Here are some highlights from Tuesday’s speakers: 

Guy Kawasaki, Author and Former Apple Chief Evangelist  

Guy Kawasaki at Engage Summit

• Business should focus on becoming more likeable and trustworthy while engaging customers to win more business.
• Companies should “remove the speed bumps” and make it easier for customers to do business with them.
• Default to Yes – always be thinking “How can I help this person.”
• Keep your message simple and tell a story to get the message across.
• Plant many seeds, engage with many and enchant all the influencers. 

Jeremiah Owyang, Social Technology Expert 

• The customer of the future is armed with information and empowered to share their brand experiences with others.
• Market research must expand to include socialgraphics, which is the understanding of how customers use social technologies.
• Registration forms are dying as customers move to social signups using their Facebook account.
• Businesses need to apply social strategies to each phase of the customer experience. 

Attendees also heard from experts about Voice of Employee (VOE) and employee engagement topics, including how to connect employee engagement to customer loyalty and business outcomes as well as employee survey and feedback topics. Leaders in data analytics, Voice of Customer and employee program start up, market research, demographic studies and social business also presented practical case studies and shared thought leadership.

Be sure to search #VOC on Twitter to see the variety of comments from attendees. Join us for next year’s event, renamed VOCFusion, which will be held at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas in 2012.

Here are some highlights from today’s speakers:

Adam Edmunds, President and CEO of Allegiance

• Enterprises are spending $80 billion on market research each year to understand customers, but only 10% of the data is being used.
• Business Intelligence, CRM, VOC, CE, EFM and Social Media are all part of managing and improving customer interactions. The ultimate goal is customer intelligence.
• Voice of Customer data combined with operational data is the best way to uncover true insights that can be turned into actions that impact revenue and sales. 

Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and CEO of ING DIRECT USA 

• ING DIRECT recognized customer frustrations with banks and set about to simplify financial products.
• It is important to not only engage with customers, but to engage with the right customers. Not everybody is the right customer for your business.
• Create an emotional connection with customers. Start simply by answering the phone, responding to email, and make a good impression.
• Define your principles and open up a conversation within the company. Create a culture of service. 

Bonny Simi, Director of Customer Experience & Analysis, JetBlue Airways 

• JetBlue focuses on bringing humanity back to travel. The company says it doesn’t know what is right, only its customers know what is right.
• The four elements of the JetBlue VOC program are: Listen across multiple channels, measure Net Promoter Score, apply robust analytics and create actionable insights.
• JetBlue combines solicited survey responses with unsolicited feedback from email and social media to create actionable insights that make a difference in the customer experience. 

Bruce Temkin, Managing Partner, Temkin Group 

• Traditional market research is obsolete. Data provides no value unless it leads to action.
• Deep analysis is not required, one data point can lead to a positive change in customer experience.
• Customer experience directly relates to customer loyalty.
• Six out of 10 companies surveyed say they want to be the leader in their industry in customer experience. 

Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality, EMC Corporation 

• In setting up a VOC program, know who your stakeholders are and what is important to them.
• Customer metrics are as important as financial and operational metrics in measuring the success of a business.
• Don’t try to produce data to meet everyone’s needs. Instead focus on what is most impactful to customers and turn data into actions.
• Learn what your customer loyalty drivers are and measure your success against competitors in your industry.
• Create a forum for stakeholders to provide feedback, including the executive and operational levels.

Thanks to all the great speakers and attendees for making this event a success. Next year’s event promises to be bigger and better than ever. Hope you can join us in 2012 in Las Vegas for VOCFusion at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

At the Summit, we will be sharing best practices on driving business growth through customer intelligence, including using social platforms, data visualization and text analytics. There will also be some exciting, new game-changing products introduced that promise to help you provide your company’s executives with actionable business intelligence from VOC and operational data.

To that end, we have a great line up of speakers this year. Headliners include Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and President of ING DIRECT USA; Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, Inc.; Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality, EMC Corporation; and Bonny Simi, Director of Customer Experience & Analysis, JetBlue Airways.

Additionally, you will learn from Federico Cesconi, Director of Business Intelligence, UPC Cablecom; Zach Gemignani, CEO, Juice Analytics; and Lynda Smith, Senior VP of Marketing, Jive Software. Sponsors include JD Power and Associates, Jive Software, Attensity, 1to1 Media, CMO Council and Juice Analytics.

Experts Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group, Andrew McInness of Forester Research and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group will also offer their insights. A variety of business authors will also be on hand, including Lisa Nirell, author of Energize Growth Now and Becky Carroll, author of The Hidden Power of Your Customers. The full agenda is here: http://engagesummit.com/agenda.html

To register for the Engage Summit 2011, please visit http://engagesummit.com. We look forward to seeing you on May 15 at the Chateaux Resort at Deer Valley in Park City, Utah.

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing and Products at Allegiance, Inc.

Our focus will be on helping voice of customer, survey, feedback administrators, and customer experience professionals to easily gather, analyze and act upon their data in a more prolific way. Our approach is to build powerful tools to automatically deliver greater insights from VOC data. This will help our clients to be more successful without having to spend as much time looking for the golden nuggets in their data.

The Business Intelligence (BI) industry has done a decent job of taking disparate operational, ERP, finance and CRM data and turning it into automated actionable insights. We think the best of BI practices combined with real-time, VOC program data creates an exciting new space that companies will use to run large parts of their business. This “VOCi” space is the best direction for VOC leaders to be successful, and we think it’s the best direction for the industry to grow.

Look for many exciting announcements from Allegiance in 2011, including product, partnership, alliances and client news that will showcase the benefits of shifting away from a focus on gathering more data to a focus on creating actionable business intelligence from the combination of VOC with other data sources.

VOCi is the future, and we invite you to join us on the journey there.

Adam Edmunds is President and CEO of Allegiance, Inc.

 Bill Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics

Billy Beane shook up the world of baseball when he hired a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and starting using data to run a sports team. He looked at statistics that others in the business had ignored or under-valued to find new insights and gain advantage. Some of the key points of his talk can apply to any business:

• Don’t accept the status quo; take a fresh look at data from new angles and perspectives
• Use data to look for inefficiencies throughout the service delivery process
• Analyze data to determine the value of specific actions on your ultimate goal
• Base your decisions on analysis of statistics, not on emotion or subjective reasoning

The bottom line: Do you know what data drives your business? Analyzing data in new ways can give you an edge on your competition.

 Vicky Stennes, VP of In-Flight Experience, Jet Blue

Jet Blue set out to “bring humanity back to air travel.” The company’s values and culture define the brand. Here are some key points you may find useful:

•  Analyze how actions or product decisions relate to the corporate culture For example, charging customers for checking the first bag would negatively impact Jet Blue’s customer-focused culture.
• Identify what is getting in the way of providing first rate service
• Use NPS as one metric of customer satisfaction, but rely on market research to understand how to impact results
• Practice “visible leadership” in which managers spend more time in the field with employees and customers
• Having supported, informed and engaged employees are key to customer loyalty

 Bruce Temkin, Temkin Group

According to Bruce, most companies are not using customer feedback, which makes Voice of the Customer (VOC) an untapped asset. He presented some best practices for implementing a closed loop VOC program. These include:

•  Analyze both structured and unstructured VOC data, including freeform comments, to get a full view of customer feedback
• Deliver insights, not just data, and be clear on specific actions that need to be taken
• Make VOC data available widely throughout the organization and its partners
• Use VOC data to take action both in immediate problem solving and in long term operational planning
• Don’t obsess about a single score, but put data in context; Interpret results separately for different customer segments or regions.

We thank all of our presenters and look forward to another exciting day on Tuesday.

More than 60 percent of the conference agenda consists of panels and presentations by Allegiance customers, who will share insights and experiences on improving Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) and Voice-of-the-Employee (VOE) programs. For professionals in market research, feedback management, VOC, customer retention, loyalty or human resources, the Engage Summit 2010 will provide critical information, best practices and peer-to-peer networking on ways to capitalize on customer and employee engagement.

Keynote Inspirational Speakers

•  Billy Beane, VP and general manager (GM), Oakland Athletics
• Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad
• Rama Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

 Industry Leaders and Loyalty Experts

•  Todd Rowe, Group VP and General Manager, WW Mid-Market Division, SAP
• Bruce Temkin, VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Experience Management, Forrester Research
• Vicky Stennes, VP In-flight Experience, Jet Blue
• Gary Rhoads, Ph.D., Loyalty Expert, Co-Founder Allegiance, Inc.

 Session Topics

•  Creating value and ROI from your survey/feedback data
• Customer and employee panels on engagement wins
• Customer case studies: Zions Bancorporation, Life Time Fitness, others
• Making insight out of the social media boom
• Market research panel on advanced data collection techniques
• Survey Design and Analytics boot camps

To register for the Allegiance Engage Summit 2010, to find out more about this year’s speakers, and to see the conference agenda, please visit http://engagesummit.com. We hope to see you there!

The winner is selected through an extensive three-month process and proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.

Allegiance was rated highest among its competitors in helping businesses to perform surveys and collect feedback from multiple channels, including e-mail, Web, phone, print, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and social media. In addition, with the acquisition of Inquisite’s online survey software, we raised our already high score in the category of depth of functionality from the prior year.

But we are not resting on our laurels. We are busy planning the launch of an entirely new set of features and functions to help companies capitalize on customer and employee feedback. I hope you will plan to join us at the Allegiance Engage Summit in May 16 – 19, 2010 to hear all about it. For more on the summit, click here: http://engagesummit.com/

• 78% of the survey respondents strongly agree or agree that their top management listens and responds to employee feedback.
• However, while most companies say they listen to employees, few solicit real-time feedback. For instance, 38% of respondents only solicit employee feedback once a year, 10% solicit feedback every six months, 16% solicit feedback once a quarter, and 18% solicit feedback monthly. By comparison, 3% solicit employee feedback weekly, and 9% solicit feedback daily.
• In addition, 79% believe engaged employees are very important or important to their company in creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

What’s interesting about these survey findings is that there have been several media articles published recently on the fact that employees are stressed and suffering from poor morale due to the recession, and that once the economy rebounds, there will likely be a backlash against employers. So in order for companies to create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage once they economy rebounds, they not only need to be actively listening to their employees now in real-time to address and resolve any concerns that they have, but also start putting some strategic measures in place to retain their best and brightest employees.

For more information on these and other survey findings, download the report at: www.allegiance.com/voereport

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing, Allegiance

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

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