How to get whatever result you want from relationship surveys

When your employees are measured individually on the results of surveys, ‘gaming the results’ is common and easy. First let's consider B2B relationship surveys; the ones where you ask customers to provide their overall impressions about your company. What follows may seem a bit cynical, but has its basis in reality. If you are measured on relationship survey results and want to manipulate them, here is how:

1. Only ask your friends at the customer or partner to take the survey.
2. Pay no attention to their organization chart to find out who actually matters, favoring the people you have met instead.
3. Decide who should be asked about a major project that has been completed only after it is complete. That way you can avoid surveying anyone who has negative views. Make certain to avoid specifying the people to be surveyed in the contract before you start.

These are my top three cheating methods for relationship surveys. I will provide cheating tips for transactional and product-level surveys in future posts. The result of all of this is that your NPS results will tend to be meaningless. They won't have any real predictive value and you won't be able to reliably foresee which of your customers will leave you.

The situation is getting worse

I used to think that this situation arose only where individuals were measured on NPS results. Many companies have started to publish NPS results in their annual reports over the last few years, creating pressure to somehow arrive at improved results every time. I am sure you understand what I mean.

There are at least two solutions

You can of course try to prevent the measurement of individuals on the results. Team metrics are better. However, the greater the financial rewards people receive for improving NPS, the more pressure there is to cheat, consciously or unconsciously.

It is far harder, though not impossible, to cheat your operational metrics. (For example, if you want to substantially shorten your product delivery lead time metric, simply change the calculation so that the clock stops when you ship something, rather than when the customer receives it.) In any case, the operational metrics in your IT systems are far more complete, and therefore reliable, than your survey results.

But of course, you probably have thousands of operational data points for each customer in your various IT systems, and it used to be difficult to work out which ones reliably predict NPS, customer retention, and upselling opportunities. That has all changed with the emergence of machine learning solutions, such as our own Customer AI. Now it has become relatively easy to understand which operational data points and KPI trends are most important, and where you should concentrate your customer retention improvements and investments. It is of course not totally impossible to cheat your own IT system measurements, but it is much harder than finding a way to trick your survey process.

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Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough Customer AI solution 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 than 100 years of CX-focused expertise in our small team and thousands in teams we have led, 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 Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $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.