Allegiance Blog

In a recent blog posting, Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group stated: the ultimate goal for any Voice of The Customer (VoC) program should be to infuse customer insight into every decision within an organization. However, he went on to say that not many companies had achieved this goal.

In fact, finding customer data is not a problem for most companies. The world is swimming in data. If you don’t have it, you can buy it, rent it, or collect it.

There is no shortage of survey and data gathering methods either. By last count, there were more than 300 survey vendors. Yet most companies with Voice of the Customer programs are struggling to gain insights from survey and feedback data.

That is because most of their time is spent sampling, surveying, and managing feedback. That includes setting up feedback channels, establishing survey frequency, etc. Attempting to find the ‘ah-ha’ insights often begins with an export to Excel and hours of cross tab work.

But not everyone is a statistician or computer scientist, and not everyone wants to sift through large data sets. Remember: The goal is not to gather gigabytes of data, it is to create actionable insights that drive change. If you work with a vendor that thinks gathering more data is the end-goal, turn and run!

And by all means, use technology for what it’s best for; making complex things simpler. In this case, turning mounds of data into insights. The right technology is ideally suited to bring all your VOC and operational data together, to easily pinpoint relevant trends, and to reveal actionable insights.

“What’s ubiquitous and cheap?… Data.  What’s Scarce and Expensive?…The talent to analyze the data and tell the story.  Data: understand it, process it, transform it, visualize it, communicate it.”  Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

After a stint in college in the early 1980’s, I set my sails and went to live in southern Chile. Letters (actual hand-written characters on paper) from home took up to two weeks to reach me. Information came through at a trickle, and communication to my family was slow. I found that “letter writing day” (as it became known) was calculated and well thought out. Every word I penned to paper had meaning.

At that time, news from home was practically non-existent. The first space shuttle launch happened, but I didn’t find out about it until nearly ten days later. I was living on the far end of the earth and on the far edge of information availability.

Dateline 2010: Chile experienced a horrific earthquake. The resulting Tsunamis inundated the areas around Concepcion (where I had lived). As I watched the news, I immediately began calling on my cell phone, texting my friends, and leaving messages on Facebook in order to check on them. Within a few hours, I found out that my dear friend Pedro had lost his home and his father. Pedro was living in a shelter, and he used a mobile phone to respond to my text and my Facebook post. Soon my Facebook friends, who had seen the exchange between us, were offering support and dollars to help them and others.

Within a day or two, Pedro was rebuilding his house. Yet, thirty years ago, it took me 14 days to find out about the first space shuttle launch.

In those thirty years, the speed of information has increased exponentially. We are at the point now where if you don’t tweet, text, blog or Facebook (yes you can conjugate Facebook as an action verb), it is difficult to keep current. The immediacy of communication allows information to become almost instantaneously available. We want people to know what we think — and we want it now!

Fast Forward to Social Media

As companies begin to embrace social media, many are using a “ready, fire, aim” approach. Companies check social media off their list by creating a Facebook presence, or a Twitter hashtag, but are they doing their due diligence in educating their employees, or better yet, establishing a policy for usage of these social media outlets? 

As you get ready to open your company to the world of social media, here are some basic things to consider:

1. Seek out best practices and ideas from current social media practitioners. Consider Seth Brogan’s The Ethics imperative in Social Media
2. Establish a usage policy for acceptable use and behavior on social media and communicate this policy to all employees.
3. Monitor what people are saying about your company on social media and decide how or if you will respond. This is feedback at the speed of light, so be sure to determine what you intend to do with the data you collect.
4. If you don’t do #3, it won’t take long before employees and customers realize that you are not serious about your social media presence, and they will treat it with ambivalence.
5. Incorporate the data received from your social media outlets into an overall VOC initiative. Allegiance offers SocialVoice to help you get started in this area.

So what have we learned in thirty years?  Information is now instantaneous, but the quality of information can be questionable. If we can incorporate the sentiment and thoughtfulness of letter writing into the instant communication of today, we can leverage social media to build real relationships. After all, elements of social media has helped alleviate the suffering of earthquake victims. We should use the same care and commitment in our tweets, yammers, posts and blogs. People are listening.

We hear it from businesses every day – how can they gather customer feedback from surveys, social media, Web, e-mail, call centers, etc. and respond quickly to avoid losing customers? And what is the best way to turn feedback into insights that can be acted upon to improve their business?

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

Not long ago, when customers had an issue with poor product or service, they had limited options. Either they could write a letter using pen and paper, or they could make a phone call hoping to talk with someone who could make a difference. Getting the company’s attention was only the beginning. Getting a response was another story.

Today’s world of customer feedback has evolved far beyond a phone call or a letter. A customer today can use a smartphone to make a complaint or use online chat. They can send an email or text to family and friends, or even tweet and blog negative news to thousands at a time. In fact, I recently learned that there are more than 100 million blogs and web forums in the English language alone — and more than 2 million Tweets in a typical day.

The point is, when customers are talking about your organization, do you hear it? And even more important, do you react and respond? Today’s customer really is in charge of the conversation, and businesses today must listen and respond to these new and critical communication channels if they’re going to stay on top of the issues and control the perception of their name and brand.

So how do you build a quality Voice of the Customer (VOC) or feedback program? What are the most important elements for automated feedback technology and solutions? Experts recommend the following:

• Do-it-yourself surveys are still critical for today’s enterprise. Departmental managers need to execute smart surveys on their own.
• Transactional surveys take many forms including receipt-based, IVR, Text/SMS, online, email or print. These are usually departmentally-based programs that rerun the same post-event survey with the intent of rescuing customers.
• More sophisticated VOC programs include relationship surveys that dive deeper into understanding customer attitudes and turnover risks. They usually involve one or many departments, sometimes CEOs or even the entire c-suite, and are part of the company-wide culture.
• New tools to pull unstructured comments from social media platforms are becoming critical to staying on top of unsolicited feedback. You should consider a VOC solution that has this function built in.
• Mobile and SMS surveys are the wave of the future and the way the younger generation communicates. Be sure to incorporate feedback tools that can interact with mobile devices.
• And don’t forget text analytics and text mining tools to round out your solution. These tools will simplify your efforts to understand the many verbatim comments that come into your organization. It’s timely and expensive to sort through them manually. Advanced tools can do this for you.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect VOC system to get started. Get going today. You can improve as you go, and be sure to build in your program a practice to close the loop with customers. They want to know what you did with their feedback, even if it’s not what they were hoping to hear. As Jeremy Whyte, Director of Customer Feedback with Oracle said, “It’s not enough to listen to the voice of the customer — the feedback must be acted upon.”

Customer loyalty is no longer driven by products but by experiences that create emotion. Emotion is created when the customer gets something they are not expecting. Listening to their needs and concerns and then creating an action plan to change your business practices will help you achieve this.

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.

Social media is here. Your customers are talking. And they’re talking publicly. Twitter has a large user base and provides a simple application and interface to get you started.

What should you do?

1. Search Twitter for your company’s name, brands, products, or services
2. Search Twitter for your competitor’s company name, brand, products, or services

Why?

We see several trends.

Today’s customers are social networkers and influencers. They are publicly sharing observations and experiences regarding your company’s products and services and those of your competitors. New social web applications such as Twitter allow any customer to amplify a single voice.

Twitter, Facebook, and all social networking services have an inherent interest in growing their user base. Hence, they continuously innovate and build new tools and services to foster easy sign-up, discovery and broadcasting of users’ experiences. For example, at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Twitter’s CEO announced @anywhere. This technology enables publishers to embed Twitter and its tools directly into any web page, thereby strengthening and streamlining the social network’s presence, broadcast, discovery and follow process for any reader. Facebook’s Connect feature has similar capabilities.

Twitter recently partnered with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo search engines to have them incorporate Twitter’s search results into those search engines’ organic search results. And this week, Facebook surpassed Google’s search page as the most visited web site in the US. Social media platforms, and hence your customers’ voice, will continue to become more ubiquitous.

Forward thinking managers and business owners are already taking advantage of new conversations enabled by social media. These business owners understand consumers have a bigger microphone, but these astute business leaders also realize that social networking applications provide a new means to respond. At a discussion about the popular and social restaurant review site Yelp.com at SXSW, a restaurant owner said he responds to negative feedback on Yelp the same way he would if the reviewer was still a guest at his restaurant.

How?

Simple. You don’t even need an account. Twitter’s real time search allows anyone to search for any buzz at any time. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in a phrase of interest. For best results, if your company or brand or product name has more than one word, enclose all the words with double quotes. Try adjusting the search phrase to include specific product names or model numbers. Do the same with your competitor’s products.

You’re likely to find many useful and interesting Tweets, a trend of positive or negative comments, and actionable insights. You may even find customers or prospects who have been reaching out to you directly.

Search is only the first step. From there, develop a process to allow for interaction and engagement. Make plans with your team to engage with authors of negative reviews or complaints about your products. Make social media a two-way street.

After all, if listening is part of your strategy, you’ve got to be ready to act and change. Be authentic, honest, and transparent in your responses. As soon as you show you care, you’ll rescue customers, and you’ll have made your caring engagement public.

Allegiance has several social media related projects in development. The Allegiance platform is all about helping you listen wherever customers and employees are talking. Hence Twitter and social media are natural channels for us to capture. In the meantime, use Twitter.com or a Twitter client such as Seesmic to monitor public experiences and dialog about your company and the competition.

I was recently interviewed by Tom Hoffman of the 1to1 Blog about the growing use of smartphones and how it is affecting the collection of customer feedback.

In the interview, I mentioned that it is important to first realize that today’s customers are in charge of the conversation. They want to speak to the company in the channel or medium of their choice. The smartphone is becoming the platform that people use to run everything they do in life. Therefore, a growing number of companies are looking at using the smartphone to gather feedback and perform customer surveys.

When a company asks Allegiance whether they should implement mobile feedback, we respond in the same way we do to other channels or mediums. You first need to look at your demographics. If your customer base is using mobile, there is a good chance that they would be receptive to giving you feedback through a mobile interface. The customer experience is what is going to be driving that decision.

There is no question that smartphone adoption is exploding. Many companies are finding that by connecting with customers this way, they can tap into new and unexpected markets. Allegiance helps companies on a one-to-one basis by doing a needs analysis and use case scenarios. We help them understand if the time is right for them to use the mobile medium. A major goal of the analysis is to be able to correlate survey response rate and customer experience against overall customer retention and purchase volume. This is something we help companies to measure and map out.

With mobile feedback, it is not a question of if you should do it, it is a question of when. We advise companies to be open to new channels, but help them think it through and make a thorough analysis on paper first. If it makes sense, the next step is to test with a small audience. If that goes well, it can be rolled out on a larger scale.

To listen to the full interview, go to:
www.bit.ly/bH84AW

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.

Capitalizing on customer feedback requires more than the occasional sending of surveys in response to ad hoc business needs. It requires a strategic and ongoing dedication to hearing, listening, understanding and acting upon the VOC through a formal program built upon actively listening to customers and regularly taking a pulse of their level of engagement.

That is the premise of a new paper now available from Allegiance, Inc. and Peppers & Rogers Group., Titled Capitalizing on Customer Feedback: Creating Measurable Value from Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programs, the paper provides analysis on how to apply business insights gathered from customer feedback to achieve sustainable growth throughout the enterprise.

Included in the paper are specific principles to follow in order to realize a return on investment in VOC programs. These principles include attaining clarity on the business problem to solve, analyzing structured and unstructured customer feedback with text mining and other technology, acting on customer feedback, and embedding customer feedback into the company culture.

In the paper, the reader will be introduced to:

• New ways to think about customer feedback
• Top nine most popular customer feedback strategies
• Five steps of VOC evolution
• Four principles to realizing a strong return on your VOC program
• Two real life case studies demonstrating the concepts in action

To download your complimentary copy, visit http://www.allegiance.com/prgvoc.

While many business managers see only doom and gloom ahead, some are focusing on a new way to unlock a prosperous future – even in a tough recession. Through the game-changing principle of engagement, companies can learn to use technology and best practices to extract new revenue from their existing customer base.

Historically engagement has been elusive and hard to measure. However, there are four outcomes of customer engagement that can be measured in actual dollars:

1. Share of Wallet – Engaged customers buy more products/services, more often
2. Positive Referral – Engaged customers persuade potential customers to switch brands
3. Customer Churn – Engaged customers remain loyal and stay longer
4. Feedback Response – Engaged customers give more feedback, which allows companies the opportunity to address concerns and save potentially lost revenue

Even using conservative numbers, the financial benefits of engagement are substantial. Our research shows that it can be measured, and it is not as difficult as companies think. In fact, we found that improving customer engagement by a small amount, as little as one percent, can have a dramatic impact on financial results. The economics of engagement are real, and they can have a major impact on any business willing to invest the time, energy and resources in a plan of action. While most companies continue to compete on the traditional battlegrounds of price, service and quality, those that capitalize on engagement will create an unbeatable advantage.

Here are few examples of companies who have experienced significant growth in revenues due to their engagement efforts:

Allegiance Customer Case Studies