In a week that has been dominated by the attack on Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday I, like the vast majority of Londoners, have just carried on with what I need to do. This week has involved monkeying around with surveys, talking about agility and generally getting distracted.
When I survey
Customer experience of the week – not very hotly competed this week – belongs to SurveyMonkey. I decided it was time to concept-test my thinking on ‘moments of joy’ by asking people I know (or since I put the links on Twitter, LinkedIn it may have included people I don’t know) a few simple questions about when and how customer experience makes them happy.
Other survey platforms may well be available – I didn’t do much of a comparison – but for the purposes of a small, indicative survey, SurveyMonkey does the trick – and more importantly does it for free. Apart from the free aspect, what impresses me about the service is the amount of knowledge and best practice – tools, templates and guidance – available to help their customers do a good job.
So from my perspective what SurveyMonkey is doing is investing in me with apparently no financial reward, except this: I’m now likely to recommend SurveyMonkey to anyone thinking of running a survey. And of course if I wanted to scale up my research I’d be thinking of them first and, already having an account on the platform, would be unlikely to go anywhere else.
I’ve noted in my comments as a survey recipient and respondent on other ‘My Week’ posts that it’s nice to have an incentive to fill the survey in. I ignored my best practice advice of course and didn’t offer any incentive other than it’s quick and anonymous. As a result, results are trickling in, but when they look conclusive I’ll put out a post on the topic.
This year’s model
Another associates’ breakfast meeting at Comotion produced a lively discussion on the use of agile techniques to develop new operating models with clients. My write-up is here.
On the way I was pleased to hear live announcements on the tube. Perhaps drivers have got fed up with the pre-recorded announcements – the one that gets me is ‘we are held at a red signal’ which is I suppose meant to be reassuring but just sounds entirely pointless to me – and prefer to have the human touch, which as a passenger is greatly appreciated (and something that was lacking from my SurveyMonkey experience – but in that case it didn’t seem to matter).
Monkey see, monkey do
A survey comes in from Sloane Square concert venue, the Cadogan Hall, to ask my opinion of their online system, prior to an upgrade. I’m pleased to note that their survey, like their current site, is pretty straightforward and is remarkably similar to my moments of joy exercise – just four questions, one of them optional – and was produced on SurveyMonkey. Quite what they will get out of it I am not sure as the current website is fine apart from not being that great on mobile so my response doesn’t tell them any more than that.
Getting physical
Close contender for customer experience on the week was the half hour I spent in my local gym in a ’50+ Circuits’ class – that’s age rather than quantity – where the five of us mature customers were the recipient of much praise from the instructor. It made me realise that as customers we’re often not in a position to get praised in the course of an experience and in other contexts it might seem artificial. And of course it reminded me what a powerful tool it can be in a management context when motivating teams of service providers…
Loret ipsum whatever…
The main distraction of the week has been breaking off from my work to practice for my imminent community choir concert, but even my distractions get distracted, this time from a short-ish Twitter series on #sillywhiteboards: the idea being that before leaving a meeting room you put an enigmatic but ultimately meaningless diagram on the whiteboard to perplex the next occupant. I’m a great user of whiteboards and this week my home office walls are adorned with a fair bit of CX stuff in preparation for future work. They’re also accompanied by something that isn’t particularly silly if you’re attempting to learn the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem off by heart. I am sure that in a career of consultant-type activity I have created my own share of silly ones – albeit unintentionally.