It’s often said that a picture can paint a thousand words but can the same be said about a number? Three numbers featured heavily in the News this week, - 14, - 15 and - 55.  They were of course the latest polling statistics of what thenation thinks of David Cameron, Ed Miliband, and Nick Clegg, our party leaders in Westminster. Ed’s rating was the lowest, tumbling in tune with widely reported media blunders. Commentary and speculation filled the airways, withattacks and defence in equal measures.
 
In the business world we love the clarity of simple digits to paint a picture of what customers think of our services, as evidenced by the significant increase in use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) by boards as a handy measure of what is going on. 
 
A speaker at a CCA event asked the audience to think carefully about their favourite piece of clothing and then score it. You would expect that the scores would have been 10, after all it's your absolute favourite?  Surprisingly most scores were 8 - this phenomenon is well known and relates in part to our cultural influences.
 
Common sense tells us that we need to dig beneath averages to find a true perspective, but with so much data and little time, it is tempting to choose the easy route. Most large organisations yearn for the type of simple feedback that a good coffee shop can have, where a full till, smiling faces and happy staff provide all the information that is required. Large organisations need to apply clever listening and translation tactics across multiple channels to hear the true voice of customer, and that requires true leadership and a relentless effort to stay close to touch points to get as much real time reporting as is possible.
 
Boards today are challenged with short termism as never before, and the days of 5 and 10 year strategies are firmly in the past. Consequently there is a risk of over-reliance on today's statistics and sound bites that provide comfort rather than exposing the reality from the true customer perspectives. Huge amounts of energy and money are a spent on asking us what we think; as consumers we are inundated with heavily scripted requests for our opinion about services we use. Perversely a good service can be soured by an unwelcome intrusion, leading to self inflicted brand damage.  What if we are not asking the right questions and/or ignoring the silent majority; perhaps overreacting to Twitter which can provide a loud but disproportionate voice?
 
An excellent article by Bill Fotch in Harvard Business Review warns of the folly of over-tracking customer experience, without relating it accurately to the financials. He calls for much greater alignment between an organisation’s overall financial strategy and that of customer service.
 
Ryanair's recent U-turn in approach to customer service hit the headlines but this time for all the right reasons. A new approach to how customers are treated paid off by improved bottom line results.  It wasn’t only Michael O’Leary’s admission that things no longer worked, and that change was imminent that caused the upturn, but that the implementation of improvements was followed through.
 
The song hinted at the beginning of the blog is of course the Drifters, ‘You're more than a number in my little red book’.  We can't all expect the red book treatment from our suppliers but neither do we like to be thought of as just a number. The challenge for organisations must be to have the correct culture and analytic capability to harness numerical data and use it to fuel the kind of service that feels fair and meets set expectations.
 
Learn more about customer engagement and transforming your business at CCA’s forthcoming 20th Annual Convention in Edinburgh on 25 & 26 November.  Click here for details.