Allegiance Blog

There are a number of well known and popular ways that companies try to measure their overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. Traditional, overall satisfaction questions are still widely in use and provide a good idea of overall customer sentiment. Other loyalty metrics address customer behaviors such as the likelihood of customers to recommend a company or product to a friend or colleague.

While traditional satisfaction and loyalty scoring methods are great, they’re typically only a stepping stone on the way to engagement. The reason is that many of these methods aren’t able to answer questions such as: Of those customers who are likely to recommend you, are all of them equally likely to recommend? Are some customers more effective at recruiting new customers than others? Does each customer’s recommendation have the same impact? Etc., etc.

Each month, our company conducts a national benchmark survey called the Allegiance Pulse of America survey, which tracks the emotional loyalty or engagement of banking customers throughout the United States. In this survey, customer engagement is measured by several questions, covering overall satisfaction, ‘likelihood to recommend’ and other emotional and behavior outcomes. In addition, Pulse of America asks customers how many friends or relatives they have told about favorable experiences with their bank, and of those they told, how many actually switched banks as a result.

What we found when we separated engaged customers (i.e. those who have an emotional bond with a business) from other customers in this survey is that the engaged customers were nearly 4 times as effective at recruiting new customers as other customers, which proves that all recommendations are not equal. After all, it makes sense that a dispassionate customer’s recommendation doesn’t have the same convincing power as a recommendation from a customer with an engaged, emotional bond.

My point is that it’s not enough to simply know your loyalty score—you have to actively track, measure and understand the feelings and behaviors of your customers and understand your organization’s unique drivers of engagement and loyalty in order to know who’s recommending you and why in order to capitalize on that behavior by obtaining more effective customer referrals. And that’s where technologies (such as those offered by Allegiance) can help pick up where other traditional methods of measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction leave off.

Alan Bainbridge, Allegiance Best Practices Consulting Specialist

Preparing your survey data for analysis can be a messy process, mostly because data typically needs to be cleansed for various reasons. For example, respondents’ answers may not match pre-defined choices or they may answer questions that don’t really apply.

Using an online survey tool can eliminate many of the problems associated with paper surveys by limiting response choice and enabling participants to skip irrelevant questions. But even online survey data may contain records that exclude key variable or include duplicate responses from the same person. And if your survey is large, the task of cleaning up your data can, at first glance, seem a bit overwhelming.

However, it needn’t be. For instance, I recently completed a survey analysis with 35,000 respondents who answered about 75 questions, which resulted in a 2,625,000 cell spread sheet. Fortunately, editing and cleansing the data was fairly simple because I used a tried-and-true, five-step process that included:

Step 1: Make a copy of your data and use that version for data cleansing. This isn’t as much of a step as it is a warning. Even the best laid data cleansing plans sometimes have to be taken back to the drawing board. So, only delete records from a copy of your data and keep your original file on hand in case you need to put something back in.

Step 2: Conduct a few mini data cleansing trial runs. Export smaller subsets of your data to conduct data cleansing trial runs to refine your process. It’s a lot easier to get the process down with a data set of 2,000 than 35,000. Plus, then you’ll know the exact steps that you’ll need to follow when you export all 35,000.

Step 3: Identify “crucial variables” in your survey efforts and define what constitutes “complete”. – In the survey I mentioned above, senior-level executives wanted to identify high-performing managers in geographically defined regions. To the company, these geographical regions were a crucial variable in their survey efforts, as without them, survey responses were useless and had to be deleted. In addition, the scores for each region were based on answers to 7 questions. The company decided that in order for a response to be considered complete, all 7 questions had to be answered.

Step 4: Remove “speeders” and “flat-liners” – Using an internet survey tool, we were able to place a date/time stamp on each response and find out how much time it took each person to complete it. We know from past experience that respondents who complete the survey too quickly (less than 30%-50% of median time) and are likely not reading or answering the questions appropriately. The same is true for flat-liners (i.e. those who mark each answer the same), which are often speeders. They may have read the questions, but they don’t really think about their answers. Therefore, it’s best to remove speeders and flat-liners from your data to eliminate a lot of meaningless data.

Step 5: Eliminate duplicate responses – Usually, it’s hard enough to get people to respond to a survey once. But some people actually care so much that they tell you twice, especially if there are some particularly juicy survey incentives involved (which may tempt them to try to increase their odds of winning) and/or if your managers are informed that their scores are somehow tied in with response rates (which may cause them to flood the system with duplicate favorable responses). Fortunately, all you have to do in those cases is match the entry information with your survey list, and then use the date/time stamp to identify and delete duplicate entries later. I recommend keeping the first response and deleting any subsequent responses.

Once you complete these steps, you’ll not only have a cleaner and more accurate data set, but you’ll also be able to ensure that each person who takes your survey only counts as one response instead of several in the results.

Alan Bainbridge, Best Practices Consulting Specialist, Allegiance

Hopefully you have already read my previous blog entry on this subject [see Why Do Electronic (email) Survey Response Rates Seem so Low? I Have a Theory, and a Way to Help Improve Them.]. This next tip I will keep short and sweet. Consider this fact as researched by the ESP (email service provider) EmailLabs: 69 Percent of Business to Business (B2B) Subscribers Frequently or Always Use a Preview Pane; 45 Percent Rarely or Never Download Images

This fact means that you have very few lines for them to read before they make a decision. Make those lines count! Consider carefully that top 10% of your email. Is your company logo, a piece of stock photography or some puffy copy really the most important communication you want to have with that 69 percent?

I know it’s hard to do (I have fought designers on this issue for years). But you have to hold your ground and fight for that 10% of real estate. Let them do whatever they want in the bottom 10%, but you absolutely must make your first impression space matter. Tell your readers right there why their feedback matters to your company and how much you value it. Tell them exactly how much time it will take them to do your survey. You are fighting for that next action and that next click. And at this point, that’s all that matters.

Terence Fugazzi, VP Demand Marketing, Allegiance

In the current economy, there is a very real and growing concern about how to gain and to keep customers. This was apparent at the 2008 North American Conference on Customer Management (NACCM) this year, with attendance lower than it has been in some time. The irony is that much of what was presented provided insight on how to reach out and hold on to customers during tough times.

In stressful times such as these, many companies tend to pull away from their customers, and may even cut back on ‘satisfaction and loyalty’ programs to try and improve their bottom line. This, unfortunately, is a mistake because it cuts at the very heart of what we all need to be doing during this time – engaging customers to the point that they are willing to ride out tough economic times with us, rather than viewing us as yet another business that really doesn’t care about its customers and is willing to drop them or cut out the programs and products they care about most as soon as times get tough.

This was part of the overarching message at NACCM, including a conference speech I gave on engagement—that it’s important to continue to invest in improving customer engagement. However, one must be smart about how one goes about it. And the five most important take aways from this year’s conference were:

Engaging your customers (moving beyond ‘satisfaction’ and ‘loyalty’) will create a relationship between your customers and your company and/or its product that will help you weather the economic storm or even any mistakes your company may make – engaged customers really do stick with you and spend more money!

Use tools that are as effective as possible with the least expense (web-based tools are ideal for this) – tools that will not only provide you with data, but will help point you toward what is really going on with your customers

Don’t just ‘survey’ your customers – use tools that will provide you with leading indicators that will allow you to predict how a much larger group of customers will react based on the responses of a smaller group.

Don’t forget your employees! Engaged employees have a positive effect (a ‘spillover effect’) on the engagement of your customers.

Engaging your customers means taking action –Even small improvements can mean an increase in your customer’s share of wallet, positive word of mouth and referrals and increased retention and productivity from employees

The key in all of this is to overcome the reactionary fear that comes with a downturn in the economy and to look beyond. By spending smarter and in the right areas (what area is more important than those people who allow us all to be paid?) we can do more than survive…we can continue to thrive.

Kevin Mellander, Director Customer Care, Allegiance

Have you ever noticed that more people start your online surveys than finish them? It’s like they start clicking through the answers and then suddenly they have a heart attack and it’s curtains!

What is happening to those hapless survey takers?

Life insurance actuaries, the Census Bureau, and the Social Security Administration use a tool to understand mortality: life tables. Life tables measure the odds of dying at a particular age. Age 0 to 1 has a higher risk of death than age 1 to 5. Past age 5, our odds of death steadily climb.

One might assume that a similar pattern would be true for online surveys, and that the odds of abandoning a survey increase with each increasing page. So, I decided to check it out. Do survey abandonment curves match similar patterns to human mortality tables? I used one of Allegiance’s client surveys to examine the trends.

In the chart below I used one axis to plot the number of survey takers who had completed each page. On the secondary axis, the red line, I plotted the odds of abandonment. The odds of abandonment is the number of survey takers lost to page x+1 divided by the survey takers remaining at page x.

Turns out, survey abandonment curves are not quite as smooth as human mortality curves. Survey abandonment curves are spiky. It’s like the Grim Reaper inhabits certain pages but not others.

Clearly, one can see where the problem pages are, where abandonment spikes. It turns out that this survey has a bunch of open-ended questions on pages 2, 3 and 10. Answering open-ended questions is a lot of work. Rather than work, people abandon the survey altogether.

There is no way this client will get rid of their open-ended questions. There is nothing I can do to make the questions less prone to abandonment. However, what we can do is re-order the pages and put the low-abandonment pages at the front of the survey and the high-abandonment pages at the back. The thought is that with more survey takers sticking around for longer, we may get to gather more data.

We can measure the increased data the same way the census bureau measures “life-years.” I’ll call this measurement “page-completes.” If we accumulate more page-completes by the end of the survey then we’ve made an improvement. Below is a simulation of re-ordering the pages to put the high-abandonment pages at the end.

Sure, the same number of respondents made it to the end of the survey, 1910. However by re-ordering the survey, the page-completes grow from 28,828 before to 32,319 after. Re-ordering may help me capture more survey data overall.

Kyle LaMalfa, Best Practices Manager and Loyalty Expert, Allegiance

Many people think that surveys are just a bunch of questions, but they’re not. Every survey is a culmination of a challenging seven-step process. And each step of that process poses unique challenges to researchers. After all, sound business decisions much come from high quality information.

And here is a seven-step process that you can use to ensure you create a high-quality survey that will produce more accurate and informative insights:

1. Establish your goals and objectives – A good survey research project must start with clearly defined goals and objectives. Create project goals and answer the questions: what is unknown?; what has already been done; what decisions will be made based on the result?; what do you think the results will look like?’ and what if you’re wrong? What if the results are inconclusive?
2. Determine your audience – Contacting the right mix of respondents is critical to an accurate outcome – just as important as asking the right questions.
3. Design your questions – Use question design best practices to minimize bias and optimize the quality of response.
4. Do a pilot test of your survey – Always conduct a pilot test with a small group prior to launching the survey. Look for misunderstandings, extremely unexpected results, technology problems, and also evaluate the time it takes a typical person to complete the survey. Update and improve your survey. This process will help you catch problems before they become costly mistakes.
5. Launch the survey – Many modern survey projects are launched via email and completed online. Above all, make sure your email invitations are accurate, genuine and compelling. Even the best survey will fall flat if people don’t bother to take it.
6. Analyze the results – Prepare to analyze the data when you are developing the questions. Use techniques such as cross-tabbing and weighting to understand and contextualize data.
7. Communicate the results to others – Action may never be taken unless others know about your survey discoveries. Communicating results clearly and efficiently is the key to a compelling argument for taking action.

Kyle LaMalfa, Best Practices Manager and Loyalty Expert, Allegiance

Here’s my theory, many of the people within companies that are sending out surveys are people that are not email marketing experts. They have not gone through either the training or the hard knocks of what it takes to successfully craft an email message to illicit response. I think most would agree it’s a bit more involved than “Please take my survey”. This is the DM expert’s (read: the evil guy who makes you click on those clever emails) world. But, worry not, in just a few blog posts I can help you avoid the common mistakes, employ some simple strategies and watch your response rates climb. I will have a series of blog posts that will address these over the next few weeks. And here is the first one:

1. First you have to get them to open it!

Lets put aside the topic of deliverability (that will be another post no doubt) and just focus on the message. When an email comes into someone’s email box, the subject line is a big factor in whether or not they will open it. Most people can only see the first thirty or so characters on the email in their Inbox and based on that information, they decide whether or not to hit delete or click on it. It’s important to make your subject line short and sweet and often to somehow identify who you are as a company. For instance “Jen, help Costco serve you better“, or “Christine, what shoes do you want to see at Nine West?”

In the example above, you’ll notice another thing that will help you get people to open your survey emails…Personalization. Studies have shown that if you use your DB data (and you can use more than just their name – think city, purchase data, gender, etc.) to make the message personalized, you will get more opens.

In closing, here is an example of what not to do for a subject line “Please take our quick and easy online survey to help us steer our business for your needs today and for tomorrow.” I think you can see why it would not be effective, but I cannot tell you how many times I have seen email subject lines like that – right before I hit ‘delete’.

Next in the series – First impressions matter

Without getting into deep research, it seems to me that the average marketing manager should be able to put together a sensible survey simply by using some common sense. Somehow, this is not happening as often as I would expect. My speculation is that people are so hungry for feedback on so many items that they can’t resist asking their customers for feedback on all of them. The result of this is that survey abandonment goes up proportionate to the length of the survey and the demographic of the recipient.  And, you wind up with skewed results, since certain classes of respondents, as a group, are more inclined to abandon than others. Here’s a recent experience of mine to make my point.

I recently stayed at a hotel in southern Utah. Two days after my stay, I received a survey request from them. I like this particular hotel chain, so I had no problem opening the survey and giving them my feedback. They had a nice little progress bar on the screen so I knew exactly how far into the survey I had gone. After three or four pages of multiple ranking pages, however, I was still only 40% complete. The next page had 15 ranking questions on everything from their toiletries, to the beds, to the TVs, etc. I bailed out of the survey.

There are two issues in how the hotel should have designed their survey:

1.  The hotel knew who I was and from my profile, should already have known whether or not I was a frequent business traveler or a pleasure/family traveler. Knowing that, they should realize that getting frequent survey responses from me would be very valuable to their business, but also knowing that I am a business person with very little time, they should ask, at most, no more than 5 questions. They could have easily asked me 5 questions out of a set of 20 and by doing this randomly across all their business travelers, still have received the feedback they desired. This would especially be true since their abandonment rate would probably drop by a factor of two or three.

2.  Even if the hotel did not know I was a business traveler, they still should have done the same process outlined above because hotel stays are generally a repeated service. This means unlike, for instance, a car purchase, you are likely to repeat business with them more often than once every few years. Common sense says that recipients of surveys who have made higher dollar, more infrequent purchases will be more likely to tolerate a longer survey. If you are a provider of a more frequent service, you want to design a survey that is quick and easy for the recipient to take so that you will get feedback EVERY time you deliver that service.

So, use common sense when surveying. Understand your recipient. Spread the feedback items across the audience, especially when the sample size and frequencies are high. Know your key goals and cut questions that are not absolutely necessary to meet them.

Terence Fugazzi, VP Demand Marketing, Allegiance

It is interesting to sometimes eavesdrop on shoppers and listen to their candid comments about an establishment they have visited. You will definitely hear different comments and points of view. If a company would like to know the needs and desires of its customers, then conducting a customer survey is one of the best tools to use.

There are 3 areas of customer survey which are all essential for the company to know.

Customer Service Survey

The objective here is to provide the company with valuable data from customer feedback. Management could then improve the service of the company to become more competitive in its field. It could also provide the management team with guidelines for strategic planning and decision-making.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

This area concerns the products, services, pricing, and satisfaction with the business relationship. The details in this survey directly give vital feedback from customers regarding their desires, wants and needs. These data are essential for the growth of the company. Here, the behavior of the customers is revealed through the answers they give. With it, management could make adjustments to suit the satisfaction of customers.

Customer Loss Review Results

Being able to win back one customer is like winning back a thousand or more. It is therefore important to know the reasons why the customer has stopped doing business with the company. There is a need to identify the root cause of the problem. If winning back the customer is no longer possible, it is imperative to take corrective measures so as to prevent the future loss of customers.

One way to benchmark the level of satisfaction of your customers is through a customer satisfaction index. One of the leading customer satisfaction indexes in the world is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI helps determine how satisfied consumers in the US are, so that consumer behavior can be understood. ACSI personnel question around 80,000 Americans per year regarding how satisfied they feel about any of the products and services they may have used for that year. Even the satisfaction of the public with government services is rated by the ACSI.

You may access information about the ACSI every quarter, after survey results have been collected and analyzed by ACSI analysts. Some of those who use the ACSI information are:

• industry trade groups
• market investors
• market analysts
• corporate and organizational decision makers
• and academic researchers.

Ordinary consumers may also opt to read ACSI results so that they can be better informed about what products and services to buy the next year.

To get their data, the ACSI personnel conduct telephone interviews based on the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing system. Respondents are usually randomly chosen and screened first via the sampling method called random-digit dial technique. The ACSI generally concerns itself with customer service satisfaction about over 200 companies that operate in 10 economic areas and 43 industries all in all. Because the ACSI has been proven to be quite reliable and credible, organizations and interest groups from other countries have also begun adopting the ACSI in their countries as well.