There are better ways of collecting customer feedback than form filling, question asking, surveys, or interviewing. Here is a wonderful application of Café principles from the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTR).
Have you ever been stopped on a station concourse by someone with a clipboard who asks if you would like to ask answer a few questions as part of a customer satisfaction survey?
You either say “no thank you” and walk quickly on or stop and answer the questions – questions that frequently have yes or no answers or scores on a 1 to 5 scale.
It is all over quite quickly, and you probably didn’t give any serious thought to the answers that you gave.
There is also the issue that you only get to answer the questions you are asked. Thus potentially missing out feedback on important factors that those who set the questionnaire have overlooked. The questions may also be biased, leading you to give the answers that are being looked for. There is quite a skill in designing unbiased, non-leading questionnaires.
The Hong Kong MTR has a different way of collecting customer feedback. They set up coffee booths (opinion zones) on station concourses and invite people to have a free coffee and a chat about customer service.
They even have special carriages on commuter trains (liaison trains) where people can have a coffee and give feedback.
What a wonderful, more human-engaging way of giving customer feedback.
But it’s more than that
When you engage several people in a conversation rather than asking simple one-to-one questions, you get fuller, richer responses.
In a one-to-one question session, you might be asked what you think about the cleanliness of the trains on a scale of 1 to 5, and you pick a number like 4.
But in a conversation, when you hear other people talk about their experiences, it reminds you of similar experiences that you’ve had and forgotten about, but now you can bring them up in the conversation.
Listening to others’ verbalized experiences stimulates memories, ideas, and experiences in participants.
This is also known as the group effect where group members engage in “a kind of ‘chaining’ or ‘cascading’ effect; talk links to, or tumbles out of, the topics and expressions preceding it”
So the conversation helps to surface long-forgotten experiences or ideas for improvement.
The MTR Corporation gets richer, more useful feedback.
This is such a simple idea. It costs a little more, but I think it is well worth the effort
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