Allegiance Blog

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.

We all know the “oh man, am I stuffed” feeling we get after eating our favorite dinner dish.  And when we send out a survey, we hope to get back the data that gives us rich, tasty and analyzable answers.  The problem is, if we don’t properly cook the survey, no will want to finish what’s on their plate.  It just tastes terrible!

Needless to say, the goal of any survey builder or analyst is to get respondents to clean their plate or, in this case, finish the conversation. After all, isn’t a survey just a conversation?  You ask engaging questions and expect the respondent to answer with the intent of giving you a full, satisfying response. Here are some basic best practices for keeping respondents engaged in the dinner/survey conversation:

1. Keep it as short as possible

Your survey needs to capture the information you need. But the longer you stretch it out, the higher the risk of the “I’m tired of this survey, I’m done” syndrome, more commonly known as “drop out.” 

2. Warm them up

Most of us aren’t able to dive into a Shakespearean play the moment we step out of bed in the morning.  Don’t dive into the difficult questions right off the bat.  Start by taking them through the experience you are surveying them for.   Get them thinking about their interaction with you.

3. Keep your questions brief and clear

No one likes to have to read a survey question twice because it’s too long or because they don’t understand what you’re asking.  Avoid using compound and ambiguous questions. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?”  Um, yeah, not a good survey question.

4. Keep your list of answer options short

A respondent can experience fatigue not just by a marathon-like survey, but also by too many answer options to select from in one question.  Too many options can cause a respondent to select just the first or last option and not read your entire list of options. 

5. Keep it interesting

Though data collection is serious business, and you need to ensure you are gathering valuable, actionable information, remember that you’ll get better data if your respondent enjoys taking your survey.  That doesn’t mean you have to “fluff it up,” but make sure it’s relevant to your respondent.

6. And finally. . . . be considerate, keep your respondent informed

Tell them why they are taking the survey, what you discovered and what kind of actions you’re going to take with the results of the analysis.
 
While this article has a bit of a lighter side to it, I hope it conveys the seriousness of creating a good survey.  Contemplate and plan a better survey to keep your respondents participating in the conversation.

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.”

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.”

Transactional surveys are a great way to capture customer feedback immediately following a transaction or event. Companies can use them to gain a better understanding of a customer’s experience and perceptions of service quality while the service interaction is still fresh on his or her mind.

Dr. Fred Van Bennekom from Great Brook Consulting has created a list of eight practical items to consider when developing your transactional survey strategy.

Keep It Short. If you want to get a good response rate, then keep it short and to the point. For most transactional processes, 7 to 12 questions should be sufficient.  

Use Random Sampling. If you have ongoing customer transactions, you probably don’t want to send a survey invitation each time a customer has a closed transaction. This will promote “survey burnout” and lead people to complete the survey only when they have an axe to grind.  

Implement a Service Recovery (Complaint Handling) System Concurrent with the Event Survey Program. Complaint handling and event surveying are tightly linked in a customer retention program. If a customer voices a complaint in a survey and you don’t respond, it will just flame the fires of dissatisfaction.  

Consider Different Survey Administrative Methods. Transactional surveying can be done by telephone, web form, paper form, or using IVR. Regardless of the method, you want to get the data as quickly as possible to act on any business process issues. Web form surveys are the fastest and most inexpensive once the system is set up, but your target audience must have web access and be web savvy.

How Often & How Soon to Survey. Most retailers or dining establishments are surveying essentially at the close of a transaction. In situations where you have a database of customer contact information, you could do the surveying in batch mode every day or every week. However, if the period between transaction and survey is too long, you increase the probability of a process problem affecting more customers until you learn about the problem.  

Outsource Surveys Versus In-House Execution. There are many services that will conduct the survey program for you. They may give you real-time access to the results through a web portal, but you will pay for these features. With advanced technology tools, you can accelerate the design, set-up, execution and analysis of your transactional surveys by performing them yourself.

Pilot Test Your Surveys. A survey is a product that you as the designer should test before launching, just as a company should test any product before selling it to customers. The pilot or field test is critical to discovering flaws in the detail of the survey design before going live.  

Don’t Abuse The Survey and Your Respondents. Please know the difference between an event survey and a relationship survey, and be humble in your request for your respondents’ time. By attempting to make the survey serve two masters — the event and the relationship – you will compromise on both.

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.

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.

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

Dr. Gary Rhoads, Loyalty Expert and Co-Founder of Allegiance, gave a good presentation today during the online Engage eSummit, in which he offered the following “Five Easy Steps to Predictive Analytics: A Top Down Business Outcome Approach”:

Step 1: Review business outcomes or key goals with leading indictators. Understand their relational patterns or trends. When you focus on business outcomes, the reason we gather data is because we want to know how it influences certain issues, as well as what kinds of things go on that increase customer loyalty and purchases. Gather data to try and predict that.

Step 2: Find the subgroup (e.g. location, gender, or job group) that is causing the dip or rise in leading indictors and hence ROI. Predictive Analytics will tell you which group it’s dipping in. When a company has problems and is experiencing a drop, it’s not the whole company, it’s usually a subgroup.

Step 3: Review top box, swing and bottom box scores–Overall get a feel of the landscape.

Step 4: Review the voice of the customer/employee for deep insights. Compare “Best in Class Groups” with “Worst in Class.” Find best practices and barriers.

Step 5: Review predictive analytics–the drivers or “hot items” that impact key goals and indictators (e.g., engagement, NPS, productivity) positive or negative.

Kimberly Carroll, MarCom Manager, Allegiance