Imagine you had to improve customer satisfaction. You are given limited time and a small budget. (Okay, you probably don't have to imagine those limitations.)

What would you focus on to get the best results?

Increasing service speed
Reducing service errors
Improving employee friendliness

According to data from Intouch Insight, the answer is number three, friendliness.

A nationwide study of fast food restaurants showed that employee friendliness was most tightly correlated with customer satisfaction. Friendly employees can even help offset the impact of slower service or a higher error rate.

Let's look at the data.

How friendliness connects to customer satisfaction

The Intouch Insight study used mystery shoppers to evaluate the drive-thru experience at ten fast food brands.

More than 1,500 visits were completed. The visits were spread out over different times of day and evaluated multiple factors including wait time, order accuracy, and friendliness.

That factor most closely correlated with overall satisfaction was friendliness:

Chick-fil-A was first in overall satisfaction (tied with Carl's Jr.) at 95 percent. It was also first in friendliness, with 88 percent of shoppers rating employees as friendly. Carl's Jr. was second in friendliness, at 83 percent.

Wendy's came in last, with just 82 percent of shoppers satisfied with their experience. It also had the worst friendliness rating at just 58 percent.

It probably isn't a big surprise that friendliness is connected to satisfaction.

The more surprising results come from looking at other factors such as accuracy, speed, or even perceived food quality.

Accuracy and speed are less important to customers

One of the factors rated by mystery shoppers was whether they received the correct order. There were two big surprises here.

First, none of the fast food chains in the study were accurate more that 89 percent of the time. That means one in ten orders were wrong.

Not good.

The second surprise was the relatively poor connection between order accuracy and overall satisfaction.

McDonald's tied for Arby's for best accuracy, at 89 percent, yet it was ninth in overall satisfaction. Chick-fil-A, the friendliness leader, had pretty terrible accuracy at 83 percent.

Okay, so what about speed?

This seems like it should be very important. It's called fast food after all, and the whole point of a drive-thru is to maximize speed and convenience.

Once again, speed didn't correlate with overall satisfaction.

The drive-thru was the slowest at satisfaction leader, Chick-fil-A. KFC had the fastest average time at 5:03, but ranked eighth in overall satisfaction.

One reason it takes longer to go through the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A is because there tends to be more cars in line than at other chains. Chick-fil-A is much faster when you factor in the other cars in line.

Yet, there's still no correlation. McDonald's had the second-best speed per car, yet it ranked next-to-last in overall satisfaction.

These results back up another study that suggests customers' perception of wait time is influenced by more than just how long they had to wait.

What about food quality?

Intouch did its study in partnership with QSR, so I pulled data from a separate QSR study for this one. It analyzed online reviews and scored several dimensions, including food quality, based on what customers mentioned in the review comments.

Chick-fil-A had the highest food quality rating of the ten chains, but the real surprise was food quality didn't correlate tightly with overall satisfaction.

The line in the chart shows the food quality ratings. The number scale represents the ratio of positive to negative comments about the food.

Chick-fil-A had a score of 5.65, which means it gets 5.65 positive mentions about the food in online reviews for every negative comment. Yet co-satisfaction leader, Carl’s Jr., had a relatively poor food quality score of 2.29.

McDonald’s was last, with a score of 1.27. Burger King, which was mid-pack in customer satisfaction, had the second-worst food quality score of 1.43.

When it comes to quality, there's Chick-fil-A and then there's everyone else.

How can companies be more friendly?

Asking employee to be more friendly is easier said than done. Otherwise, friendliness would be the norm.

It helps to look at reasons why employees aren't friendly. Fast food employees tend to face a variety of challenges, including uncertain schedules, low pay, and demanding bosses. Even naturally friendly employees can find themselves struggling to smile in these environments.

Poor products and services also lead to mutually assured dissatisfaction. Customers get more angry, which makes employees’ jobs more miserable. Eventually, nobody’s happy.

For example, a McDonald’s cashier once looked me straight in the eye and said, “I hate people like you,” because I didn’t have exact change when paying for my meal. (This was a long time ago when paying with cash was the norm.)

It took my a long time to figure out why the employee was so rude.

You can read that story in the first chapter of my book, Getting Service Right. Download the first chapter for free right here.

Conclusion

This data reveals two important points.

First, Chick-fil-A has a well-earned reputation for great food and service but it doesn't pay a penalty for long wait times and poor order accuracy.

Second, friendliness isn't as obvious as it might seem. Otherwise, more fast food chains would put it on the menu.

The prank was pure genius.

Two boys, each about 12 years old, stood on opposite sides of the road. As a car approached, the boys would pantomime picking up a rope and pulling it taught across the road.

This caused speeding cars to slow down as the drivers perceived they were about to run into whatever the boys had stretched across the road. They couldn't see anything in front of them, but the boys' actions told the drivers' subconscious brains that some danger lurked ahead.

Of course, there was no rope. The drivers were reacting to their perception, not reality.

Customer service is often the same way. The experience is almost always amplified for good or bad by invisible ropes—things that alter your customer's perception of reality.

This post will help you identify invisible ropes that might annoy your customers and ruin their experience.

Sign asking customer to wait to be called.

Wait Time

Customer service often involves waiting. Waiting in line for help. Waiting in line to make a purchase. Waiting on hold for a customer service representative to answer the phone.

Long waits tend to make customers very unhappy, but there's an invisible rope here.

A 1996 study by researchers Ziv Carmon and Daniel Kahneman revealed that people overestimate wait times by as much as 36 percent. They discovered several factors in particular that increase our perception of how long we've been waiting:

Expectations: The wait time is longer than we expected it to be.
Fairness: People are cutting in line.
Competition: Another line appears to be moving faster.
Movement: The queue is moving slowly.
Line Length: We can see a long line.
Boredom: Our wait time perception increases when we are bored.
Unpredictability: There is no information telling us how much longer it will be.

The easiest fix is to shorten the actual wait., but that's sometimes not possible. So some companies have found a set of techniques to make the wait time feel shorter.

Contact Friction

Customers must often deal with an unnecessary amount of friction to contact a company, even for the most basic of transactions.

A 2015 study from Mattersight found that 66 percent of customers who called a contact center were frustrated before they even started talking to a live person. The amount of phone menu hoops we have to jump through is ridiculous.

I recently tried to sign up for a webinar that looked mildly interesting. The registration field for this free event contained 20 required fields. Suddenly, I was no longer interested.

A certain florist has been sending me several spam emails per day, ever since I made the mistake of ordering flowers through its website. I never signed up (hence, spam), and I've clicked "unsubscribe" on multiple emails. All to no avail.

Perhaps I can send a simple direct message on Twitter? Nope! The "primary" Twitter handle directs customers to the customer service Twitter account. That account still uses outdated techniques, such as requiring customers to email, or follow the account so the customer can san a direct message.

I won’t be ordering from that company anytime soon. (Side note, if your company uses Twitter, make sure your account is set up to allow customers to send you a direct message without following you, like mine.)

In reality, this extra effort might add an additional minute or two to the interaction. That's really not too much, but it's the perceived waste that really annoys us.

The solution here is simple. Make it as easy as possible for customers to contact your company. If you’re having difficulty getting support to make necessary changes, ask your executives contact your company through the same channels your customers use. That should get their attention.

Friendliness

So many customer service situations can be solved or ruined based on the perceived friendliness of the employee.

A restaurant meal can become "an amazing experience" or the "worst meal ever," depending on the rapport the server can develop with their guests.

A retail shopper can become "a customer for life" or vow to "never go back," based on the retail associate's ability to listen carefully to the customers' needs.

A cable company can ensure a problem is "quickly solved" or deliver "nightmare customer service" based on the technician's ability to solve a problem and make customers feel okay in the process.

Yet getting employees to be friendly isn't as simple as demanding or expecting it from the people who report to us. They need a work environment where they can actually be happy. They want to feel respected, and support products and services that make them proud.

And when they don't feel great, acting friendly can be incredibly difficult.

Conclusion

You can see an example of the invisible rope prank in this short video. It's a great example of how perception can alter the way we see reality.

Look for invisible ropes in your own organization. A sure sign is when customers complain about something unreasonable or their complaint seems untrue. That's often an indicator that an invisible rope tripped them up somewhere along their customer journey.

Another solution is improving your ability to set clear expectations. You can identify some situations with this short video:

Find places where you can manage expectations from Customer Service: Managing Customer Expectations by Jeff Toister