Measuring Service

I'm very focused on measurement.  As far as I can tell, if there is no way to measure an initiative, its very hard to understand the value.  Customer service can be particularly tricky with this.  One can measure the number of times that a customer comes back after having a good service experience.

The difficulty is that this kind of measurement shortchanges the real value of a commitment to customer service.  Seth Godin would say its building a tribe.  Nordstrom would claim that it is the central offering of their company.  Zappos would relate that their entire business was built on hard to track word of mouth.  Measuring ROI is just so frakking tough with this stuff. I had some very personal experience with this recently:

I ordered some stuff from Dell. It was a disaster. An initial email that simply said "order cancel." 8 phone calls.  Several disconnects. Lots of transfers.  Lack of understanding. Blaming the customer. We've all been there before.  Yet for all that, I'll probably order from them again. The price is right. Our other PCs are Dells. Its a pain in the butt, but it is a known quantity.

Later that same day I was riding a bus. A guy a few seats down was in a nice suit. The "gentleman" next to him started abusing him for being "some kind of fancy downtown lawyer or accountant"  The suit replied very politely.  Gently informed him that he worked at a Nordstrom. Went on to explain it was a clothing store and that he'd be happy to be of service. He went so far as to give the crazy man a card.  No prejudices. All politeness and service.  I was absolutely stunned. To be that polite and service oriented on the way home on the bus.  No way!  And yet, even though this backed up what I've read about "The Nordstrom Way" I'll probably not be going to that store anytime soon. 

So here I have this dilemma:  Anecdotally, giving great service is the right thing to do.  Statistically, its hard to prove. Most pundits intuition is that great service is the way to go. Sure there are outliers that show great service works wonders: Zappos.  But, there are also outliers in the other direction of generally reviled companies that do really well.  Experts on the subject such as Malcom Gladwell and Seth Godin present powerful arguments. But they are just that: arguments. Usually proven through assertion and repetition rather than statistics and facts. 

*sigh* I'm going to need to keep cracking away at this problem. Its an important issue. After all, how can one improve if one isn't able to effectively measure progress. No point in putting a bunch of effort in and stumbling around.  *sigh* 

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