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.

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

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

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

• Know your customers – Who are they? What’s most important to them?  Etc.
• Make sure your employees’ point of view matches up with your customers’ point of view (and that all of your employees understand why each customer is important as well as the role that each of your employees play in retaining customers)
• Unite your marketing and operations teams and ensure they have a shared vision
• Realize every customer counts – Treat them that way; reward your employees for doing so
• Understand your leaky bucket (why customers are not coming back) and fix it (i.e. Identify your customers’ breaking points and decision to return points. In addition, go through the customer experience yourself and see and feel the pain through the eyes of your customers.)
• Improve and enhance your customer experience

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing,  Allegiance

As part of today’s online Engage eSummit, Gary Tucker, SVP and General Manager of JD Power and Associates, talked about the importance of delighing your customers in the current economic environment, as well as the resulting increases in financial performance for companies that come with improving their customer satisfaction.

Tucker recommended five steps that organizations can use to pursue customer delight, including: 

1. Focus – Who owns the customer experience? Is everyone traveling down the same road? The companies that really stand out have a very clear understanding of who in their organization owns the customer experience. The companies that perform best have engrained that sense of ownership in everyone across the organization.

2. Quantify – What is most important to your customers? (It varies by company and brand). Companies often spend a lot of money in areas that don’t pay back. What are the drivers of customer satisfaction in your industry? Look at it through the lense of the people, presentation, price, product quality, and the process that a customer goes through. Each one of those five Ps represents an area of opportunity for your company to improve. Know what your drivers are so that you can focus your improvement on things that are going to have the most value to your customers–and the greatest payback for your company. 

3. Prioritize actions based on benchmarks – Who/what are my target customers comparing me to? Why are they defecting? Why are they shopping for an alternative solution? Knowing this information will help you understand and forecast your customers’ expectations and needs.

4. Define the business case upfront – What’s it worth to me in lower defection rates? Lower costs? Increased share? $$$$? Connect customer satisfaction activity with the same discipline and scrutiny is critical to getting the equation right.

5. Monitor and make course corrections – Getting good at delighting your customers is not an event. You’ve got to have a continuous customer feedback loop. Make sure that customers are feeling the changes that you’re making. If not, make course corrections. 

As Tucker pointed out, satisfaction is the path, but not the destination. The destination through an excellent customer experience is commitment–that part of a customer’s behavior that creates power for a brand. The primary input to commitment is the experience that customers have.

Kevin Mellander, Director of Customer Care, Allegiance