NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Part one. The Reading

The two questions

What did you expect, and what happened? Everything else is commentary.

0:45. Captions on by default. Everything said here is also written above, so nothing is only in the video.

Read the transcript

Two questions, asked of a real customer, produce more usable information than most survey programmes. What did you expect when you bought this? And what actually happened? They work because satisfaction is not some absolute state. It is a comparison, and these retrieve both sides of it. A customer receiving excellent service that is not what they expected is dissatisfied. A customer receiving modest service that is exactly what they expected is satisfied, and frequently loyal. They also locate the fault. If expectation and outcome are both accurate and they differ, you have a delivery problem. If the expectation was never achievable, you have a sales problem, and no amount of delivery improvement will resolve it. Record the answers in the words the customer used.

Two questions, asked of a real customer, produce more usable information than most survey programmes.

What did you expect when you bought this? And what actually happened?

They work because satisfaction is not an absolute state, it is a comparison, and these two questions retrieve both sides of it. A customer receiving an excellent service that is not what they expected is dissatisfied. A customer receiving a modest service that is exactly what they expected is satisfied and frequently loyal.

They also locate the fault far more precisely than a rating does. If expectation and outcome are both accurate and they differ, you have a delivery problem. If the expectation was never achievable, you have a sales problem, and no amount of delivery improvement will resolve it.

Ask them of customers who are doing well, not only ones who are complaining. The healthy accounts tell you which expectations you are meeting, which is what you need in order to set them deliberately.

Record the answers in the customer's words. A summarised expectation loses the specificity that made it diagnostic.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practising operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.