Allegiance Blog

My last business trip resulted in no less than four feedback opportunities: the airline, the hotel, the rental car company and the travel agency.  Each of these organizations sought my feedback to help improve my customer experience.  Marvelous!

It seems every time I buy a product or service, the provider offers the opportunity to give them some feedback through a customer survey. Although the feedback opportunities are wonderful, my service providers are mired in the details of asking about the logistics of their service. Executing flawlessly merely provides them feedback that they delivered what I expected. This is useful information, yet often empty. In fact, we call these feedback surveys “happy charts,” meaning that an extremely high percentage, as high as 90%, of customers, are “happy” with the experience they just had unless a significant service failure occurred or an expectation went unmet.

In the early stages of truly understanding what drives loyalty and advocacy, many of my clients focus on the details of executing a process without failure. Basic service/product quality is really the metric being captured. Yet meeting basic quality expectations isn’t enough today to enchant customers.

Voice of the Customer programs fall behind by focusing primarily on the quality of an experience. Knowing if a customer was greeted properly, if reservations were in order, and if the rental car had fuel are measures of basic service quality, core expectations of value for money. Today’s leaders take the next step and tease out what drives customers to extol the virtues of the experience.

Last year a colleague stayed at a hotel that was very close to the airport and provided a pickup service. He arrived and contacted the hotel for pickup, but they never arrived. Being tired and hungry, he jumped in a taxi. While he was checking into the hotel, the desk clerk asked if he was the gentleman that had requested pick-up. Finding out that he was, the clerk reimbursed his taxi fare. Wow! More than six months later, he still talks about how delighted he was with the hotel and recommends it constantly.

Does your organization know what customers love about you?

The whole love thing sounds a little squishy doesn’t it? That’s the challenge. Gaining the emotional connection with customers is truly the goal of any business. Emotional connection drives loyalty and advocacy. The Walt Disney Company knows what guests love about their experience; Apple knows what users love about their products. Do you?

The next time you review customer feedback results, see if you have the answer to these questions:

1. What did your customers love about their experience with you today?
2. Is there anything that they’ll tell their friends not to miss about their experience with you?
3. If customers could change one single thing about their experience, what would that be?

Look beyond the basic quality of the process to discover the heart of the experience. This will help you build an experience that truly enchants your customers.

It’s now commonplace for companies to ask for customer feedback by email, phone or even the mail. But that’s just one factor in VOC success. CustomerThink research has identified the following five major pitfalls to VOC success:

1. Lack of executive support to drive change

Being customer-centric is easy to say but hard to do without executive leadership. For example, despite proclamations of being “customer-driven,” a large software company found itself out of touch with consumers who felt the vendor pushed the technology and didn’t pay enough attention to implementation and ease-of-use issues. A comprehensive VOC program identified the issues, but what really mattered was CEO driving action. The key to the company’s success, according to the VOC program leader, was that top executives “believe with heart and soul in the importance of a VOC program and then drive real cultural change.”

2. Garbage in, garbage out

With VOC programs, you’re collecting customer feedback (input) so you can get insights you can act on (output). If you ask customers the wrong questions, that’s just garbage in. If your VOC program is built on faulty logic about what really impacts customer loyalty, you’ll waste time and money making changes that don’t matter, or actually make things worse. A worldwide restaurant chain found, for instance, that while good food was naturally essential, the key differentiator was in fact the “hospitality” of team members. This insight helped the chain make better hiring decisions and invest in training that would improve brand reputation.

3. Employees aren’t motivated to be customer-focused

Employees are people and tend to do things in their own self interests. So it shouldn’t come as a shock if rewards to decrease “average handle time”—a measure of efficiency—motivates call center agents to rush to get customers off the phone. Sadly, these tactics usually don’t save any money because the customer calls back or uses other support channels. Take a tip from Zappos, a popular retailer founded 10 years ago as an online shoe shore. In the Zappos call center, “customer loyalty representatives” are measured on First Call Resolution (FCR) and rewarded for the quality of conversations, not speed.

4. Listening with only one ear

Analyzing quantitative feedback from customers is like listening to customers with only ear. The other ear should be used to understand customers through the unstructured and often unsolicited feedback they provide. To start, text analytics can help listen to customers via their written comments on relationship and transaction surveys. But many other sources can provide unsolicited feedback, such as web site forms, email messages, chat messages and call center agent logs. One U.S airline was able to tie comments to a specific aircraft or even a seat number to help find and fix problems that have a direct impact on the customer experience.

5. Ignoring social voices

Consumer usage of social media has exploded in recent years, including blogs, review sites, Facebook and more recently, Twitter. This provides lots of options to rave about great experiences or vent about bad ones. Now, it’s true that social media is a chaotic and noisy world where it can be challenging to “separate the wheat from the chaff.” And besides, how do you know if the complainers are really your customers? Despite these challenges, can you really afford to ignore social voices?

Avoid these five pitfalls and you’ll be well on your way to success with your Voice of the Customer program.

The best source of information about the quality of your products, service delivery, and processes is, of course, your customers. So you create a voice of the customer program to ensure you get that valuable insight. Sometimes, however, what customers tell you isn’t always easy to hear. Pardon the cliché, but that negative feedback is a gift. Customers who value you enough to tell you the hard truth are ones who will stick around—and most likely become evangelists—once you’ve addressed their concerns.

Here are two examples of how constructive negative feedback can be, directly from the people who received it:

Product Woes
A user of our software commented, “I just can’t find any value in this product” on our online user community site. Of course I was disappointed. Then other users chimed in and helped the person to find the value, how they use it, why they use it and so forth.

It’s the best feedback I’ve received, and here’s why…

1. I learn from others how they explain the product
2. Because people have choices, they defend their product decision and help others
3. It demonstrated that even if the feedback is not positive, people care – otherwise that person wouldn’t even bother to comment
4. We reacted and changed our home page to better explain what we do
5. It reiterated that a negative feedback may do more than a “satisfied customer” who just moves on without saying
6. We actually got additional users directly related to this incident – so it helped grow our user base

Listen up
I was asked once by a customer, in a very terse tone of voice, “Do you actually want to help me right now, because you seem like you don’t.”

It was in a face-to-face conversation, so he was reading my body language and inattentiveness quite clearly. I had entered the conversation distracted and was not really focusing on his questions and needs. I was honestly embarrassed and had to apologize. It was a real wake up call for me. Since then I have always been more attentive to being in the moment when dealing with both my customers and my employees.

This experience has also been a vital lesson I pass along in training and mentoring others. I have always been of the opinion that our mistakes give us the most opportunity to improve — if we pay attention.

Now what?
As these two stories illustrate, uncensored feedback can be tough to hear, but can trigger positive changes that not only solidify that one customer relationship, but can cause a ripple effect that improves relationships with other customers as well.

It’s easy to get defensive or ignore negative feedback. Neither will help move your business forward or improve customer relationships. In fact, quite the opposite. So, don’t ask for feedback unless you intend to follow up on it—whether it’s what you wanted to hear, or not.

About the Author: Ginger Conlon is editorial director of 1to1 Media.

A new research report from industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group called “Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand” reveals how organizations that achieve superior performance in customer retention and customer satisfaction grow and harvest customer advocates.

Some of the most compelling survey findings include:

- 70% of firms that enjoyed Best-in-Class performance periodically used customer feedback to influence strategic decisions (versus 29% of Laggards). [By comparison, the report notes that even though "70% of Industry Average organizations indicated they collected customer feedback...only half of these organizations actually used feedback to influence strategic decisions."]

- 96% of respondents saw value in formalizing a strategy to encourage or incent loyal customers to promote the brand, product or service.

- 37% of respondents currently have a formal program in place to systematically identify and encourage loyal customers to become advocates for the brand, product, or service.

- Over the next 12 months, more than three-quarters of all organizations will either have in place, or be in the process of pursuing, a formalized program to promote customer advocacy.

The report also cites a  March 2009 Aberdeen study titled “The ROI on Customer Feedback: Why It Pays to Listen to the Voice of the Customer” which found that the number one pressure driving investments in customer feedback initiatives is to increase customer retention and customer loyalty.

Since every interaction that a business has with a customer is an opportunity to positively influence the customer experience as well as grow customer retention, customer loyalty and customer advocacy, it makes sense that customer feedback has become a critical component in these initiatives.

Kimberly Mathie, MarComm Manager, Allegiance

I’m participating in the Gartner CRM conference today. Some of the major themes of the conference include customer feedback, customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM). I like the direction things are heading–a convergence between CRM, marketing, voice of the customer (VOC) and customer experience. There’s no doubt that business leaders are getting more savvy, but so is the technology.

What does this mean for all of us? As business practitioners, we have the opportunity to use advanced technology to accomplish things that we have wished would happen for years (i.e. being able to connect CRM, which delivers the who, what, where, when and why of the customer transactional world, with the ‘why’ obtained through attitudinal customer surveys and customer feedback collection). Reaching out to customers who talk about a company, but not to that company through social media text analysis. The ability to create a dialog with customers through multiple channels, such as SMS/text, and other up-and-coming modes of communications is becoming critical. 

Jim Davis, Ed Thomson, and Gareth Herschel with Gartner have a solid feel for where the market is headed. They have presented thoughts about how to connect with customer to improve the customer experience. In the end though, the “raising of the game” by all practitioners and leaders must happen, too. In my conversations with other practitioners, I’ve found that there is a general lack of understanding about the role that feedback plays within an organization. Most practitioners seem to think that a yearly satisfaction survey is enough, or even that an event-driven survey, such as receipt surveys, will provide them with what they need to hear the voice of the customer. Not true. A true VOC program is more comprehensive, using various surveys, unsolicited feedback collection and predictive analytics to drive true business change.

I’d like to ask for your help in “raising our game.” I’m compiling a paper about how to build a VOC launch plan. If you have developed any plans in the past for launching a VOC or customer experience program, please send them to me (i.e. altered to protect sensitive information, if needed) and I will contact you to ask some follow up questions. Send them to chris.cottle@allegiance.com

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing, Allegiance