Allegiance Blog

This is the first in a series of blog posts regarding use of features and functions available in the Allegiance Engage7 Voice of Customer platform. 

Introduction

Allegiance Engage7 has several advanced survey campaign analytic capabilities that enable you to treat invitation data as first-class data, similar to response data. We realize that who is invited, how many responses you get, and the response rate are vital to data analysis.

Insight into the response rate is key to invitation management. The response rate of a campaign represents the percentage of invitees who responded to the survey. A high response rate ensures that the survey results are representative of the population contacted. Engage7 Invitation Reports provide several options to determine the accurate response rate for a survey.

How is Response Rate Calculated? 

The basic response rate in Invitation Reports is: 

Be sure to include the count of abandoned or incomplete responses in the response rate report. Configure this at Manage Survey > Manage Responses. When enabled, Response Rate is:

 When bounce reporting is enabled, hard bounces are automatically excluded from the number of invitations. This is configurable in the Options menu. One can optionally configure Soft & Hard bounces to be excluded or included in the Response Rate. When bounces are excluded, the calculation is:

Allegiance Advantage  

Engage7 tools bring you significant advantages to help you draw insights from your invitation data.

• The Invitation Reports provide an easy to use, zero training user interface
• Robust segmentation and filtering tools provide the ability to deep dive into invitation data by demographic or time
• Smart bounce processing capabilities automatically track bad email addresses and provide tools to easily rectify and resend invitations to increase response rates
• The ability to allow anyone within your organization access to these reports, with similar permission levels as our standard analytics product.

Look forward soon to a blog post on how to use the Engage7 product and other industry best practices to increase response rates.

It has been a joy to watch our clients’ Voice of Customer initiatives season and mature over the last few years. Some things do get better with age, and a finely-honed VoC initiative is no exception.  

With a solid VoC initiative underway and having firmly established their guidance as critical to their organization’s success, many mature VoC teams are turning to more sophisticated analysis, reporting and forecasting. They are looking for opportunities for continuous improvement. I applaud these efforts and will be thrilled to see what 2012 brings to these VoC pioneers and their programs. 

Remember to Sweat the Small Stuff 

This is a reminder, however, to continue sweating the small stuff. Specifically, I mean reacting to tactical customer feedback in a prompt fashion: Addressing customer concerns and complaints swiftly and sincerely with empathy, and responding quickly to customer compliments to reinforce their enthusiasm. 
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Best practice companies are not only listening to Voice of the Customer, but they are using that feedback to increase customer retention and loyalty, solve customer challenges and develop new products and services. They are also using new technologies to streamline surveys and feedback management programs to gain a better understanding of why customers do business with them.

From our experience working with them, here are nine habits that make them successful:

1. Well-defined goals and objectives: Successful VOC managers know what overall business objectives are at stake, why they are collecting the data and how they are going to use that data to make decisions.

2. Executive buy-in and internal support: Successful practitioners work alongside the executive team in communicating and sharing important customer feedback and VOC program goals and objectives with all employees.

3. A formal VOC program: Managers who follow best practices set up multiple communication channels for customers to communicate with the company. They help create and implement formal processes to support customer feedback data collection and management efforts.
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At last year’s Allegiance Engage Summit, Billy Beane gave attendees an insightful and entertaining presentation on the importance of analytics. With the movie Moneyball being released this week, it’s a good time to re-visit this blog post and how it applies to VOC. 

What do Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and your company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives have in common? At the basic level, you both have employees, operational metrics, and outcomes. But there are more similarities. Do these sound familiar?

 1. Traditional key metrics used to measure performance
 2. Undervalued or undiscovered insights that can make a big difference
 3. Analytics to aid decision making and resource allocation
 4. Competitors that have much larger budgets

On the heels of the Allegiance Engage Summit, I re-read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. This time, my copy was autographed by Billy Beane himself. Beane’s inspirational Summit talk reminded us that sports and business have much in common: metrics, analytics, and insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.
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Allegiance recently conducted a focus group of Voice of Customer (VOC) practitioners at leading companies. One of the questions asked was: What is on your wish list for what you’d like to see in a VOC program in the future? Here are a few of the responses: 

• Ability to leverage CRM to the Voice of Customer.
• Integrate multiple sources across customer communication channels, so that social surveys, e-mails etc., are able to be pulled in, in an integrated fashion. 
• A better way to ensure smart dissemination of information so that the data isn’t sliced and diced down to levels that don’t make sense. 
• Access to applications that go beyond surveys and reporting. 
• Higher ease of use especially, as we work with champions who aren’t analysts. (Apple-ize it.) 
• Rolling up both the transactional and loyalty data that we’re collecting over time into some sort of cold, warm, or hot type of flag for sales.  
• Automated way to have the system go through segmentations and give something at the end that says “this went up, this went down” instead of having to go through the same charts every quarter to figure it out. 
• In those cases with very targeted feed back systems on accounts, we need a way to audit who was surveyed and when, and flag inconsistencies. 
• Being able to prepare the 360 degree view of the customer. “I don’t want an account rep to go out on an account, not armed with information that is in the transactional survey aboutan issue that has been brewing for 6 months.” 
• Consistent tool set to eliminate all the manual work and eliminate bias.  (Different people code the same thing differently, based on their bias.) 

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There is a lot of talk in the industry about making Voice of Customer data more actionable. But to achieve this, you must first understand the type of data that is uniquely available and actionable in a successful VOC program. 

Actionable data is data that you can use to improve the operations of the company.  It goes beyond answering “what” to understanding “why.” 

VOC programs fail most often because they provide just scores, changes in scores, or data that is only part of the solution. This only tells business managers that their SAT scores are down this month without telling them the reasons why or pointing out comments and stats to help them see the impact of fixing the problem. 

If you present your VOC results as broader business story, rather than just a VOC/SAT report, success will skyrocket. It is hard to do, and requires thinking big, being ready to tackle processes beyond your job scope, and thinking like an executive. 

Unfortunately, many VOC practitioners place their efforts on the collection side, improving surveys and feedback mechanisms. They need to think more strategically about VOC data.  More surveys are not the answer, but more strategically designed feedback mechanisms that yield actionable data is what is needed.
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With the growth of digital transactions, more consumer data is becoming available through smartphones, GPS, mobile banking, etc. The availability of “big data” means marketers and customer experience professionals have the potential to gain deeper insight into customer behavior. 

For Voice of Customer data, the combination of data mining and text analytics provides the best analysis method. Text analytics turns comments on social media or the web into structured data that can be analyzed. Data mining can be applied to uncover the hidden value of the information or link it to other sources to compare trends and relationships. 

Ideally, the variables culled from text analytics are used alongside structured and transactional data from many other databases (such as customer satisfaction scores, geographic data, demographics, purchase and usage histories, product-feature data, etc.) 

Through data mining, we can identify and refine patterns and trends among the hundreds, even thousands of variables that often come with “big data.” We can then make predictions based on information obtained from analyzing and exploring this data. 
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Forrester recently announced the winners of its 2011 Voice of the Customer Awards at the Customer Experience Forum. We were very pleased to see JetBlue, a customer of Allegiance, among the winners, and another Allegiance customer, EMC Corp., among the finalists. 

Although the idea is not new, companies are now actually achieving competitive advantage by using customer feedback. Together with price and product, customer voice has become the accepted third tool that top companies use to beat out the competition. These companies are doing more than merely measuring customer satisfaction or driving marketing campaigns. They are using customer feedback to drive change among their many business units. For example:

Operations:  JetBlue has used customer feedback from a wide variety of channels to drive operational changes that resulted in improving the compliment to complaint ratio for Flight Attendants by 300%, reducing the number of passengers with LiveTV issues by 10%, and dramatically improving customer satisfaction scores at specific airport locations.
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Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. www.wiley.com  from “The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Grow Your Business Through Existing Customers” by Becky Carroll (c) 2011

Your customers are comparing experiences as they deal with top-notch customer-focused organizations. It is important to determine how your organization’s customer experience stacks up against other experiences your customers are having on both the business and the consumer sides. The following three steps will help  you begin to plan the best experience for your customers:

Step 1: Look to your customers. By this, I mean find out what your customers expect from  you and from other companies. What do they consider to be great customer service? What sets one experience apart from another in their minds? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask! Your customers will tell you which companies they believe provide stellar (and not-so-stellar) customer experiences.
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Ok, let’s face it.  A lot of the blogs posted by VOC experts and those offering VOC solutions focus around best practice, what the research says, or perhaps it may be just one person’s opinion.  That is a not bad thing; it is helpful, entertaining and gives us something to consider.

However, this time, I thought I would let you hear what a couple of leading practitioners in the VOC space are saying. 

Some time ago, Allegiance began hosting weekly broadcasts (that turn into podcasts) on BlogTalk Radio.  Yes, talk radio on the Internet.  The topics have ranged from survey design best practices to social media, and I have to say, Allegiance is gaining quite an audience.

Recently, at the Allegiance Summit, I took the opportunity to host some interviews of some of the leaders and trendsetters in the VOC world. So this month, rather than read my blog post, I’d like you to listen to my blog post.

1. Arkadi Kuhlmann: Chairman, President and CEO of ING Bank.   http://tinyurl.com/64veskq
2. Jim Bampos: Vice President of Customer Quality at EMC corporation. http://tinyurl.com/6z4t6q8 

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