Are your customer surveys accurate? Put another way, are you guilty of survey malpractice by giving your company faulty information based on inadequate research methods?

Malpractice is a hard word -- it directly implies professional incompetence through negligence, ignorance or intent. Doctors carry insurance for malpractice in the event that a patient perceives a lack of professional competence. But, for contact center professionals, there is no fall back for professional incompetence, whether intentional or not.

You should never put yourself in a position where your competence can be called into question. Many call center managers are skating on thin ice when it comes to typical practices used to measure customer satisfaction. By definition, an ineffective measurement program generates errors from negligence, ignorance and/or intentional wrongdoing. You have a fiduciary responsibility to your company -- and recommendations made based on erroneous customer data do indeed meet the definition of malpractice.

Measurement programs must meet certain scientific criteria to be statistically valid with an acceptable confidence level and level of precision or tolerated error. Without these considerations, you are guilty of Survey Malpractice. To defend your program with "it has always been this way" or "we were told to do a survey" is not sufficient. Research laws adhered to in academia apply to the business world. A deficient survey yields inaccurate data and results in invalid conclusions no matter who conducts it.

Before assuming that Survey Malpractice does not apply to your program, consider the following tell-tale signs of errors and biases:

Measuring too many things. Your survey evaluation of a 5-minute contact center service experience takes the customer 15 minutes to complete and has 40 questions on it. While everyone in your organization has a need for customer intelligence, you should not be fielding only one survey to get all of the answers.

Should the contact center be measuring satisfaction with the inhome repair service, the accounting and invoicing process, the latest marketing campaign, or the distribution network? Not all on one survey.

Not measuring enough things. An overall satisfaction question and a question about agent courtesy does not a survey make. Without a robust set of measurement constructs, answers to questions will not be found. Three or four questions will not facilitate a change in process, won't enable effective agent coaching and is unlikely to be a valid measure to include in an incentive or performance plan.

Measuring questions with an unreliable scale. In school, everyone agreed on what test scores meant: a 95 was an A, an 85 was a B and a 75 was a C. Everything in between has its own marks associated with it as well. Yet, when it comes to our service measurement, we tend to give customers limited responses. What do the categories excellent, good, fair and poor really mean? Should you translate them into numbers for a grade from the customer? Giving limited options does not permit robust analysis and statistical analysis is generally applied incorrectly. Using a categorical scale or a scale that is too small (like many typical 5-point survey questions) is not adequate for the evaluation of service delivery.

Measuring the wrong things or the right things wrong. Surveys should not be designed to tell you what you want to hear but rather what you need to hear. Constructs that are measured should have a purpose in the overall plan. Each item should have a definitive plan for use within the evaluation process. The right things to measure will focus on several overall company measures that affect your center (or your center's value statement to the organization), the agents and Issue/Problem Resolution.

Asking for an evaluation after memory has degraded. When we think about time, 24-48 hours does not seem like a long time. But when you are measuring satisfaction with your service, it is the difference between an accurate evaluation and a flawed one. Do you remember exactly how you felt after you called your telephone company about an issue? Could you accurately rate that particular experience 48 hours later after other calls to the same company, or others, have been made? Yet, you are asking your customers to do just that with a delayed measurement and are opening the door to inaccurate reporting and compromised decision-making for your organization. This is also an unfair evaluation of your agents.

Accuracy and credibility of service providers and product vendors. As with any technology or service, the user assumes responsibility for applying the correct tool, or applying the tool correctly. You can purchase software to schedule agents but if you do not apply the functionality correctly, you will be responsible for the error.

There are plenty of home-grown or vendor-supplied tools to field a survey, but again if you do not apply the functionality correctly, you will be responsible for the error. You can locate a service provider that is interested in selling you something, but it is usually something that fits into their cookie cutter approach which will not be to your specific requirements.

Wiggle room via correction factors. If you are using correction factors to account for issues in the data or to placate the agents or the management team, some aspect of the survey design is flawed. A common adjustment is to collect 11 survey evaluations per agent and delete everyone's lowest score. With a valid measurement that includes numeric scores as well as explanations for scores and a rigorous quality control process, adjustments in the final scores are not necessary. Making excuses for the results or allowing holes to be poked diminishes/ undermines the effectiveness of the program and highlights an opening for Survey Malpractice claims.