Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors

Asking the Crowd for Ideas Is Very Different from Asking Them to Evaluate Your Performance

Customer/client evaluations are always a tricky proposition because you so desperately want validation that you are pleasing the people who pay you money. But if you refer to the preceding argument about asking for help from your crowd, you'll be wary when asking them to (1) recall and (2) articulate their experience with you in the words you've constructed in your survey. Because our company has been studying customer behavior since 1994, we have paid particular attention to how the repeat-buying habit indicates loyalty after the survey. I wrote extensively about this in The Customer Shouts Back and Are You Relevant? To save you time, I'll compress my findings into a single sentence: Customers hate evaluating you.

As we discussed in Chapter 3, your customers lead extremely busy lives. They don't have time to fill out your form. Although they can probably remember the feeling they had after the transaction, they can't recall the intricacies and details of the experience you're asking them for. Therefore, they don't know how to score you properly.

Remember, this averse reaction to surveys (from our research) refers to a collective consciousness. What do most people respond to? What basic experiences do most people like or dislike? Surveys fall easily into the “dislike” category.

From my experience in show business, it was a given that the final moment of every performance had to be the most ...