It looks like Rock and Roll Heaven is filling up this week as Ric Ocasek died over the weekend. (Indeed the scribe of the Boston Compliance Community asked when I was coming out with my Ocasek tribute.) He was a co-founder of and lead singer with The Cars. The Cars formed in Boston in the mid-1970s by Ocasek and band-mate Benjamin Orr after they met at high school. Their early hits included Just What I Needed, My Best Friend’s Girl and Good Times Roll. In the late ‘70s, The Cars had one of the most unique sounds I had ever heard. According to his New York Times (NYT) obituary, “Ocasek’s songs were invariably terse and catchy, spiked with Mr. Easton’s twangy guitar lines and Mr. Hawkes’s pithy keyboard hooks. But they were also elaborately filled out by multitracked instruments and vocals. Lyrics that might initially seem like pop love songs were, more often, calmly ambivalent.”
The Cars seemed to bring some of the progressive musical elements of the burgeoning punk scene, which morphed into New Wave, into the mainstream. I will never forget their haunting base lines which seemed to literally hum with excitement, most particularly in Just What I Needed and My Best Friend’s Girl. Once again the NYT said, “In the Cars, Mr. Ocasek’s lead vocals mixed a gawky, yelping deadpan with hints of suppressed emotion, while his songs drew hooks from basic three-chord rockabilly and punk, from surf-rock, from emerging synth-pop, from echoes of the Beatles and glam-rock and from hints of the 1970s art-rock avant-garde.”
As you can probably tell, I loved The Cars. But Ocasek’s music career extended past the end of The Cars, which broke up in the late 1980s. Thereafter Ocasek embarked on a solo career as well as working as a producer for artists including Weezer, Bad Religion and No Doubt. Ocasek was about as cool a rocker was in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, “In a pop world full of extroverts and peacocks, Mr. Ocasek always presented himself as a detached, introverted craftsman, dedicated to songwriting rather than showmanship.” Rock and Roll Heaven just garnered one heck of musician.
This cool detachment of Ocasek informs today’s blog post on surveys and communications. We take communications first, in the area of internal reporting through a whistleblower or reporting system. Simply put, it is not a positive for a company to have no internal reports through the hotline. This typically means there has been either little publicity and communications about the reporting line or employees are concerned with retaliation. Both situations would be viewed as problematic by regulators should they ever come knocking.
If there are no reports for a length of time but certainly for one year, the compliance function needs to engage with a communications campaign publicizing the hotline. You should get your Chief Executive on board to put out a message to all company employees that the organization wants hotline reports and the company is committed to a strong no-retaliation policy for all hotline reports. Always remember this is a key metric for regulators.
The second area is surveys. I recently had two very different experiences around surveys that seem to me to inform corporate surveys. The first was at the Apple Store. I went into look at some upgrades and spent a good half hour with the salesperson. Since it was Apple, he was well informed and very enthusiastic about the company and its products. When we concluded he related that I would receive a survey about my experience and that if there was anything I could enter into the survey which would help him going forward to please do so. He added that even if this information was negative both he and Apple would use it to improve his customer service and my customer experience going forward.
The second example was at my auto dealership. I have been trading at the same dealership for about 10 years and know the long-term service personnel well. I always go to the sale service representative as she knows both my wife and myself/our cars and the problems that we both routinely have driving the streets, highways and by-ways of Houston, Harris County, Texas. It was a routine service call, during a warranty period. The service itself was done quickly and efficiently with a minimum of fuss. When I picked the car up, she told me that I would receive a survey and asked that I fill out with all Number 10 ratings (Exceptional) for all areas of my service experience. She also related that she and the dealership would be rated negatively by the manufacturer for anything less than a 9.
As this auto experience came shortly after my Apple Store experience, I thought about what you are attempting to garner through a customer survey. For an inhouse compliance professional, employees are your customers. For Apple, it was to use the survey to improve both customer service and the customer experience. For the car dealership, it was to (1) keep from being chastised by the manufacturer and (2) to be able to crow about how exceptional the customer experience is at the dealership.
I once worked in the legal department for a major oilfield services company. We did an annual employee service survey of their comments on the law department. It usually came back with about 50% complaints about the law department delivery services (it really was abysmal). When we were given the results of the survey, the leadership would crow that 50% of our customers approved of our service delivery. In short, the leadership of the legal department had no intention of (1) listening to its customers and (2) improving the abysmal service delivery.
Just as Ric Ocasek epitomized cool & hip rockers from the late ‘70s (a decidedly uncool and unhip period), you should work to make your surveys actually mean something. It is not about claiming that you get 10s on every customer service, you don’t and you should not receive 10s across the board. The Apple representative really wanted to improve himself and his company’s customer service and customer experience. Finally, if there are 50% complaints about your function’s service delivery, do not crow that half your customers ‘like us’.
[View source.]
