Allegiance Blog

The names we give them vary from company to company: rogue, unofficial, unsanctioned, ghost, one-off. Voice of Customer (VOC) experts appreciate the power of a neat customer feedback strategy. But in many organizations, there is no central authority governing how, when and why customers are surveyed. 

When your customers are surveyed in a disjointed, illogical and inconsistent manner, both your VOC initiative and your customer relationships suffer. Some examples include:

Over-Contact

• With no method of controlling the frequency of contact, customers are overburdened with survey invites, especially highly sought-after research participants.
• Furthermore, lack of a survey contact strategy can lead to over-representation of certain respondents or response segments, skewing results.

 Poor Design

• When non-researchers send surveys, they may unfortunately make rookie mistakes that reflect badly on your company and weaken your brand. These missteps may include:
  • Simple operational mistakes like lack of quality assurance review that lead to dead-end links and spelling errors.
  • Use of a rudimentary survey design tool or lack of access to graphics and branding expertise, resulting in a survey that looks “cheap” and doesn’t positively promote the brand.

 Questionable, Scattered Data

• Lack of survey design experience can result in methodologically weak surveys that yield data of suspicious validity and water down overall VOC data quality.
• Variations in survey design, for instance differences in scale, mean results across the organization are incomparable and sometimes contradictory.
• Data stored throughout multiple databases is difficult to locate, share and leverage.

 It’s frustrating for a VOC expert to know rogue surveys are compromising your VOC initiative and your brand voice. You may feel helpless in countering these negative forces, but you’re not. 

Here are two methods you can employ to bring this matter under control.

Central Command

If unsanctioned surveys are a serious detriment to your VOC initiative in particular and your relationship to the customer overall, it may be time to announce “no more Mr. Nice Guy” and take control with a firm hand. Establish ground rules for surveying customers (who, what, when, where and why) and communicate these rules. Let it be known that your team and your team alone owns the process of gathering feedback from your customers and that all surveys, no matter the size or scope, need to be approved by your team to ensure adherence to your VOC strategy, methodology and sampling plan.

Best Practices Consultation

Perhaps resource constraints or corporate culture make a collaborative, consultative approach more appropriate. Proactively offer your expert services of survey design, survey media/method selection and sampling and contact frequency planning to your coworkers. Communicate to them that you have a VOC strategy in place that you would like them to follow and work with them in a positive, constructive fashion as internal clients to guide them to feedback program design excellence.

A good VOC initiative has set objectives in place and a plan to meet these objectives.  Rogue surveys undermine your strategy by squandering valuable customer feedback opportunities, collecting data that does not map back to VOC objectives and polluting your data. While the approach taken to control wayward feedback initiatives will vary from one organization to the next, there is no better time than the present to bring rogue surveys to heel.

Customer relationships are dynamic, never static.  Customers’ perceptions and beliefs are continuously evolving.  Each customer interaction with your company (either direct or indirect) has the power to strengthen, weaken, or destroy customer relationships.

Each customer experience affects your customers’ beliefs and perceptions – their realities.  The changes can be subtle, unrecognizable at first; but they will continue to evolve in a positive or negative direction until they manifest into tangible change. 

The slow evolution of customer relationships can be out of your control to a great extent, which is why it’s imperative to your B2B company’s success that customers are given a consistent voice.  Proactively engaging customers to understand their realities through Voice of the Customer insight enables companies to have more control over their customer relationships.

Issues and misconceptions are normal because we’re all human, and communication breakdowns happen frequently as the intended message communicated is not heard and understood as expected.  Add to that the barrage of uncontrollable external influences that by their nature you are unaware of their occurrence and impact on your customer relationships.

Without a voice, issues and misconceptions can be left undiscovered.  Seemingly small infractions accumulate and aggregate into larger issues, disappointments and resentments.  Left unspoken and unresolved they become time bombs threatening to annihilate customer relationships and their long-term revenue streams at any moment. 

Can you afford the risk of not capturing your customers’ voices on a regular and consistent basis? 

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.

I recently met up with a group of Voice of the Customer (VOC) practitioners for lunch in Atlanta.  The purpose of the luncheon was to enable VOC practitioners to come together and swap ideas, network, and to get fresh ideas. For me, it was a terrific opportunity to meet folks who on a daily basis struggle to identify the best way to collect, analyze and act on VOC data; how to build political support and fund their initiatives. There were as many different industries represented as people at the table.  Companies varied in size from the gargantuan down to small 50-person companies. It was a terrific cross-section of VOC practitioners. Amid the laughter and lively discussion, I noticed a few trends emerging from the conversation.

• Net Promoter Score. Everyone at the luncheon was familiar with Net Promoter and a few used a loose interpretation of it.  However, most everyone acknowledged the limitations that come from only knowing a score without receiving any insights into how to improve that score. The answer seems to come down to the nature of the data collected – are you merely looking to see if they were satisfied with their past experience or do you also have a future focus  by identifying current and anticipated needs. (I felt fortunate to know that enterprise feedback management (EFM) technologies, such as those offered by Allegiance, are available to help VOC leaders address this area of concern.)
• Alignment of the cosmos. Senior executives are starting to focus heavily on current customers and how to increase share of wallet and how to better measure and improve customer loyalty. Some of the luncheon attendees felt it was prompted by the recession while others felt it was the improvement of ROI analysis. All seemed to agree that they had better success gaining political support and funding when tying VOC to business outcomes.
• Balance the good with the bad. Many attendees lamented that VOC professionals focused too much on the negative feedback and to a certain extent, ignored learning how to turn positive customer experiences into phenomenal customer experiences, learning the link between revenues and movement on the customer loyalty scale, soliciting feedback about product innovation, identifying what emotional needs the company/product/service fills and how to strengthen that emotional tie.

Regardless, the VOC luncheon was a great opportunity to hear about some of the issues that are currently top of mind with today’s VOC leaders.

Matthew Bowman, Director of Campaign Marketing, Allegiance

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

Trust is at the core of every relationship. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, our common challenge in bringing business relationships out of the proverbial tank and back into the light is renewing a level of trust with our customers, employees, and shareholders.

So how does a company do that? At the core, it’s about making offers that build trust–offers of stress-free service that really is stress free. Offers of discounts that are actually discounts. Offers of personal growth to employees that are made good. Each time we in the business world “make good” on a promise, trust is enhanced and deeper bonding occurs.

Here are three additional steps that organizations can take to enhance trust:

1. Offer customers/employees something unexpected
2. Deliver on the offer quickly without conditions (a.k.a. fine print)
3. Repeat as often as you can

Case in point – A few years ago, Bell South implemented a “just ask” program requiring every customer-facing employee to ask customers a simple question at the conclusion of every interaction: “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

The result was a rise in overall customer satisfaction and customer loyalty because a little offer goes a long way and sales increased based on that little question, adding $100M in the first year. Additionally, reward points were given to service people to be used ot choose from a catalog of goods enhancing the quality of work because they had to qualify for the opportunity and follow up with the sale.

Bob Caruso, Managing Director, Endeavor Management

Everyone who’s been watching TV or reading the news lately knows that banks have certainly had their fair share of challenges lately. But what’s been interesting to watch is how those challenges and the fall out from big bank failures and the economic crisis have impacted bank and credit union customer loyalty and engagement levels.

In a new report called the “National Benchmarking/Pulse of America report for Banks and Credit Unions” which was put together by Allegiance, 600 consumers per quarter were asked questions about their “primary” bank or credit union (i.e. the financial institution that they use for everyday purchases) between January-June 2009 (about 1200 responses). What we found was: 

1. Customer/member expectations of banks and credit unions have shifted away from the more traditional roles of industry leader, guardian and protector of customer/member finances. As a result, two items increased in their impact on customer/member engagement: 1) The perception that doing business with one’s bank or credit union saves customers/members time and money, and 2) Feeling trust in the financial advice customers/members get from their bank and credit union.
2. Credit unions continue to have much higher member/customer engagement levels than banks, but the gap is narrowing. Customers’ engagement with their banks stayed about the same with roughly 30% engaged customers from Q1 to Q2. Although credit unions continue to have much higher member/customer engagement than banks, credit unions saw a significant drop in customer engagement from 57% to 49% between January and June 2009. [The 8% drop in credit union engagement is the sharpest drop Allegiance has seen in credit union member engagement since the Allegiance National Benchmarking/Pulse of America survey began in October 2007.] In addition, the percentage of disengaged credit union members rose from 4% to 8%, most likely due to credit unions being forced to raise rates on credit cards and/or introduce variable rates.
3. Engagement levels among older customers have fallen. Engagement stayed roughly the same (rose on average by 5%) for banking and credit union customers/members age 54 and younger. However, customers 55 and older saw a 10% drop on average in engagement. (i.e. The push to engage younger customers through social networking may be leaving older customers/members disengaged. Therefore, banks and credit unions should not and need not abandon the practices that have grown their base of loyal, older customers.)
4. Both banks and credit unions appear to be focusing their customer/member engagement resources on the most profitable demographics. While engagement fell by 8% for customers with incomes of $50,000 or less, engagement rose by 3% for customers with incomes of $50,000-$150,000.
5. Banks and credit unions that had a multi-state and/or international presence experienced a huge 12% drop in customer/member engagement between Q2 2008 and Q2 2009, whereas banks and credit unions that only operated on a local or statewide level saw little change in their customer/member engagement levels during that same period.

To read about these and other findings, download the report  at: http://www.allegiance.com/resources/papers/poa-aug09-report.php

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

In my last blog post, ‘Customer Feedback: The Key to Creating More Value’, I dispelled some of the myths about collecting customer feedback. I also promised that in my next post, this one, I would tell you how and why, if you listen to customer feedback, it can show you where and how to gain a competitive advantage, and improve customer loyalty and engagement. So, here I go:

While there are several great examples that come to mind on how companies are using customer feedback to gain a competitive advantage, since there isn’t enough room in this blog post for all of them, I’ll just share one. (So as not to make this blog a promotional piece, I picked a neutral one).

In the book ‘What Customer Really Want’, author Scott McKain tells a great story about how a coach bus company that transports music stars across the nation to their concerts (i.e. clients either lease or purchase its buses), was originally planning to improve the interior of its buses because it believed that if it did, its customers would be willing to pay more, and the company would make more money.

However, in the midst of picking out fabric, flooring, etc., the company realized that it had never asked its customers what they thought about its plans. So, the company did. To the company’s surprise, it found out that while its customers did want nice interiors, the single most important factor to them in selecting a coach company was the bus driver! (i.e. Someone who could get these music stars to their destination safe, especially if they had to drive through the night. And, someone who would also serve as a good ambassador for the band with fans).

The company immediately launched a driver education program to teach its drivers how to communicate more effectively with customers, and how to retain and grow customer relationships. The company also changed its reward system so that drivers were compensated according to how well they served the customer, and how well they cultivated long-term relationships with them. Once the company did that, it moved from fourth in the marketplace to first, and grew from 28 to 56 coaches.

My point is if you want to grow your revenues and increase your customer retention, customer loyalty and engagement, you have to ask your customers for feedback. It’s the only way to find out what they really want, where and how your company can improve, and yes, even make more money and gain a competitive advantage.

Kimberly Mathie, MarComm Manager, Allegiance

In the work that we do at Allegiance, we occassionally come across a company that is afraid to ask for or collect feedback from its customers or employees for fear of what those individuals might say – or that the only feedback that they’ll receive will be negative.

While this is a natural human concern, it isn’t a concern that typically matches up with reality.

In fact, we’ve found that the businesses that we work with on their voice of the customer (VOC) and voice of the employee programs receive feedback of all types–compliments, suggestions, questions, complaints, concerns, etc. And regardless of how that feedback is shared (e.g. via an e-mail, a letter, a phone call, an in-person discussion, survey, etc.), this feedback–when centrally collected, stored and analyzed–can provide a business with tremendous insights about what its customers need, want, and value most. Moreover, it can help a business understand what’s working and what’s not working in their organization so that they can continue to do more of what’s working and discontinue or fix what’s not.

In contrast, if a company only collects or receives feeback from customers when something goes wrong or a customer has a bad experience, that business can end up having a pretty distorted view of what its customers think and feel about its business. Not only that, but the business also typically misses the opportunity to gain a better understanding of its customers, as well as develop more meaningful and lasting relationships with them.

My point is that collecting customer feedback isn’t just about finding out what your customers are unhappy about–instead, it’s about gaining a better understanding of what your customers want, need and care about most in order to create more and lasting value for them.

And, if you do happen to receive some negative comments along the way, don’t take them personally. Instead, view that feedback as an opportunity to improve. As Bill Gates, chairman and founder of Microsoft, once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. And he’s right. Talking to your customers and listening to their feedback is the only means through which you can gain clairity about what’s most important to them. Plus, if you listen closely, it may even show you where and how to gain a competitive advantage. And in my next blog post, I’ll tell you how.

Kimberly Carroll, MarCom Manager, Allegiance