Last night Stacey and I enjoyed an excellent dinner with a couple of senior people from Germany from a large technology company, who were in town for the weekend working on some business with their client here. The discussion ranged over quite a bit of space - from the woman from the former East Germany who was seeking her long lost North Korean husband, to the intellectual ability of Nicholas Sarkozy (I found they had a different view to that of French friends of mine!).
Partway through the meal though we got onto the difficulties of doing business in parts of Asia. The more senior executive of the two shared a story about a trying time he had in Korea. The services team he was managing there got a horrible, horrible report card from the client - 5 out of 5 on every measure - where 1 was ideal and 5 was the worst! Following due process, they convened a meeting to find a scapegoat to hang at first light.
All fingers of course pointed at the person responsible for the services. He had no answers and didn't say much - when prodded by this German executive, the best answer he had was that some equipment had been delivered late. The exec, sniffing that something was up, asked for a meeting with the CIO of this client.
The CIO was surprisingly ready to meet, at a time and place of the exec's convenience. When they did get together, the German began by apologising and stressing that he was concerned for the relationship, and ready to do whatever was necessary to reverse the satisfaction score.
The Korean customer then laughed, waggled his finger at the German and said "someone needs to tell you how we do business in Korea!". It turned out they were disappointed in the relationship, but not on any of the measures that had been included in the survey. They felt that once they signed the deal with this client, the execs from the IT company flew away and never looked back. None of the strategic promises of partnership were delivered; none of the important goals were met. The team left on the ground (all locals despite what was sold) did their best and met all the performance targets, but that was all they could do.
The Korean said "as soon as I saw this form, I knew this was the way to get your attention". The story has a happy ending - the relationship got back on track; a workshop was held, commitments were made and subsequently delivered upon.
Its interesting though that companies continue to use these explicit measurement systems. There are a number of problems with these:
- They never measure what is really important to the customer - often, the customer cannot even explain coherently what is important to them so how could this possibly be translated to a survey?
- The customer can game the hell out of these, depending on their mood. I've done it, I'm sure you have. As soon as you reveal your priorities through these surveys, you've played your hand - you've ceded all power to the customer. You've got a classic problem of asymmetry - they know how to press your buttons, but you have no idea what they are really thinking (or doing).
- If the customers do answer them truthfully, you can't make any sense out of the results. I've often told the story about the company I worked for that had a magic black box that calculated organisational climate - they told me it was at 62%, but their target was 65% - i could never figure out what this meant! 62% of what??
There was only one reassuring thing that came from this story for me ... customers in Korea do business exactly the way that customers do business all over the world!