Allegiance Blog

In our professional lives, surveys are an indispensable tool in our enterprise voice arsenal. When combined with operational data, business performance metrics, social media chatter and other less-structured forms of customer voice (e.g. call center logs, online comment cards, in-bound emails and letters), survey results form the critical foundation of a rich and robust voice of the enterprise choir.

This is the first in a series of blog posts regarding use of features and functions available in the Allegiance Engage7 Voice of Customer platform. Allegiance Engage7 has several advanced survey campaign analytic capabilities that enable you to treat invitation data as first-class data, similar to response data. We realize that who is invited, how many responses you get, and the response rate are vital to data analysis.

Could your loyalty, satisfaction and engagement surveys also behave as sort of “leading indicators” that affect performance in other areas of your company? If customers are more engaged, will they buy more product? Will they recommend you? Will this have any bearing on inventory, staffing or R&D? Think about designing your VOC program with the intent that the data can trickle down to show relevance in your day-to-day operations and business outcomes.

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.

Survey results that are presented as “average scores” can easily miss the mark. What does an average satisfaction score of 7.78 really mean? Presenting metrics that everyone can understand and act on is a critical component of any Customer Satisfaction / Customer Loyalty program, and it need not be very difficult.

Join us for Allegiance Radio in 2011. 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.

The design of any world-class customer feedback program should include a closed loop process that makes the 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.

Email has become the major method for delivering survey invitations. With so many types of legitimate and junk email hitting inboxes every day, people have become more selective in opening and responding to email invitations. However, there are a few actions you can take as you create your survey invitations that will help you increase your response rates, legitimize your survey and ensure that you are CAN-SPAM compliant.

In Tamilnadu, South India, the chef is complimented following a well-cooked meal with the phrase “Kai Manam,” meaning the knowledge, care and soul the cook’s hands imparted to the meal.

This is also true for Voice of the Customer champions who try to convey a similar sense to their customers through surveys, analysis and the action thereafter. By acquiring knowledge to understand the needs of the customer and communicating care, VOC experts strive to deliver improved products and services and create happier customers.

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.