Measuring your customer experience

We measure satisfaction through the JD Power Survey at Lexus. We don’t have a customer satisfaction index in the way that other car brands do. I think we are probably the only car manufacturer that doesn’t. There is a very real point of philosophy behind that which is that even researching a customer’s experience is a contact with the brand. If you have a survey where people fill it in and get nothing back from their investment, then you have actually cheated them. What the vast majority of CSI measurements do is demand something from the customer and offer nothing in return. It also makes the issues anonymous because you get a statistical measurement of how you are performing. You end up treating your customer base as a statistical set rather than as a set of individuals. When companies phone up a customer through their CSI to check up on their experience of having their car serviced, one of the questions they might ask is, ‘Was the car returned to you in a satisfactory condition’? The customer might say, ‘No, there was oil on the floor mats.’ Most, if not all, CSI index measures record that fact and don’t do anything about it. Our approach is if a customer says to us there was oil on the mats, before we do anything else that customer needs a new set of mats, because there is no point in isolating a problem if you don’t put it right.