Allegiance Blog

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:

Customer	Employee
Product purchase date / tenure	Employment start date / tenure
Product(s) owned	Department
Store/location/branch visited	Region
Sales representative	Manager name
Total sale (retail	Annual salary
Hold/wait times (support or customer care)	PTO utilization rate

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.