Allegiance Blog

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!

Last month I received a survey about a service experience. The support organization sent the survey to me within a day of the call and the questions pertained to my experience (so far, so good). At the end of the survey, they asked if I would like to be contacted by a representative. I didn’t really have any major issues to discuss, but I was curious to see what would happen, so I marked yes. I waited a day, then 2 days, and then weeks passed with no contact (by email or phone). My expectation had been set that I would be contacted, so that left me disappointed by an otherwise positive experience.

The experience that I described above is an example of tactically closing the loop (or not closing it, in this case). The design of any world-class customer feedback program should include a closed loop process that makes customers feel that they have been heard and promotes learning about what to do to improve the business in ways that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

There are three primary processes that comprise a comprehensive closed loop program:

 In addition to understanding the different types of closed loop processes, there are other factors to consider, such as:

• What is the goal of the follow-up process? Are you trying to learn from detractors, leverage promoters, or assess root cause problems? Or is your goal some combination of the three? Determining your overall goals and objectives is a necessary step toward designing an effective closed loop program.
• Which customers should be contacted, and who should conduct the follow-up? Your business model and capacity for follow-up will help guide your decisions in this area. Make sure there is clear ownership and that the follow-up involves all relevant functions. Then choose the appropriate contact method/channel (phone, email or corporate communications, for example) and establish and train employees on the process.
• When should the follow-up occur? Typically, front line follow-up will happen within 48 hours. However, a reasonable period of time depends on client perspective and operational limitations. Closing the loop on issues (e.g. detractors or service problems) or specific requests for follow-up should occur quickly. Follow-up for root cause investigation can happen over time.
• What are the key touchpoints in the customer experience, and how can we better manage them cross-functionally? Understanding the key touchpoints from the customer’s perspective and aligning goals cross-functionally will help you better understand the customer experience and make end-to-end improvements that will improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. This involvement at the management level will further optimize investments in ways that will directly impact customers and your bottom line.
• How should our executives be involved? Executives drive business outcomes and define overall company strategy. By establishing a customer-centric company culture and reinforcing that culture through internal and external communications, they can let the customers and employees alike know that customers are the first priority. Executives can communicate to customers that they are listening and acting on their feedback by explaining the actions taking place based on that feedback. Within the company, executives can foster customer-centric behaviors and use customer feedback to drive business strategy through initiatives, target-setting and employee recognition programs.

At Allegiance, we encourage clients to get more out of their data. Listening to your customers and analyzing the results are important steps in understanding your clients. However, effectively closing the loop with your clients is another critical component of a world-class customer feedback program. Listen, respond and act – your customers will thank you!

On the heels of my recent paper, Customer Data: The Essential Element of Your Enterprise Voice of the Customer Program, here is an exercise that you can use to identify all of the sources of customer data in your organization, specifically, the sources of customer feedback data.

Every department in your company thirsts for feedback from customers to help  measure brand awareness, design products, improve service offerings, understand satisfaction levels, and more. Unfortunately, more often than not, there is no concerted effort across the organization to ensure that (a) customers are not over-surveyed – which can be defined either as being surveyed too frequently, i.e., no touch rules, or asked the same or similar questions by different departments – or (b) the feedback is collected, analyzed, and used in a cohesive fashion. 

In my last blog, I talked about creating a Customer Touchpoint Map. Think about the many customer touchpoints of your organization, and then think about the various departments in your organization that might be asking customers for feedback at each of those touchpoints. It can be quite overwhelming — for you and for your customers! To make sense of it all, you should compile a Customer Feedback Map to accompany your Customer Touchpoint Map.

Creating a Customer Feedback Map can be a daunting task, especially in very large, disparate, and/or siloed organizations, but the benefits – not the least of which is financial – are endless. For example, if you have nine different departments all working in a vacuum, including licensing nine different survey, EFM, or text analytics platforms, consolidating the data can reduce costs and improve the way the company listens to the voice of the customer. Other benefits include reducing/eliminating respondent fatigue, increasing response rates, and improving the actionability of the data.

The Customer Feedback Map should first identify your touchpoints and the corresponding departments that support each. It should then list:

• All forms/sources of customer feedback at each touchpoint
• Other feedback that’s not directly linked to a touchpoint
• Owner of the feedback
• Audience for each piece of feedback
• End user (internal) of the feedback
• Objective/purpose of the feedback
• all resources used for feedback/analysis (software, tools, etc.)
• other desired sources of feedback (if any are missing)

The next step is to consolidate. Centralizing to one department both the ownership of your VOC efforts and the platform used to collect, analyze, and respond to the feedback eliminates redundancies, creates efficiencies, saves money, and ensures a cohesive approach to your VOC initiative overall and, ultimately, to the customer experience.

Identifying the various sources of customer feedback within your organization is a valuable exercise. You may just discover some very scary information:  how much your customers are being asked to provide feedback – and just how little of that is actually being used in a meaningful way.

Action plans are in place in response to customer, employee and partner feedback initiatives. As a result, you are measuring increased satisfaction, loyalty and engagement among these key groups.  Driving improvements in these areas has been baked into the very culture of your organization.

However, there are limitations to approaching satisfaction, loyalty and engagement as end points.  Integrating business performance metrics into your feedback initiatives will enable you to leverage them to drive lasting performance improvement and bottom-line results. 

Emphasize the Bottom-Line Value of Your Feedback Initiative

The core objective of your feedback program is not to drive improved survey metrics.  The ultimate objective is increased business performance and improved results. 

Dutifully reporting to a senior executive or business unit owner that “customer engagement scores have increased for the past eight quarters” is nice. Telling that same audience that “in this same time period, quarterly sales increases of 8%, on average, and a steady decline in customer attrition of 24% have been associated with increased customer engagement” is a much more compelling story.

Linking business performance metrics with survey metrics not only provides greater decision support to key decision makers, but also underscores the vital role your feedback initiative plays in the success of the organization.

Performance Metrics Selection

In selecting meaningful metrics for inclusion into your program, the answers to these questions should help you formulate a plan to make this happen:

1. How does my organization measure success?  (What are the key measures of success?)
2. Who owns the metrics data?  (In many cases, multiple parties may own different pieces of the puzzle.)
3. What do I need to do to obtain the metrics I have identified as crucial to my program?

The typical organization has a database full of performance metrics that can be augmented to a survey invitation file.  Below are just a few examples from a small sample of industries:

Integrating Performance Metrics

The next step is to integrate business performance metrics with feedback results from your initiatives.  As covered in my previous blog post Linking Operational Data with Survey Data,  these performance data variables are uploaded to your survey database as part of the invitation process (or such variables may be back-augmented after data collection has taken place). These variables remain hidden to the survey taker and are pre-populated at the record-level (meaning each survey invite record contains unique values for each variable for maximum reporting flexibility). 

Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Data

Finally, put all this data to work! This recent Allegiance blog post Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Feedback has some excellent ideas for analyzing feedback program data and using it to drive lasting, positive change in your organization.

Have any of these things ever happened to you?

1)      You know that your company regularly conducts a customer survey, but you have no clue what the results are.
2)      You are the lucky recipient of a ‘data dump’ (reports, spreadsheets, emails) with no explanation of what it means or how to use it.
3)      You are compensated or measured based on a metric with no idea of how you can help improve the score.

Most companies are good at collecting data from customers. In fact, it’s common practice to have a customer feedback program in place. However, for some companies, dealing with the results is when things begin to get fuzzy. What are our customers trying to tell us? And how do we take that information and use it to effectively improve the customer experience?

To benefit from analysis, a successful customer feedback program must first include the collection of credible data:

• Are we targeting the right customers?
• Are we collecting actionable data that reflects the customer experience?
• Are we surveying customers at an appropriate time?

With these as a foundation, you can begin the process of analyzing and operationalizing the data.

Analysis for Action

When designing your analysis plan, consider the following:  1) Who will be using the data; and 2) What is the best method of distribution? You should be able to analyze and report results in a way that is useful and meaningful at all levels of the organization (executive, management, and front line employees).

For example, executives often like to see the key insights in dashboards, presentations, or emails, with access to additional information if they want to dig deeper. A service area manager may want to have access (either online, or in reports) to all of the data for his survey results, broken out by key segments and  linked to operational metrics, so that he or she can use the results to drive improvements in people, tools and/or processes.

Next, consider how you will extract the drivers of satisfaction and loyalty from your data. A good analytical plan should include the use of objective and subjective survey results. Some examples of objective survey data include: overall satisfaction and loyalty questions, functional area, transaction or agent rating questions. Subjective data can be collected using verbatim questions and customer follow-up/root cause analysis. Using this customer feedback data, driver results can either be inferred (e.g. correlation, regression, factor analysis) or direct (e.g. comment analysis, text analytics, root-cause customer interviews). How you approach your analysis depends on your audience, company culture, survey content and the overall goals and objectives of the program.

You are now ready for action planning and execution. A survey governance model (policies and people who direct how the survey program is designed, administered and utilized) is a solid step toward business transformation. Survey results can be collected and analysis done, but it takes sponsorship, cooperation and coordination across the organization to be truly effective. Executives need to see the financial benefits of improving the customer experience and make it a part of the company DNA. Cross-functional management teams can bring the organization together to prioritize and develop action plans. Front-line employees should understand company goals and the part that they play in becoming champions for the customers. And don’t forget to communicate your goals, insights and successes, both internally and externally.

Whether your business is Fortune 500 or a Mom-and-Pop store, business-to-business or business-to-customer, local or global – all companies should strive to understand the customer experience and continuously plan for improvements. True success means that you are driving to business outcomes and not just a metric. Collect the feedback data and then do something with it. Your customers will thank you!

Congratulations on reaching a milestone.

You have a well-designed, comprehensive feedback program in place, with several gigabytes of data on employee and customer satisfaction, loyalty and engagement. You have identified the key drivers of customer engagement and trended employee loyalty and satisfaction over time.  In response, action plans have been drafted and executed in a constant effort to move the needle toward increased customer and employee satisfaction, loyalty and engagement. What’s next?

Your data is worth more!

Now is the time to maximize the actionability of your VOC (Voice of the Customer) and VOE (Voice of the Employee) initiatives and optimize the ROI realized from your feedback program. To take your feedback program to the next level, you will want to link strategically-selected operational data with your valuable survey data.

These operational data variables are uploaded to your survey database as part of the invitation process (or such variables may be back-augmented after data collection has taken place). These variables remain hidden to the survey taker and are pre-populated at the record-level (meaning each survey invite record contains unique values for each variable for maximum reporting flexibility). 

Segmentation Variables

A typical customer or employee database contains variables that can be used to segment survey respondent data. Pre-populating survey records with information already available frees up valuable and limited “survey real estate,” enabling a shorter survey focused on capturing customer or employee feedback. Operational variables can be used to drive survey logic, producing a brief and targeted survey. They can even be used to guide data collection soft quotas. Finally, by pre-populating “known “values, the surveyor can avoid annoying the survey taker with questions they think researchers should know the answer to (e.g. if you really valued me as a customer, you would know that I purchased my Jeep Rubicon from Rudy on September 8, 2010 at 6:27 PM…I should not have to remind you!)

Here are a few examples of segmentation variables that add value to a survey database:

Drive Operational Excellence

Now you have a shorter, more targeted survey with data amped up by the integration of operational data. From this, you can make simple customer or employee segment comparisons. This arms decision makers with the results of these segment comparisons, backed by correlation analysis, to drive action.  Here are some examples:

Customer
Finding: The West Coast call center has much shorter hold times than the East Coast call center. Shorter hold times are correlated with higher satisfaction with the support experience.

Action: Investigate what factors are driving shorter West Coast hold times and replicate these conditions (e.g. staffing, technology, training, culture, etc.) at the East Coast call center.

Employee
Finding:  The Operations Team has much higher PTO (Paid Time Off) utilization rates than other departments. Higher PTO utilization is correlated with greater employee engagement.

Action:  Encourage employees in all departments to utilize their PTO through a corporate communications effort. Empower departmental leadership to foster a culture conducive to taking time away from work to “recharge the batteries” and hold management accountable for increased PTO utilization.

Operational Intelligence Mother Lode

Like un-mined gold sitting right under your nose, you can use these new variables linked to customer and employee feedback to drive strategic decision support and continuing operational improvement. Segment comparisons fueled by this data augmentation can guide targeted marking and communications efforts. These insights drive lasting, positive change in the organization, increase operating efficiency and cost savings, and drive increased satisfaction, loyalty and engagement for both customers and employees.

Still looking to up your game? Stay tuned for another blog post on Linking Business Performance Metrics with Operational & Survey Data.

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by going to our favorite restaurant. Usually, we have a great experience, but this time everything went wrong. The server was inattentive, the food was cold, the drink glasses went empty, etc. When we returned home, my wife and I were faced with a dilemma: What do you do when you have a bad service experience with a company you love? 

As a subscriber to this restaurant’s Facebook updates, I logged on and thrust my opinion into cyberspace. My wall post clearly illustrated my disappointment. As a loyal, engaged customer, I felt I owed it to the restaurant to provide feedback about my experience. Besides, any responsible business would want to know about the experience of a loyal customer, right?

It has been weeks, and I have heard nothing in response to my feedback.

There is a lesson in this for all businesses. Social media has become the no. 1 online activity, so it’s essential for businesses to pay attention. When a small percentage of customers share their experiences with your company via social media, you have an opportunity to engage or re-engage these customers. To use social media to your advantage, consider the following:

Get involved.  Businesses should be actively monitoring what is being said about their brand on social media sites and across cyberspace. Seek out not only feedback posted directly on your Facebook page or directed at you on Twitter, but research your brand. Find out where your customers are talking and become part of that community. Take the opportunity to engage customers who mention your brand and learn from them. 

Ask for more.  As it becomes more difficult to solicit feedback from customers through common survey methods, follow your customers online and connect with those who are already talking about you. With technology such as Allegiance SocialVoice, you can turn unstructured social media comments into structured data by reaching out to customers with a survey to ask specific questions about their experience or brand perceptions. You’ll find that many of these customers will appreciate your effort to engage them and learn more.

Actively manage feedback.  It’s okay to be reactive to specific social media mentions about your brand. Many times you’ll be able to identify “quick wins” where intervention is warranted to resolve an issue and save a defecting customer. However, it’s also important to allow social media data to paint a bigger picture. With Allegiance SocialVoice, you can pull social media feedback into a single platform and include it in analysis with other data collected across your organization. Here you can report on what type of feedback has come via social media alongside data collected with surveys and other tools. This gives you added insight.

If you’re only using social media sites to promote your brand and obtain additional customers, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. As customers see your willingness to consider their opinions posted online, loyalty will surely increase. Those companies who act on the wealth of information customers share on social media sites will surely gain an advantage.

For a good number of the Vice Presidents of Sales, the economy is forcing them to rely upon cross/up-selling current customers to generate anywhere from 10% to 50% of their annual quota.  One of their big concerns is the increase in customer attrition.  Given the current cost and difficulty of acquiring new customers, customer attrition is not only making it very difficult to meet sales quotas but it is also eating into the company’s overall profitability.  

An old idea that is gaining new popularity among sales managers is the idea of using customer feedback tools (surveys, Twitter, etc) to help identify customers who are likely to defect to the competition and rescue them before it is too late.  Although not fool proof, I’ve seen companies identify and rescue 6,300 customers over a single year representing over $2.2 million in recovered revenues.  

Care needs to be given to basic survey administration best practices to avoid the problems of survey fatigue, useless data, and to ensure at-risk customers are contacted in a timely and proper manner.  For tips on avoiding the most common customer feedback pitfalls, see Bob Thompon’s post “Five Voice of the Customer Pitfalls.”

Too many businesses focus solely on the minds of customers and forget the importance of connecting emotionally – to customers’ hearts. What drives their passion, loyalty and engagement?

 Attitudinal Information = Emotional Information

Measuring attitudes is a relatively new thing to do. The purpose is to understand the “spark” of the relationship. What was it that got them interested in the first place, and what values drive them to remain interested and engaged?

This information can be uncovered through asking attitudinal questions when gathering customer feedback. A critical step is to understand the role that emotion plays in the consumer decision-making process.

Given that customers remember the emotion of a brand experience, it is logical that much of their attitude about a brand is based on the emotional connection they have formed with that company. Yet many businesses continue to act like much of what drives their customers to buy is solely based on other factors, such as baseline products and features.

Customers get emotional about their business relationships, much like personal relationships. That helps explain these staggering statistics:

• According to Target Training International, more than 60% of all customers stop dealing with a company because of perceived indifference on the part of an employee.
• 70% of the reason customers leave a company has nothing to do with the product, and 84% of customers that leave do so for poor service. Forum Corp.
• Tarp Worldwide research found that customers who experience mild or strong dissatisfaction will tell between 9 and 16 other people.
• Up to 80% of defecting customers describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before they leave.  Business Week, October 2006

These statistics exemplify the issue facing businesses today – customers make decisions about staying or leaving a business relationship based upon a multitude of factors – and attitude and emotion play major roles. By collecting feedback in real time, and at all possible customer interaction points, a company can learn firsthand what customers think when interactions happen and why customers become emotionally charged.

Get a Complete Customer Relationship Picture

Customer attitudes reveal the softer side of the business relationship. Knowing why customers do business with you is critical to maintaining that relationship and to adding new customers in the future. The difficulty in business is that many of the solutions today reveal only a portion of what is needed to really understand the customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a good example. Most CRM-derived information is transactional in nature. It is solid information – critical to any business – but it doesn’t tell the entire customer relationship story. It tracks the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’ of the business relationship.

The missing element is often ‘why.’ Why do your customers do business with you? To uncover the ‘why,’ you must understand the basic principles driving any business relationship. A good relationship survey will reveal this. However, a relationship survey should not be your only Voice of the Customer component. Use it as part of a comprehensive program with transaction-based surveys, ad-hoc surveys, and unsolicited feedback management. Together they can offer you a clear picture of what your customers think, what drives their emotional connection with you, and how you can move the needle.

My Facebook status today reads, “I’m hoping this morning’s travels will inspire another interesting blog post.” Right after I posted that, a thought popped into my head:  it’s not my travels today as much as my destination that has inspired me. I’m on my way to our headquarters in Utah to meet with my team for our Quarterly Business Review. This got me thinking about how our clients might review their businesses…especially as it pertains to their Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives.

Gathering feedback from your customers helps you understand what you’re doing well and not so well for them. However, if that’s all you do, it’s like living in a bubble. It’s important to put all of your scores and feedback into the broader context – how well do you do stack up against your competitors? This is applies not only to financial/operational metrics, but also with your VOC data.

I’m talking about benchmarking, which means making comparisons to help you understand the perception of your business relative to the competition in the minds of your customers.

1. Competitive Benchmarking helps you determine your performance relative to a primary competitor or a set of key competitors. Competitive Benchmarking data can be obtained in several different ways.

          Third-Party Surveys:  Engage with a third party to conduct a blind competitive survey. This is the cleanest survey approach, but it’s also the most expensive.

          Your Surveys:  Add some questions to the end of your relationship survey that ask your customers to rate one or two of your competitors with which they’ve done business. This approach is a little less clean and perhaps even a bit biased because you’re asking these questions only of your customers. As long as you view the responses in that light, you can still get a decent benchmark.

          External Metrics:  Get access to syndicated results for ACSI, JDPA indexes, NPS, Forrester CxPi Customer Experience Index, etc. that are relevant for your industry, product, etc. Ask a comparable question or set of questions in your own survey(s) to benchmark.

2. World Class Benchmarking is a slightly different approach where you’re not necessarily interested in benchmarking question to question or score to score. In World Class Benchmarking, you ask your customers to tell you about a “world class experience” they had with another company – any company, regardless of industry. What you’re looking for is a way to identify who your customers look up to when it comes to service, products, literature, training, etc.  You then study that company inside and out – you might even partner with them or find a mentor in that organization, depending on who it is – to identify best practices that you can put to work in your own company.

My final thought about how clients review their businesses brings me to Internal Benchmarking, which entails taking the feedback you’ve gathered and comparing scores, ratings, or indexes internally – within your own business, i.e., benchmark business units, locations, sites, etc. against each other. Identify your stars and your dogs, compare practices, and have your stars mentor your dogs.

Ok, it’s time to go update my Facebook status to “another one’s in the can.”