Corporate culture
For a trip to go smoothly, planning and coordination are essential. Whether it's a vacation or a business trip, many elements have to come together. Airplane flights and hotel rooms have to be booked. Rental cars have to be reserved. Most people prefer to have someone else do the coordinating. One of the largest companies providing this service is American Express Travel Related Services, a division of American Express that provides travel services for card holders, consumers, and corporations over the telephone and in-person through a network of travel bureaus.
Mitchell Gross, director of quality services, Travel Service Division of American Express, says that customer satisfaction/service quality research, particularly an ongoing telephone interviewing program, keeps American Express in touch with customer perceptions of its performance.
"In a business of this complexity, where every transaction is important, we rely on the research to help us step back from the day-to-day hustle and look at things from the customer's perspective," Gross says.
"The research is the cornerstone of our process improvement work that we do. We start by eliminating non value-added work, by involving and empowering our frontline employees who know the most about customers, and then taking the remaining elements - the things that do add value - and making them work in the most efficient way possible. All of that starts with a clear understanding of the things that drive customer loyalty."
The telephone interviews are conducted to measure satisfaction with membership travel services provided to Gold and Platinum American Express Card holders, and also to the businesses that use American Express to book their corporate travel.
During the 10-15 minute interviews, respondents who recently used American Express to book a trip are asked to indicate their overall satisfaction level and the likelihood that they'll use American Express to book a future trip. They also score American Express' performance on a variety of service dimensions.
Needs assessment
The service dimensions were uncovered and clarified during needs assessment work done prior to developing the survey program, Gross says. "We found that there were a number of service basics or dissatisfiers that don't appear through the normal methods. We look at satisfaction from both angles: satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Satisfiers are the things that, if you do them well, create satisfaction and if you do them poorly create dissatisfaction. Dissatisfiers are things that upset the customer if you mess them up but that you don't get credit for doing right. They include things like getting tickets delivered on time. No one's going to write a letter to the president saying, 'you guys just blew me away, I booked my trip two months ago and my tickets actually got here when they were supposed to.' But if you mess up on that you can count on losing a customer."
Richard Reiser, chairman of BAI, the Tarrytown, New York-based marketing research firm that works with American Express on the telephone survey, says that the needs assessment work is an important step in pinpointing how the customers define satisfactory service.
"It isn't sufficient to deal with generalities when you're doing customer satisfaction or quality of service work. It's not enough to have the customer say well, 'they provide me with prompt service.' You have to understand what prompt is and what services they're talking about.
"For this project, a major piece of research was done to define precisely what different kinds of travelers were looking for in different parts of the travel process. We wanted to separate what is the responsibility of the travel agent from what is the responsibility of the hotels, the airlines, etc. Once that piece of research is done, you come up with the factors that are important and you understand the meaning of each one."
Using those factors American Express and BAI developed a questionnaire that could be administered over the phone, Reiser says. "The process has evolved to the point where the items that we're measuring can explain almost all of the overall satisfaction with the travel service. It's very important to be able to demonstrate that there's a relationship between what you're measuring and the overall measure of satisfaction. It's fairly easy to measure each part of the equation, but you have to know how those pieces add together to create overall satisfaction."
Open-ended questions
An important feature of the questionnaire, Gross says, is the presence of several open-ended questions, which allow American Express - specifically the managers and employees of the travel centers - to hear the customers' feelings in their own words.
"Our objective is to establish a foundation, a common language around the customer. Even our closed-ended questions use the customers' words, we don't rephrase what they tell us. All the questions in the surveys are words that customers said. It can be harder to work with at first but it's very consistent with our customer-obsessed culture," Gross says.
For example, Reiser says, if the branch manager of a bank is given a research report showing customer dissatisfaction with the tellers, he or she might say that's interesting, but what do I do with that information?
"If you give it to them in the customer's words, such as, 'I went to the teller's cage and he was writing something on a piece of paper and then turned to talk to somebody else for two minutes,' that is specific and it shows the manager why the customer was dissatisfied. By producing open-ended information, you can enrich the structured responses that come with the quantified evaluation."
Meaningful to employees
Making the research meaningful for employees at all levels of the company - especially those who deal with customers every day - was a goal in designing the research. It's also key to making the most of customer satisfaction research findings, Gross says.
"People who interact with the customers daily are really the ones who make the business work so that's where we put the information. The science that's behind the customer research is most powerful when linked to the insight, experience and passion to get the insight of our front liners."
"Customer satisfaction work should not be done for the purpose of reporting to management," says BAI's Richard Reiser. "It's for the purpose of managing and improving your business and improving profits. Therefore it has to be useful down to the operational level. American Express is able, through the system that we jointly developed, to take customer satisfaction work and bring it down to the operational level. They can use it to train people by letting them know what customers do and don't respond to and what produces dissatisfaction."
For a company as large and decentralized as American Express, it can be difficult to meet with all of the employees to discuss the customer satisfaction information, Gross says. "We have hundreds of offices around the country, so it's hard to get out and chat with everybody. But it's essential for support groups like ours, and our consultants and researchers, to work directly with operations. Before we talk research and numbers, we ask what they are hearing and what they feel the issues are. Then we actively participate in the improvement process. It helps keep us down to earth."
Those dealing with business travel receive quarterly reports; those in the membership travel offices get reports twice a year. The Travel Service offices receive a report with information specific to their location, some national benchmarks and national averages. Offices are also shown how they scored in comparison to other offices of similar size and type. "We've learned a couple of things: the benchmarks have to be relevant," Gross says. "For example, if they're a small office, and they feel that there's a natural advantage to being big, or vice versa, they'll ignore their results. We want people to reach. We'd like them to say gosh I'm at an 80 and the best person in the country who's just like me is a 99, I can do it."
Rather than make customer satisfaction/service quality results a basis for punitive action against employees, they should be used to set business objectives and as an incentive for improvement. At American Express Travel Related Services, customer satisfaction levels influence employee incentives and bonuses. "If you don't score on customer satisfaction, you don't earn. It's a basic requirement," Gross says.
Wrong reasons
Customer satisfaction, service quality, total quality management - call it what you will, it's all the rage right now in U.S. business. Some companies might be getting into it because it's hot, or because everyone else is doing it. But those are the wrong reasons, Gross says. "If you're not able to tie it to the bottom line, you shouldn't be making the investment. Save your time and money until you're ready. That's smart business. Smarter business is to take customer satisfaction information and use it, because it's incredibly powerful.
"I think customer satisfaction research is here to stay in the companies that probably need it least. These companies are already in close touch with their customers, they have an emphasis on continually improving the way they work and their first commitment is to their people."
Another stumbling block for companies looking to implement a service quality program can be difficulty in making customer satisfaction part of the corporate culture. Either because of bureaucracy or employee skepticism, many firms can't fully embrace the quality gospel--and that usually spells failure for any fledgling customer satisfaction efforts.
BAI's Richard Reiser: "There are going to be a lot of companies that get dissatisfied with the way they're doing customer satisfaction work as the numbers don't change and their ability to use the data as a managerial tool doesn't seem to work because they've been dealing with generalities. Some will get dissatisfied and stop. Some will move on to more sophisticated measures.
"You can't design a process that's just going to be a senior management report on the happiness of the customers. It has to be designed as something that can be used at every level of the company, so that people at every level of the company can see the importance of what they do relative to what the customer experiences."
Gross says that customer satisfaction research has been successful at American Express because the company has been clear about what its main goal is. "Customer satisfaction research and the customer orientation of our business is a fundamental principal of our company. We believe that we serve three constituencies: the external customers, our employees, and our shareholders. All of our management goals are now organized to those three constituencies. We believe that we as management should be creating employee satisfaction, that happy, motivated people on the front lines armed with efficient work processes and support will create delighted customers, and that this leads to increased profits and better margins. And the cornerstone of all this is having a clear read on what matters to customers."