Live from Future Call Center Summit: Arby's Doesn't Cook Up the Voice of the Customer

Beneath all the hype, metrics and data, there are two questions that speak to the heart of the customer experience:

What is the customer seeing?

What is the customer feeling?

When attempting to understand the voice of the customers, it is those questions that matter. It is those questions that let a business know whether all of its thousands of hours and millions of dollars are producing customer satisfaction rather than customer sorrow.

Few businesses successfully hone in on the answers to those questions. While they might touch on customer sentiment tangentially in their hollow, rhetorical messaging about customer-centricity, most businesses are content to let insulated mentalities and misguided assumptions fuel their perception of the customer experience. The tune of the "voice of the customer" they end up creating is designed without any meaningful contribution from the customer.

Unwilling to settle for that insufficient, inaccurate portrait of its customer base, Arby’s recognized the flaws of the existing customer feedback process. Shared by Chuck Slicker at Call Center IQ’s Future Call Center Summit, such hazards included:

*Making decisions based on limited data. Arby’s—and other retailers—would rely on isolated or even planned site visits and inspections to formulate big picture opinions about its business. Many retailers also fail to account for all customer types and demographics when evaluating service experiences.

*Reacting dramatically to dramatic events. Things will occasionally go wrong. And in the age of social media, news of those relatively isolated customer service nightmares are always at risk of going viral. Businesses, however, need to be careful when making sweeping changes to policy and practice based on anomalies in the service process. The customer experience refers to a totality of moments rather than a singular circumstance.

*Evaluating performance narrowly. While all business endeavors should favorably impact the income statement, organizations sometimes ignore context and circumstantial factors when evaluating a strategy. As a result, businesses could miss out on enormous, indirect opportunities to attain profitability simply because that profitability did not seem vividly evident in the immediate term.

In all three cases, businesses subject themselves to internal fears and motivations. They should instead be focusing on what will drive overall customer perception and behavior.

To achieve that, Arby’s implemented an aggressive, large-scale customer satisfaction survey program.

Known as the Promise Check, the program shifted decision making away from the insulated corporate boardroom and into the hands of the customers. Real experiences—across all customer profiles and all locations—began to trigger customer management strategy. Real preferences and annoyances began to drive customer service evaluation.

Arby’s initiated and mastered the survey based on the following process chain:

Ideation

Evaluation

Recommendation

Education

Implementation

Correction

Expansion

Experimentation

Rollout

According to Slicker, the result was a survey highlighted elements of the customer experience—good and bad—that Arby’s internal team never previously considered in the evaluation process.

One such example: by measuring drive-thru wait time, Arby’s was inadvertently creating bad experiences for customers. Fearing the label of poor performance, employees would advise drive-thru customers to "pull up and wait" for their food, which took them out of the official queue and thus gave the false perception that they were being served with the appropriate combination of care and expediency.