It’s not a personality thing. You don’t have to swap family photos and go for dinner once a month. It’s important that your customers feel welcome in your service department, though, and that professional courtesy and approachability can set you apart.

The barometer for your service department’s friendliness and professionalism is almost certainly your CSI survey score, right? It’s what you use to gauge what your customers truly think about your service department. After all, your customers answer the survey honestly, don’t they?

Not so. Virtually anyone who has completed a customer satisfaction survey, whether for a restaurant, an online help chat, a spa, or a car dealership knows those responses are closely tied to someone’s personal income. No one wants to be responsible for someone taking home less of a paycheck because of a bad experience, so most people will complete the survey with full marks.

The degree of dissatisfaction can influence the survey, however. If you’ve received straight zeros or ones across the whole survey from someone, you can safely assume that customer is unhappy. Even when the service visit went swimmingly aside from one aspect, some customers will destroy you on the whole survey when just one question should really take the hit.

There are three kinds of survey respondents:

• The trained customer. This is the repeat customer that you’ve trained to provide the responses you want – all perfect scores. They know their survey answers have an effect on someone’s income and don’t want to rock the boat. They may have had a less than stellar experience, but you might never hear about it because they’ve been trained (by you) not to mention it.
• The disruptor. This is the customer that comes in with a chip on their shoulder or with something to prove. Even perfect service results in less than perfect scores simply because “there’s always some way to improve”. You’ll never fully satisfy this critic and their scores will reflect it.
• The honest respondent. Making up a tiny portion of your survey results, the person who answers honestly about their service visit will have answers typically ranging from neutral to perfect. You might see a “dissatisfied” answer now and then, but largely the answers will stay close to the positive side.

A fourth group will never answer the survey no matter what you do, and you’ll never get away from the disruptors. It’s their lot in life to make everyone experience their opinion whether it's detrimental or not. It’s the main reason your CSI scores will never, ever be perfect.

The biggest problem with customer satisfaction surveys is this: we turn our honest respondents into trained customers. It happens whether we mean for it or not. We explain to customers that they’re going to receive a survey and we’d appreciate if they could answer it “completely satisfied” across the board.

If a response comes in with less than perfect scores, we contact the customer, often sounding hurt that they didn’t give us full marks, and ask what we could’ve done better. It’s uncomfortable for the customer so they either don’t do the surveys anymore or begin to answer “completely satisfied” on everything and neglect their honest opinion.

So if we can’t count on the CSI survey scores to find out if our customers actually like us, what do we do? How do we determine if we’re providing a comfortable environment, if our staff are friendly and courteous, or if we’re attentive to our customer’s needs?

You need to develop a way to find your customers’ true feelings. It probably won’t be from asking each one directly, and an impersonal email or follow-up survey will probably garner the same results as the CSI survey. Here are a few ideas:

• Have your staff’s family members visit your department for service. If you want a true opinion of your care and concern, you’ll get it from the people who live with your employees. Here’s the kicker, though: every customer that comes through your door should be treated like the family of your staff members.
• Spend time in the service drive. Either passively or actively put in face time with your customers and staff to gauge for yourself if friendly, courteous relationships are being fostered. Be the example of how to treat your customers by greeting people with a warm smile and firm handshake.
• Sit in your customer lounge. Be anonymous if possible. Listen to the conversations your customers are having with each other and with the people on the other end of their cell phones. You might be surprised how openly people talk to each other about their dissatisfaction and never tell you. You may also hear glowing praise about one of your staff which you can pass along.
• Thank your customers for honest survey responses. These are the results you can actually build off of, ones you can learn from. A quick call to acknowledge their survey response and a statement like, “It’s refreshing to get an honest survey response. Please continue to let us know areas of improvement” will encourage your customer to be open and honest with you in the future, hopefully in person as well as in their survey.

This is just a starting point for a much larger issue. It’s no secret that dealership service departments are a dreaded place to be for most customers. Once you can accurately gauge if your customers actually like you, you can begin to tackle the root of the problem.