Why not survey your customers on how THEY did today?

I receive a couple of customer satisfaction surveys every week where the company asks me to evaluate the performance of the company and the overall experience along several lines of measurement.

But since service experiences require input from the customer to execute a successful experience, why don’t service companies survey the customer on their own performance?

This may sound silly, but it could lead service development in the direction of getting the customer to take on a larger part in production, recrafting of external communications around customer role, and ultimately, improvement of satisfaction from the direction of customer input.

Think of what your service business could do with quantitative responses to questions like:

• I clearly explained what I wanted the person serving me to do.
• I gave the server (company) proper information.
• I understand the process associated with this service.
• I understand my role in providing this service.
• I was friendly to the employee.
• The service was a pleasant experience overall.

If you knew the answers to those questions, what are the chances that you would spend additional time & effort on educating the customer on their role, or how to effectively interact with your service employees? What are the chances you might redesign parts of the service to be more user friendly, or have more personal contact at places in the delivery process where your customers are getting lost?