Allegiance Blog

Ok, let’s face it.  A lot of the blogs posted by VOC experts and those offering VOC solutions focus around best practice, what the research says, or perhaps it may be just one person’s opinion.  That is a not bad thing; it is helpful, entertaining and gives us something to consider.

However, this time, I thought I would let you hear what a couple of leading practitioners in the VOC space are saying. 

Some time ago, Allegiance began hosting weekly broadcasts (that turn into podcasts) on BlogTalk Radio.  Yes, talk radio on the Internet.  The topics have ranged from survey design best practices to social media, and I have to say, Allegiance is gaining quite an audience.

Recently, at the Allegiance Summit, I took the opportunity to host some interviews of some of the leaders and trendsetters in the VOC world. So this month, rather than read my blog post, I’d like you to listen to my blog post.

1. Arkadi Kuhlmann: Chairman, President and CEO of ING Bank.   http://tinyurl.com/64veskq
2. Jim Bampos: Vice President of Customer Quality at EMC corporation. http://tinyurl.com/6z4t6q8 

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As a light snow fell in Park City, Utah, hundreds of Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts gathered for day two of the Allegiance Engage Summit. Attendees enjoyed great speakers and hands-on workshops that focused on how to uncover and apply insights from customer feedback to achieve positive business outcomes. 

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. 

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A sold out attendance of more than 250 Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and Customer Intelligence experts gathered Monday at the Allegiance Engage Summit to share experiences and discover new ways to leverage customer insights to drive business growth.

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.

The amount of customer feedback coming from social media channels is growing rapidly. Companies who don’t capture and analyze this feedback are missing or ignoring a large percentage of the valuable information that could be helpful to their business. Therefore, many businesses are turning to text analytics systems and technologies to automatically process and analyze text in all its forms and transform it to be utilized in identifying trends, early warning signs, product issues, suggestions for improvement, and cries for help from customers.

In applying text analytics to gathering customer feedback from social media, many new challenges must be considered. The number one challenge is that there is so much text out there, yet only a fraction of it is actually relevant to your business.

Even if you use traditional keyword filtering, it is still going to yield inconsistent and inaccurate results. For example, if you were evaluating comments about American Airlines, you would find some people who say, “I flew on American Airlines,” while others say, “I flew on American.” Think of the number of matches you will find if you just use the term “American”!

To manage this challenge, VOC programs using social media need to be able to apply smart filtering techniques and select only the relevant information from the mountain of available data. Text analytics technology based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) can also be utilized in the development of these smart filters, but due to the relatively new emergence of social media, very few are commercially available. With the popularity of social media, many of the leading text analytics and customer feedback technology providers are rapidly developing systems to overcome this challenge.

The power of text analytics will allow companies to quickly and accurately identify actionable issues and then adapt in real time by taking immediate steps that will boost customer retention, differentiate their business and quickly grow revenue.

Many companies are excited about the opportunities that social media marketing can bring to their organizations. They recognize that it provides a relatively inexpensive method of connecting with customers and understanding them in a way that can be acted upon to engender customer loyalty. Therefore, these companies are creating strategies for how best to break through the noise and talk directly to their customers in a new way.

However, one of the keys to being successful in the use of social media marketing is actually not talking at all; rather, it is listening to the existing conversation taking place online. Proactive listening to the customer conversation is critical to the creation of the appropriate social media communication plan.

This process is analogous to attending a cocktail party. Upon entering a room, it would be considered rude for us to walk up to a group of people already conversing and start talking about ourselves. However, that is what many firms are doing in social media. They see it as just another communication channel and, rather than listening to the existing conversation, they start spouting out the same marketing messages they use in other channels – messages that talk AT people, not WITH people. This is not appropriate for social media; social media is about creating a two-way conversation.

Savvy “partygoers” approaches a group of people and don’t say a word. They spend a few minutes listening to what is being discussed in order to get the proper context. Then, after introducing themselves briefly, they may begin to engage in the conversation by sharing their viewpoint or something relevant and interesting to the other participants. Or they may enter the discussion by asking a question related to the topic at hand. Either way, they are engaging others in a meaningful dialogue based on the listening they have already done.

Marketers have not generally had this opportunity to dialogue with their customers before, unless it was face-to-face during a transaction. These non-transactional conversations are the foundation of building stronger customer relationships. The familiarity created by a series of social media conversations tends to build closer relationships than any series of advertisements might hope to accomplish.

What can we learn by listening to customer conversations “in the wilds” of social media? We can learn what they are saying about our products, brand, or company. We can learn what they think about our policies. We can learn what they think about our people – and our customer service. We can learn the words they use to describe us, our competitors, and our industry.

There are a lot of good customer insights that can be gathered through social media listening posts. The savvy marketer will partner closely with their Voice of the Customer (VOC) team to pull in these conversations and learn from them, even if they never decide to say a word through a social media channel.

Becky Carroll is the author of the upcoming book The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers (Wiley, July 2011) and writes the blog Customers Rock!.

As VOC practitioners, you need to ensure that the data you collect is actionable and relevant to other business leaders in your organization. To help you achieve that goal, join me and VOC practitioners and experts from around the globe on May 15 – 18, 2011, at the Engage Summit 2011. But hurry, we are almost sold out for the event.

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.

Traditional business intelligence systems that analyze structured data are very good for statistically reporting the current state of customers and markets. Sales are up or sales are down. Customers are more satisfied or customers are less satisfied. This region seems to be performing better than that region. Although these are important facts to understand, the key insights that are missing are why those things are happening now. Answering the “why” behind the data is typically not possible, even with investments in interpolation, modeling, and statistical analysis on traditional structured data.

However, when you combine structured data with unstructured data, such as freeform replies to open-ended survey questions or comments on the Internet, you add another layer of depth that can give you a complete picture. For example, you can see what customers are saying about a poorly performing product, why customers in a specific region for a specific type of product and for a specific time period are unhappy, and what were the key issues that drove low satisfaction.

Text analytics is the key to understanding these questions. Well-designed surveys will typically ask for customers to rate products or services, then ask “Why did you give us that rating?” or “Why were you dissatisfied with our service?” The answers to those questions provide powerful insights. However, until recently this has been difficult to analyze. Businesses have traditionally relied on verbatim coding systems where outsourced vendors or analysts manually review a random sample of a few hundred responses, and then create codes to categorize them into common issues.

Although manually reviewing a sample of responses provides some level of accuracy, there are some inherent flaws in that process. First and foremost is that you are not looking at all of the data. If you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of responses, you are only able to cost effectively analyze a small fraction of the available information.

The second flaw is human bias. Whenever humans are making decisions about the data, there is always a tendency for people to respond and categorize based on the way they are feeling that day. Eye strain and fatigue also play a role in delivering inconsistent results. One day an analyst may categorize a particular issue as a customer service problem, the next day or week they may think it is more of a product problem.

In addition, customers may have complex issues that are not easily categorized with traditional coding schemes. In this case, you may need multiple interdependent codes, but that can make it even more difficult for human analysts to be consistent. All of these challenges to analyzing freeform, open-ended comments in surveys are prevalent today. Text analytics delivers the capability to automatically process and analyze large volumes of freeform text with consistency and accuracy.

Coming Soon: The new way to do text analytics in a VOC program

Eric Weight is Director Text Analytics Products at Allegiance, Inc.

How much impact does employee engagement have on a company’s bottom line? More than you think.

A recent Gallup study estimated that disengaged employees wasted more than $300 billion in productivity at U.S. firms. The flip side:  firms with engaged workforces have 2.6 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to their industry counterparts.

So what’s the connection of engagement to productivity? It’s based on the premise of “Pay it Forward” — engaged employees lead to engaged customers lead to increased profits. At Nicor National, we measure both our employee engagement and customer engagement on a monthly basis using the Allegiance platform and see a consistent correlation between the two — the upticks and the downticks tend to go hand in hand.

Our engagement efforts beyond monthly tracking include a combination of e-based and direct communications, both on a scheduled and ad-hoc basis. To keep your finger on the pulse of employee engagement, you can’t rely on just one approach, since not all employees respond to our communications in the same way.

Given that our business sucess is based on creating stronger relationships with our customers, the connection between customer engagement (i.e. customer satisfaction) and profitability in our company is well documented. We’ve learned that in order to achieve our business goals and meet customers’ changing expectations, we have to start with our employees.

Barbara Porter is Vice President, Customer Service and Business Development at Nicor National

Currently, there is an explosion of freeform text information being generated by consumers. Studies show that as much as 80% of the information that is created in a corporation is freeform or text in nature. At the same time, computer technology can not accurately process and understand language in its traditional form because computers are made to simply match patterns, compare and sort. Therefore, companies are missing or ignoring a large percentage of the valuable information that could be helpful to their business.

Since the revolution of the Internet, paying attention to this type of information has become even more important. Consumers now generate an incredible amount of online content by posting comments that are publicly available to everyone. Most compelling, this is information that is not being said to the companies themselves, but to the world at large.

Companies have numerous internal systems such as call centers, email and automated feedback systems to gather and manage customer information. However, public Internet comments are posted for all to see, providing low-cost access to relevant customer thoughts and feelings about a company and its competitors. Businesses and their competitors can use this information to do competitive research, understand general market trends, and pinpoint emerging problems early on in the product development lifecycle.

However, due to the freeform nature and sheer volume of this information, it is an expensive and cumbersome process to gather and understand unstructured data. Transaction or feedback surveys typically contain one or more verbatim questions such as, “How can we improve?” or “Please describe the problem you had.” Responses to these are typically very helpful individually. But what if you had a few thousand? How would you summarize them?

For these reasons, businesses are turning to text analytics systems and technologies to automatically process and analyze text in all its forms and transform it to be utilized in identifying trends, early warning signs, product issues, suggestions for improvement, and cries for help from customers. We will be getting into more details about text analytics in the future….so stay tuned.

When sales and marketing professionals hear the words “customer feedback,” most tend to think of colleagues who spend their time in statistical analysis and tracking customer satisfaction scores. But as customer feedback tools give way to the more sophisticated technologies of customer intelligence (CI), we believe that many will start to use CI and its insights to drive sales and improve marketing campaign ROI. Below are three fledgling practices used by larger companies that will soon become mainstay.

1. Identify emerging changes to consumer needs by segment.  Customer Intelligence technologies include predictive analytics that pull from vast amounts of data collected from customer feedback, social media, unstructured data, and operational data. This increase in data combined with more focused insights will give marketing and sales executives a better view of developing consumer trends, changes in consumer preferences, and the ability to track those changes by segment. This allows marketing exeuctives to modify their strategy, messaging, and sales collateral appropriately in time to take advantage of developing trends.
2. Improve sales pipeline management.  Another element of CI is data mining, which offers the potential of extracting new and deeper insights into the prospects in your company’s sales pipeline. This feature will help sales executives to better identify the prospects most lifely to convert to opportunities and the opportunities most likely to convert to sales based on identified behaviors, demographics, psychographics, etc. For example, prospect personal A is 4 times more likely to buy than persona B. The lifetime value of prospect personal C is 1.5 times greater than persona D.
3. Enhance product development.  Many companies use feedback from their sales and marketing teams when designing new products or updating current products. However, CI marries qualitative with quantitative analysis to provide a solid and reliable view of developing customer preferences. Further, product managers will use CI tools to test consumer preferences on beta products and solicit feedback on product concepts to refine the product before development begins.

To learn more about the concept of CI (also called Voice of Customer Intelligence), see the blog post “Where is VOC Going Anyway.” You can also view the on-demand webinar from the American Marketing Association titled “Customer Intelligence: The New Frontier of Customer Voice.”