Introduction

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.

Insight into the response rate is key to invitation management. The response rate of a campaign represents the percentage of invitees who responded to the survey. A high response rate ensures that the survey results are representative of the population contacted. Engage7 Invitation Reports provide several options to determine the accurate response rate for a survey.

How is Response Rate Calculated? 

The basic response rate in Invitation Reports is: 

Be sure to include the count of abandoned or incomplete responses in the response rate report. Configure this at Manage Survey > Manage Responses. When enabled, Response Rate is:

 When bounce reporting is enabled, hard bounces are automatically excluded from the number of invitations. This is configurable in the Options menu. One can optionally configure Soft & Hard bounces to be excluded or included in the Response Rate. When bounces are excluded, the calculation is:

Allegiance Advantage  

Engage7 tools bring you significant advantages to help you draw insights from your invitation data.

• The Invitation Reports provide an easy to use, zero training user interface
• Robust segmentation and filtering tools provide the ability to deep dive into invitation data by demographic or time
• Smart bounce processing capabilities automatically track bad email addresses and provide tools to easily rectify and resend invitations to increase response rates
• The ability to allow anyone within your organization access to these reports, with similar permission levels as our standard analytics product.

Look forward soon to a blog post on how to use the Engage7 product and other industry best practices to increase response rates.

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!

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.

1) Give the executives an opportunity to provide feedback, before the program goes live.

Keeping executives informed will help to ensure the success of any program and will allow you to make necessary corrections early in the VOC process. Often the executives will empower you to make decisions. However, keep them apprised of the program’s progress to avoid any delays later in the process.

2) Make sure the executives know and understand the goals and objectives of the VOC program.

Understanding the strategic direction of the organization and knowing what is expected with the VOC program is crucial to the success of the program. Having clear goals and objectives will ensure that you stay on course and make the right decisions for your organization.

3) Understand how the executives are being measured for a successful VOC program.

To ensure future career advancement, it is imperative that you know the metrics by which you will be measured. Therefore, a successful VOC program should include specific benchmarks for evaluating the performance of you and your team. To support the program success, keep the executive team connected with the customer by continually sharing customer comments and feedback gathered through the program.

These three key points will help you ensure executive buy-in for your VOC program. By focusing on the primary business needs and the value the VOC program will bring to the organization, you will ensure a successful outcome.

Conducting employee surveys within your organization presents opportunities for you to show employees that you care about them and their needs. At the same time, it provides employees an avenue for providing feedback about the company, culture, management, tools, resources, training, and more.  For survey results to be most effective, employees need to trust that they can provide candid feedback in an anonymous fashion without retribution.

Even more important than conducting these surveys is to act on the results – and then to hold managers accountable for creating action plans and executing on them. However, is it a good or standard practice to compensate managers based on their employee satisfaction scores?  This is a practice that is difficult to support, given the following complications caused by providing incentives to managers based on the satisfaction of their employees.

1. Any time you tie survey results to a bonus plan, managers will waste time and energy trying to find fault with the overall program design, survey questions, or data quality – instead of taking the candid feedback at face value, taking ownership, and putting the feedback to work. 
2. Tying compensation to employee feedback also leads to situations that I refer to as the “car dealer syndrome,” which includes gaming the system, bribes, and other seedy behavior.
3. The potential to earn more money because of these results can also lead to retribution for low scores and poor feedback; employees need to know they can provide feedback without fear of recourse for negative feedback.

If you want to reward your managers, use objective measures, such as employee turnover, that can’t be tinkered with.  If you feel the need to reward managers, do so based not on the scores and the feedback, but on the execution of action plans created as a result of the feedback.

Having said all that, I do believe that company executives should certainly have a portion of their bonus plans tied to both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction scores.  Creating a customer-centric culture begins when you first focus on your employees and make their satisfaction a priority.  This culture can only be created and driven by those at the top.

In fact, finding customer data is not a problem for most companies. The world is swimming in data. If you don’t have it, you can buy it, rent it, or collect it.

There is no shortage of survey and data gathering methods either. By last count, there were more than 300 survey vendors. Yet most companies with Voice of the Customer programs are struggling to gain insights from survey and feedback data.

That is because most of their time is spent sampling, surveying, and managing feedback. That includes setting up feedback channels, establishing survey frequency, etc. Attempting to find the ‘ah-ha’ insights often begins with an export to Excel and hours of cross tab work.

But not everyone is a statistician or computer scientist, and not everyone wants to sift through large data sets. Remember: The goal is not to gather gigabytes of data, it is to create actionable insights that drive change. If you work with a vendor that thinks gathering more data is the end-goal, turn and run!

And by all means, use technology for what it’s best for; making complex things simpler. In this case, turning mounds of data into insights. The right technology is ideally suited to bring all your VOC and operational data together, to easily pinpoint relevant trends, and to reveal actionable insights.

“What’s ubiquitous and cheap?… Data.  What’s Scarce and Expensive?…The talent to analyze the data and tell the story.  Data: understand it, process it, transform it, visualize it, communicate it.”  Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

At that time, news from home was practically non-existent. The first space shuttle launch happened, but I didn’t find out about it until nearly ten days later. I was living on the far end of the earth and on the far edge of information availability.

Dateline 2010: Chile experienced a horrific earthquake. The resulting Tsunamis inundated the areas around Concepcion (where I had lived). As I watched the news, I immediately began calling on my cell phone, texting my friends, and leaving messages on Facebook in order to check on them. Within a few hours, I found out that my dear friend Pedro had lost his home and his father. Pedro was living in a shelter, and he used a mobile phone to respond to my text and my Facebook post. Soon my Facebook friends, who had seen the exchange between us, were offering support and dollars to help them and others.

Within a day or two, Pedro was rebuilding his house. Yet, thirty years ago, it took me 14 days to find out about the first space shuttle launch.

In those thirty years, the speed of information has increased exponentially. We are at the point now where if you don’t tweet, text, blog or Facebook (yes you can conjugate Facebook as an action verb), it is difficult to keep current. The immediacy of communication allows information to become almost instantaneously available. We want people to know what we think — and we want it now!

Fast Forward to Social Media

As companies begin to embrace social media, many are using a “ready, fire, aim” approach. Companies check social media off their list by creating a Facebook presence, or a Twitter hashtag, but are they doing their due diligence in educating their employees, or better yet, establishing a policy for usage of these social media outlets? 

As you get ready to open your company to the world of social media, here are some basic things to consider:

1. Seek out best practices and ideas from current social media practitioners. Consider Seth Brogan’s The Ethics imperative in Social Media
2. Establish a usage policy for acceptable use and behavior on social media and communicate this policy to all employees.
3. Monitor what people are saying about your company on social media and decide how or if you will respond. This is feedback at the speed of light, so be sure to determine what you intend to do with the data you collect.
4. If you don’t do #3, it won’t take long before employees and customers realize that you are not serious about your social media presence, and they will treat it with ambivalence.
5. Incorporate the data received from your social media outlets into an overall VOC initiative. Allegiance offers SocialVoice to help you get started in this area.

So what have we learned in thirty years?  Information is now instantaneous, but the quality of information can be questionable. If we can incorporate the sentiment and thoughtfulness of letter writing into the instant communication of today, we can leverage social media to build real relationships. After all, elements of social media has helped alleviate the suffering of earthquake victims. We should use the same care and commitment in our tweets, yammers, posts and blogs. People are listening.

 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.

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

Today’s world of customer feedback has evolved far beyond a phone call or a letter. A customer today can use a smartphone to make a complaint or use online chat. They can send an email or text to family and friends, or even tweet and blog negative news to thousands at a time. In fact, I recently learned that there are more than 100 million blogs and web forums in the English language alone — and more than 2 million Tweets in a typical day.

The point is, when customers are talking about your organization, do you hear it? And even more important, do you react and respond? Today’s customer really is in charge of the conversation, and businesses today must listen and respond to these new and critical communication channels if they’re going to stay on top of the issues and control the perception of their name and brand.

So how do you build a quality Voice of the Customer (VOC) or feedback program? What are the most important elements for automated feedback technology and solutions? Experts recommend the following:

• Do-it-yourself surveys are still critical for today’s enterprise. Departmental managers need to execute smart surveys on their own.
• Transactional surveys take many forms including receipt-based, IVR, Text/SMS, online, email or print. These are usually departmentally-based programs that rerun the same post-event survey with the intent of rescuing customers.
• More sophisticated VOC programs include relationship surveys that dive deeper into understanding customer attitudes and turnover risks. They usually involve one or many departments, sometimes CEOs or even the entire c-suite, and are part of the company-wide culture.
• New tools to pull unstructured comments from social media platforms are becoming critical to staying on top of unsolicited feedback. You should consider a VOC solution that has this function built in.
• Mobile and SMS surveys are the wave of the future and the way the younger generation communicates. Be sure to incorporate feedback tools that can interact with mobile devices.
• And don’t forget text analytics and text mining tools to round out your solution. These tools will simplify your efforts to understand the many verbatim comments that come into your organization. It’s timely and expensive to sort through them manually. Advanced tools can do this for you.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect VOC system to get started. Get going today. You can improve as you go, and be sure to build in your program a practice to close the loop with customers. They want to know what you did with their feedback, even if it’s not what they were hoping to hear. As Jeremy Whyte, Director of Customer Feedback with Oracle said, “It’s not enough to listen to the voice of the customer — the feedback must be acted upon.”

Customer loyalty is no longer driven by products but by experiences that create emotion. Emotion is created when the customer gets something they are not expecting. Listening to their needs and concerns and then creating an action plan to change your business practices will help you achieve this.