Surveys do give accurate results

It suggested that monthly tracking surveys may give ‘unduly flattering scores’ because the sample would typically be drawn from tenants who had recently experienced the organisation’s service. Aren’t these the people that we should be contacting? Presumably they’ll only give a ‘flattering’ score if they’ve received good service, and at least the survey results will be more meaningful and actionable because they represent what’s happening now.

The article also questioned the trend away from postal surveys towards telephone interviews although it failed to mention that telephone surveys get much higher response rates and so suffer far less from ‘non-response’ bias, a much more serious factor in the unreliability of survey data.

I’m also not sure where the evidence is for saying that customer satisfaction has gone down in the recession. The UK Customer Satisfaction Index conducted by the Institute of Customer Service shows it has consistently risen during the recession as companies have worked harder to hang onto the customers they’ve got by giving them the best customer experience possible. The only answer for any deterioration is a less satisfactory customer experience.

Some of the recommendations make good sense. These include comparing landlords in peer groups to eliminate distortions caused by different housing stock, black and minority ethnic or age profiles, focusing more on specific aspects of the customer experience such as satisfaction with repairs and using these to produce a tenant satisfaction index as the headline measure to replace the overall satisfaction question. This would also result in a composite index which would be statistically more reliable than a single question measure.

The final recommendation is also good, saying there’s a case for following best practice from private sector customer satisfaction measurement. That’s exactly what we already do at Affinity Sutton. Our agency, the Leadership Factor, is conducting more than 100 live customer satisfaction surveys at any one time, many for some of the UK’s most respected companies with the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

And guess what the trends are? Frequent, monthly measures focused on specific and recent customer experiences using telephone interviews, 10-point numerical scales and indices to minimise the sample sizes needed for adequate statistical reliability and, above all, focus on using the results to make improvements rather than navel-gaze into the survey methodology and the minutiae of the data.

Neil McCall, group operations director, Affinity Sutton