of survey data sets by bringing operational data into the picture. Machine learning insights augment human judgement to produce operationally connected insights that allow quick action and meaningful improvements in the customer experience. Download our report here to learn more.

Two more insights blog posts from me on LinkedIn last week. First, I covered what I see as the declining role surveys should have in CX. I called it Don't give me that attitude! (I prefer the facts.) Some of the sub-themes covered should be pretty familiar by now.

My second post last week was based on the simple observation that most companies have been using the same customer experience performance indicators for a long time. Whether these are survey-based or operational, I still find the situation problematic. I hope you like what I cover. I simply ask and try to suggest answers to the question, How confident are you that your CX KPIs are correct? All feedback welcome.

Interesting content on other people's websites

Mukesh Mirchandani: Customer Empathy Starts With Having the Right Data. Mukesh is Vice President, Global Field Solution Engineering at Freshworks. He was interviewed by the people at CMSwire a few days ago. I found his insights about the changes he has seen during the pandemic interesting. His insights about the need to gather and understand operational data at different points in the customer journey also seem spot on. I hope you enjoy the read too.

Sue Nabeth Moore on MyCustomer: How Customer Success overcame scepticism to become a foundational function. I am always interested in what people have to say about Customer Success as a function. Sue's views are expressed clearly and you may find things you disagree with here. Personally, I am a big fan of Customer Success. A challenge is that it is difficult to scale downwards, as it usually requires warm bodies to execute. I believe tools such as OCX Cognition's Spectrum AI can automate it for your smaller customers at the very least.

Conclusion

That's it for this time. Please share with your colleagues and friends and subscribe if you have not already done so. And of course, your content suggestions are always welcome.

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough SaaS solution, Spectrum AI, lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more that 15 years of CX-focused expertise, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at?www.ocxcognition.com.

Maurice FitzGerald is a retired VP of Customer Experience for HP's $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, and a fourth book that focuses on Peter's cartoon illustrations for the first three. All are available from Amazon.

The author can be reached here on LinkedIn or at?[email protected]. Please let me know what you think and what sort of content you would like to see here.