Thomas Cook finds out tick box customer surveys do not make customers tick!
by Feedback Ferret on July 13, 2011 at 1:15 pm
by Piers Alington
When an esteemed travel guru devotes an entire article in a national newspaper to a customer questionnaire from a travel company, surely that has to be great PR for the company in question? Thomas Cook may wish to differ, after being the subject of a wittily scathing piece by Simon Calder in the Independent recently.
In yet another piece of bad PR for the traditional tick box survey, the journalist explains how a lengthy customer questionnaire about his recent trip to Les Deux Alpes had taken a turn for the bizarre by page three. After being asked about the make of this car, the survey delved into his current utilities suppliers before asking for the renewal date for car, buildings and home contents insurance.
The journalist drew a fairly damning conclusion from all this:
“You don’t care two hoots what I thought of the flight, or the bed, or the breakfasts. All you want is my contact details and spending habits so you can sell the information to other firms. Anyone who is fool enough to fill this out is an ideal target for any identity thief who gets his hands on the data”.
The real shame here is that Thomas Cook was probably nothing like as cynically pre-meditated as Simon Calder imagines. But what the travel company is guilty of, like many brands, is applying an off-the-peg customer feedback solution to an occasion where one-size fits-all is just not appropriate.
Today’s consumers are a richly-diverse bunch, who may want very different things from their holiday experience. If Thomas Cook genuinely wants to find out what ‘makes its customers tick’, why not ask them what they really thought?
In our experience, inviting customers to provide a simple Net Promoter Score (NPS) together with open-ended comments to provide context to their NPS rating, can be much more rewarding than imposing a list of generic, bland and frankly irrelevant questions?
In addition to capturing some valuable insights (and possibly positive PR) from a vastly experienced and knowledgeable traveller such as Simon Calder, Thomas Cook would discover a wealth of data from a wide range of customers who have just as much emotional investment in the travel brand. This approach will yield the type of nuanced actionable insight that market research companies can only dream about.
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