Allegiance Blog

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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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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As a light snow fell in Park City, Utah, hundreds of Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts gathered for day two of the Allegiance Engage Summit. Attendees enjoyed great speakers and hands-on workshops that focused on how to uncover and apply insights from customer feedback to achieve positive business outcomes. 

Here are some highlights from Tuesday’s speakers: 

Guy Kawasaki, Author and Former Apple Chief Evangelist  

Guy Kawasaki at Engage Summit

• Business should focus on becoming more likeable and trustworthy while engaging customers to win more business.
• Companies should “remove the speed bumps” and make it easier for customers to do business with them.
• Default to Yes – always be thinking “How can I help this person.”
• Keep your message simple and tell a story to get the message across.
• Plant many seeds, engage with many and enchant all the influencers. 

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Many companies are excited about the opportunities that social media marketing can bring to their organizations. They recognize that it provides a relatively inexpensive method of connecting with customers and understanding them in a way that can be acted upon to engender customer loyalty. Therefore, these companies are creating strategies for how best to break through the noise and talk directly to their customers in a new way.

However, one of the keys to being successful in the use of social media marketing is actually not talking at all; rather, it is listening to the existing conversation taking place online. Proactive listening to the customer conversation is critical to the creation of the appropriate social media communication plan.

This process is analogous to attending a cocktail party. Upon entering a room, it would be considered rude for us to walk up to a group of people already conversing and start talking about ourselves. However, that is what many firms are doing in social media. They see it as just another communication channel and, rather than listening to the existing conversation, they start spouting out the same marketing messages they use in other channels – messages that talk AT people, not WITH people. This is not appropriate for social media; social media is about creating a two-way conversation.

Savvy “partygoers” approaches a group of people and don’t say a word. They spend a few minutes listening to what is being discussed in order to get the proper context. Then, after introducing themselves briefly, they may begin to engage in the conversation by sharing their viewpoint or something relevant and interesting to the other participants. Or they may enter the discussion by asking a question related to the topic at hand. Either way, they are engaging others in a meaningful dialogue based on the listening they have already done.

Marketers have not generally had this opportunity to dialogue with their customers before, unless it was face-to-face during a transaction. These non-transactional conversations are the foundation of building stronger customer relationships. The familiarity created by a series of social media conversations tends to build closer relationships than any series of advertisements might hope to accomplish.

What can we learn by listening to customer conversations “in the wilds” of social media? We can learn what they are saying about our products, brand, or company. We can learn what they think about our policies. We can learn what they think about our people – and our customer service. We can learn the words they use to describe us, our competitors, and our industry.

There are a lot of good customer insights that can be gathered through social media listening posts. The savvy marketer will partner closely with their Voice of the Customer (VOC) team to pull in these conversations and learn from them, even if they never decide to say a word through a social media channel.

Becky Carroll is the author of the upcoming book The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers (Wiley, July 2011) and writes the blog Customers Rock!.

Traditional business intelligence systems that analyze structured data are very good for statistically reporting the current state of customers and markets. Sales are up or sales are down. Customers are more satisfied or customers are less satisfied. This region seems to be performing better than that region. Although these are important facts to understand, the key insights that are missing are why those things are happening now. Answering the “why” behind the data is typically not possible, even with investments in interpolation, modeling, and statistical analysis on traditional structured data.

However, when you combine structured data with unstructured data, such as freeform replies to open-ended survey questions or comments on the Internet, you add another layer of depth that can give you a complete picture. For example, you can see what customers are saying about a poorly performing product, why customers in a specific region for a specific type of product and for a specific time period are unhappy, and what were the key issues that drove low satisfaction.

Text analytics is the key to understanding these questions. Well-designed surveys will typically ask for customers to rate products or services, then ask “Why did you give us that rating?” or “Why were you dissatisfied with our service?” The answers to those questions provide powerful insights. However, until recently this has been difficult to analyze. Businesses have traditionally relied on verbatim coding systems where outsourced vendors or analysts manually review a random sample of a few hundred responses, and then create codes to categorize them into common issues.

Although manually reviewing a sample of responses provides some level of accuracy, there are some inherent flaws in that process. First and foremost is that you are not looking at all of the data. If you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of responses, you are only able to cost effectively analyze a small fraction of the available information.

The second flaw is human bias. Whenever humans are making decisions about the data, there is always a tendency for people to respond and categorize based on the way they are feeling that day. Eye strain and fatigue also play a role in delivering inconsistent results. One day an analyst may categorize a particular issue as a customer service problem, the next day or week they may think it is more of a product problem.

In addition, customers may have complex issues that are not easily categorized with traditional coding schemes. In this case, you may need multiple interdependent codes, but that can make it even more difficult for human analysts to be consistent. All of these challenges to analyzing freeform, open-ended comments in surveys are prevalent today. Text analytics delivers the capability to automatically process and analyze large volumes of freeform text with consistency and accuracy.

Coming Soon: The new way to do text analytics in a VOC program

Eric Weight is Director Text Analytics Products at Allegiance, Inc.

When sales and marketing professionals hear the words “customer feedback,” most tend to think of colleagues who spend their time in statistical analysis and tracking customer satisfaction scores. But as customer feedback tools give way to the more sophisticated technologies of customer intelligence (CI), we believe that many will start to use CI and its insights to drive sales and improve marketing campaign ROI. Below are three fledgling practices used by larger companies that will soon become mainstay.

1. Identify emerging changes to consumer needs by segment.  Customer Intelligence technologies include predictive analytics that pull from vast amounts of data collected from customer feedback, social media, unstructured data, and operational data. This increase in data combined with more focused insights will give marketing and sales executives a better view of developing consumer trends, changes in consumer preferences, and the ability to track those changes by segment. This allows marketing exeuctives to modify their strategy, messaging, and sales collateral appropriately in time to take advantage of developing trends.
2. Improve sales pipeline management.  Another element of CI is data mining, which offers the potential of extracting new and deeper insights into the prospects in your company’s sales pipeline. This feature will help sales executives to better identify the prospects most lifely to convert to opportunities and the opportunities most likely to convert to sales based on identified behaviors, demographics, psychographics, etc. For example, prospect personal A is 4 times more likely to buy than persona B. The lifetime value of prospect personal C is 1.5 times greater than persona D.
3. Enhance product development.  Many companies use feedback from their sales and marketing teams when designing new products or updating current products. However, CI marries qualitative with quantitative analysis to provide a solid and reliable view of developing customer preferences. Further, product managers will use CI tools to test consumer preferences on beta products and solicit feedback on product concepts to refine the product before development begins.

To learn more about the concept of CI (also called Voice of Customer Intelligence), see the blog post “Where is VOC Going Anyway.” You can also view the on-demand webinar from the American Marketing Association titled “Customer Intelligence: The New Frontier of Customer Voice.”

Social media offers customer service professionals a great opportunity to leverage a new channel for customer feedback and enhanced communications. By establishing social media as a shared resource, contact center managers can identify new ways to enhance the quantity, quality and value of electronic communications.

Outlined below are some of the best practices for developing and maintaining an effective social media strategy and program for progressive customer service organizations.

1. Solidify your strategy: Establish a social media strategy and then empower the right departments to both listen and talk, inbound and outbound.

2. Empower Employees: Give power to front line employees to act. The contact center should be able to fully leverage your social media channel – don’t relegate it to another department.

3. Measure and respond: Treat social media feedback data like any other form of feed­back data – measure, track, actively respond and close the loop. Without it, you are just passively listening and missing valuable opportunities to direct your customer’s conversations.

4. Integrate social media: Integrate into feedback processes and your existing management processes.

5. Be ready to sift through some noise and exert some effort to find the gold:

• Don’t be defeated by the noise, filter it out!
• Be prepared to invest in the systems and management processes to properly use this new channel.

 6. Respond as a social media user would expect: Respond quickly – the shelf life of social media information is short. People expect that you’ll get back to them quickly.

7. Take action on the data: Cross sell, up-sell and rescue. People have spoken to you, and they may not be your customer or on your grid. This is the best way to ensure future success and visibility. Getting feedback is one thing, but saving customers and creating measurable revenue is the right thing.

Eric Weight is Director of Text Analytics Products for Allegiance

This is no longer your father’s VOC program. Many VOC professionals have realized that in order to add value to the organization, they must spend less time telling a VOC story and more time telling a business story. Let me explain.

The most successful VOC programs include several elements: ability to relate VOC data to a business story executives easily get, feedback from multiple sources, results that move the needle, and acceptance at high levels, sometimes even at the c-suite. Unfortunately, way too many programs lack many of these elements. This must change – a new approach is needed. Think of this new approach as a fundamental mental shift starting with the VOC leadership team. You must ensure that the data you collect is actionable and relevant to other business leaders in the organization. The best way to do this is by asking leaders what they really want from you instead of giving them what you think they want.

If you want to change your VOC approach, you are not alone. Allegiance recently surveyed VOC, survey, market research and feedback management professionals. We asked the question “Over the next three years, will your approach to customer feedback…? (select one) The results are clear: most VOC professionals believe their fundamental business approach will be changing.

Making VOC programs pay off is the key to success. But how do you really do that? Two common barriers stand in your way. The first is getting your hands on more than just VOC data sets (you are probably drowning in VOC data already). Other data sets include operational data, financial, CRM, ERP data. The other barrier is finding a platform that will help you easily analyze data from multiple sources, including 3rd party databases. When your platform contains the proper analytics and reporting tools, it can reduce the amount of manual number crunching and pivot tables you need to create.

This will be tricky but stick with it! Combining VOC data with operational data produces something unique and exciting: actionable business intelligence derived primarily from VOC data. This is called VOCi™, and your success will thrive if this is your goal.

In 1894 Marchese Guglielmo Marconi built his first radio equipment, a device that would ring a bell from 30 ft. away.  In December 2010, Allegiance hosted its first of what will be many weekly radio shows hosted by blogtalkradio.

Why?

Allegiance has been a thought leader in the use of social media to gather feedback and respond to customers.  The release of  Allegiance Engage7 was a big step into the arena of using social media as a building block in an overall VOC program. With that in mind, Allegiance is also reaching out proactively to provide thought leadership and training on a variety of topics.  With the advent of internet “talk radio,” Allegiance is using the tried and true medium of communication and linking it through social media to provide ongoing idea forums and discussions on many topics such as:

• Survey Design Best Practices
• Use of Incentives
• 5 Steps to Building Great Survey Questions
• Text Analytics
• And the list keeps growing…

How it works

Every week, Allegiance will announce the weekly topic and time along with the URL to connect to the live broadcasts.  These will come as tweets on the Allegiance Twitter account or Allegiance on Facebook. You are invited to “call in” to chat live on the air, or you can listen after the airing of the broadcast via podcast on iTunes or any other audio playback device.  As you listen to each broadcast, you can choose to “mark as favorite” the Allegiance Talk Radio site, and you will be automatically notified of upcoming broadcasts. 

 This healthy blend of Mr. Marconi’s innovation, coupled with an up and coming medium like blogtalkradio, is designed to keep you informed and connected to Allegiance, while benefitting from our ideas and expertise. We hope you will tune in 2011!