Allegiance Blog

Being a sort of a junkie of the stock market and economics in general, I noticed today that the CCI (consumer confidence index) was up. This is good news. But just what is the Consumer Confidence Index and what does it have to do with VOC?

Each month The Conference Board (an independent economic research organization) surveys 5,000 U.S. households. The survey consists of five questions that ask the respondents’ opinions about the following:

1. Current business conditions
2. Business conditions for the next six months
3. Current employment conditions
4. Employment conditions for the next six months
5. Total family income for the next six months

Survey participants are asked to answer each question as “positive, negative or neutral.” The preliminary results from the Consumer Confidence Survey are released on the last Tuesday of each month at 10am EST.

Through a complex system of analysis and weighting of answers, the CCI is calculated, and this helps to formulate major economic policy for the US and for the world. These results affect everything from jobs, production and warehousing of goods, right down to how much a bushel of corn may cost. All this from one simple five question survey.

The CCI can be used as a “leading indicator” or an indicator that influences other fiscal decisions. If the CCI is trending upward, manufacturers make more cars.

The ultimate VOC survey? Maybe. 

Now lets take this down to a more personal level. Could your loyalty, satisfaction and engagement surveys also behave as sort of “leading indicators” that affect performance in other areas of your company?

If customers are more engaged, will they buy more product? Will they recommend you? Will this have any bearing on inventory, staffing or R&D?

Making this data real, and applying it to the bottom line aspects of your company is vital. Using tools such as Quad Charts, Correlation Analysis and trend charts, help you do what the US Government does with the CCI survey.

A 5000-response survey helps to dictate major US economic policy. Think about designing your VOC program with the intent that the data can trickle down to show relevance in your day-to-day operations and business outcomes. Otherwise, its just another survey.

The names we give them vary from company to company: rogue, unofficial, unsanctioned, ghost, one-off. Voice of Customer (VOC) experts appreciate the power of a neat customer feedback strategy. But in many organizations, there is no central authority governing how, when and why customers are surveyed. 

When your customers are surveyed in a disjointed, illogical and inconsistent manner, both your VOC initiative and your customer relationships suffer. Some examples include:

Over-Contact

• With no method of controlling the frequency of contact, customers are overburdened with survey invites, especially highly sought-after research participants.
• Furthermore, lack of a survey contact strategy can lead to over-representation of certain respondents or response segments, skewing results.

 Poor Design

• When non-researchers send surveys, they may unfortunately make rookie mistakes that reflect badly on your company and weaken your brand. These missteps may include:
  • Simple operational mistakes like lack of quality assurance review that lead to dead-end links and spelling errors.
  • Use of a rudimentary survey design tool or lack of access to graphics and branding expertise, resulting in a survey that looks “cheap” and doesn’t positively promote the brand.

 Questionable, Scattered Data

• Lack of survey design experience can result in methodologically weak surveys that yield data of suspicious validity and water down overall VOC data quality.
• Variations in survey design, for instance differences in scale, mean results across the organization are incomparable and sometimes contradictory.
• Data stored throughout multiple databases is difficult to locate, share and leverage.

 It’s frustrating for a VOC expert to know rogue surveys are compromising your VOC initiative and your brand voice. You may feel helpless in countering these negative forces, but you’re not. 

Here are two methods you can employ to bring this matter under control.

Central Command

If unsanctioned surveys are a serious detriment to your VOC initiative in particular and your relationship to the customer overall, it may be time to announce “no more Mr. Nice Guy” and take control with a firm hand. Establish ground rules for surveying customers (who, what, when, where and why) and communicate these rules. Let it be known that your team and your team alone owns the process of gathering feedback from your customers and that all surveys, no matter the size or scope, need to be approved by your team to ensure adherence to your VOC strategy, methodology and sampling plan.

Best Practices Consultation

Perhaps resource constraints or corporate culture make a collaborative, consultative approach more appropriate. Proactively offer your expert services of survey design, survey media/method selection and sampling and contact frequency planning to your coworkers. Communicate to them that you have a VOC strategy in place that you would like them to follow and work with them in a positive, constructive fashion as internal clients to guide them to feedback program design excellence.

A good VOC initiative has set objectives in place and a plan to meet these objectives.  Rogue surveys undermine your strategy by squandering valuable customer feedback opportunities, collecting data that does not map back to VOC objectives and polluting your data. While the approach taken to control wayward feedback initiatives will vary from one organization to the next, there is no better time than the present to bring rogue surveys to heel.

There’s a lot of debate around Net Promoter Score® (NPS) as “the ultimate question.” In the meantime, companies continue reporting customer satisfaction scores with NPS and with aggregate averages. These discussions miss the mark. The point should be to drive improvement:  if you aren’t taking direct action on the results, then you are actually losing ground to your competitors. So what metrics can help drive that focus on improvement?

Start by telling the story. How would you tell an executive in 30 seconds or less what a “7.78 average satisfaction rating” means? On the other hand, executives should react if we tell them that only 38% of the company’s customers are Promoters, and that the differential annual value between a Promoter and a Detractor is $162 (as a real-world example of a B2C company we recently worked with). Armed with this knowledge and with understanding of what creates Promoters and Detractors, executives can make good decisions and also gain a leading indicator of progress by watching the % of promoters grow in their segment.

The background research for Net Promoter was based on a series of longitudinal studies that examined actual customer behaviors associated with their feedback (documented in Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question, and in dozens of case studies over the years). The beauty of Net Promoter isn’t in the score – its strength lies in its ability to easily communicate action plans based on a proven segmentation strategy. It turns out that customers who rate you as less than 9 (on a 0 to 10 scale) are actually not with you (i.e. they aren’t “Promoters”), and they are prone to go elsewhere with their money. Prior to the research in Fred’s book, conventional wisdom found that a score of 5 on an overall satisfaction or recommend question was “neutral” and therefore “ok” and so an average score of 7.78 was generally perceived as good.

However, we all know that a focus on a score, including NPS, is missing the point. A single metric always focuses the discussion on scores, while a focus on improvement and the resulting financial metrics would better serve the business. Reporting averages makes action even more difficult. Take the first step by simply reporting “top box” scoring (% of customers that score a 9 or 10) and see what dialogs result. What percent of your customers are really with you?

Steve is a founder and Principal Consultant with Waypoint Group.  Contact Steve at steveb@waypointgroup.ORG

Social media offers customer service professionals a great opportunity to leverage a new channel for customer feedback and enhanced communications. By establishing social media as a shared resource, contact center managers can identify new ways to enhance the quantity, quality and value of electronic communications.

Outlined below are some of the best practices for developing and maintaining an effective social media strategy and program for progressive customer service organizations.

1. Solidify your strategy: Establish a social media strategy and then empower the right departments to both listen and talk, inbound and outbound.

2. Empower Employees: Give power to front line employees to act. The contact center should be able to fully leverage your social media channel – don’t relegate it to another department.

3. Measure and respond: Treat social media feedback data like any other form of feed­back data – measure, track, actively respond and close the loop. Without it, you are just passively listening and missing valuable opportunities to direct your customer’s conversations.

4. Integrate social media: Integrate into feedback processes and your existing management processes.

5. Be ready to sift through some noise and exert some effort to find the gold:

• Don’t be defeated by the noise, filter it out!
• Be prepared to invest in the systems and management processes to properly use this new channel.

 6. Respond as a social media user would expect: Respond quickly – the shelf life of social media information is short. People expect that you’ll get back to them quickly.

7. Take action on the data: Cross sell, up-sell and rescue. People have spoken to you, and they may not be your customer or on your grid. This is the best way to ensure future success and visibility. Getting feedback is one thing, but saving customers and creating measurable revenue is the right thing.

Eric Weight is Director of Text Analytics Products for Allegiance

Customer relationships are dynamic, never static.  Customers’ perceptions and beliefs are continuously evolving.  Each customer interaction with your company (either direct or indirect) has the power to strengthen, weaken, or destroy customer relationships.

Each customer experience affects your customers’ beliefs and perceptions – their realities.  The changes can be subtle, unrecognizable at first; but they will continue to evolve in a positive or negative direction until they manifest into tangible change. 

The slow evolution of customer relationships can be out of your control to a great extent, which is why it’s imperative to your B2B company’s success that customers are given a consistent voice.  Proactively engaging customers to understand their realities through Voice of the Customer insight enables companies to have more control over their customer relationships.

Issues and misconceptions are normal because we’re all human, and communication breakdowns happen frequently as the intended message communicated is not heard and understood as expected.  Add to that the barrage of uncontrollable external influences that by their nature you are unaware of their occurrence and impact on your customer relationships.

Without a voice, issues and misconceptions can be left undiscovered.  Seemingly small infractions accumulate and aggregate into larger issues, disappointments and resentments.  Left unspoken and unresolved they become time bombs threatening to annihilate customer relationships and their long-term revenue streams at any moment. 

Can you afford the risk of not capturing your customers’ voices on a regular and consistent basis? 

We talk a lot in this industry about Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee. But what about the Voice of the Partner?

The success of many organizations relies on the trefoil of customers, employees and partners. This is especially true for companies where the third-party sales channel is an essential and built-in element of their business model. Yet listening to these valued partners and making ongoing, positive changes to improve the relationship with them is an afterthought for far too many companies. 

Companies steeped in listening to their customers and employees too often dismiss extending the same opportunity to their partners and resellers as unnecessary, a luxury, or even a dangerous gesture that may send to partners the wrong message about the power distribution in the relationship.

Over the years, when discussing partner voice opportunities with clients, I have heard many versions of these themes:

• Our partners work closely with us. We don’t need a separate listening program for them. If they want to tell us something, they will.
• Our channel is spread all over the globe, and some of these people don’t even do business in the same language as our company. Listening to them is just too much trouble.
• We’re in charge here! If our resellers don’t like doing business with us, well, too bad!

In other words: Fly our flag, carry the awesome responsibility of pleasing our customers, follow our rules and meet our sales quotas, but be quiet and know your place. That’s no way to treat a business partner!

Partners have a unique perspective on your organization, seeing things not as a direct employee or a customer, but as a special third-party to your organization, aligned with your company, products and services in a unique way.

• Give your partners a way to communicate their ideas, compliments and grievances with you in a way that doesn’t put them on the spot. As is the case with customers and employees, best practices suggest using solicited feedback in the form of regular relationship measurement and key touch-point transactional surveys combined with an unsolicited feedback option, such as an electronic “comment box” tool.
• You brought your partners into the fold for a reason, often to extend the reach of your company’s sales team into geographies or verticals you alone could not master directly in a cost-effective fashion. Leverage the diversity of your channel to learn more about parts of your marketplace where your partner has special expertise or knowledge.
• Show your commitment to your channel by listening to them and making improvements based on their feedback. Uncover ways to maximize their performance and find out what drives their engagement with your company. Identify what makes a strong business partner to optimize the performance of your indirect sales force.

You’ve taken the steps to listen to your customers and your employees. Now it’s time to bring your partners’ voice into your corporate feedback initiative.

Sarah Simon is Enterprise Program Manager for Allegiance, Inc.

Voice of the Customer (VOC) objectives are vital for any organization and provide a roadmap to a successful VOC program. It’s like going into a new city and trying to navigate without a map or GPS. Without having clear directions to the address, you can spend a lot of time, resources, and energy trying to get to your destination. The same applies to your VOC program objectives.

How do you determine your objectives, and what are some of the red flags or pitfalls to avoid? VOC objectives are intended to understand your customers’ needs and prioritize their importance. Providing well-executed VOC objectives will result in actionable insights that will help your customers have a great experience with your organization. 

There are a couple of red flags to be aware of when determining your VOC objectives. First, know the DNA of your customers and why they continue to use your organization or buy your products. If your current VOC program satisfaction scores have not increased for years, this could be an indication that the current objectives need an overhaul. Another red flag is seeing the satisfaction reports in your organization, but not seeing anything being done with them. If an organization is going to ask for information, it’s imperative to act on the information so that customers see changes and improvements. 

There are many things to consider when developing your VOC objectives.  For example, it’s important to develop objectives that match your company culture and make sense to implement. Be sure to develop VOC objectives that can be realistically implemented throughout the organization.

No matter what level of sophistication your VOC program is at today, the important thing is to do something now to make incremental improvements. As you understand your customers more, you can continue to look for ways to improve, tweak or update your VOC objectives.

Bret Butler is Enterprise Program Manager for Allegiance.

This is no longer your father’s VOC program. Many VOC professionals have realized that in order to add value to the organization, they must spend less time telling a VOC story and more time telling a business story. Let me explain.

The most successful VOC programs include several elements: ability to relate VOC data to a business story executives easily get, feedback from multiple sources, results that move the needle, and acceptance at high levels, sometimes even at the c-suite. Unfortunately, way too many programs lack many of these elements. This must change – a new approach is needed. Think of this new approach as a fundamental mental shift starting with the VOC leadership team. You must ensure that the data you collect is actionable and relevant to other business leaders in the organization. The best way to do this is by asking leaders what they really want from you instead of giving them what you think they want.

If you want to change your VOC approach, you are not alone. Allegiance recently surveyed VOC, survey, market research and feedback management professionals. We asked the question “Over the next three years, will your approach to customer feedback…? (select one) The results are clear: most VOC professionals believe their fundamental business approach will be changing.

Making VOC programs pay off is the key to success. But how do you really do that? Two common barriers stand in your way. The first is getting your hands on more than just VOC data sets (you are probably drowning in VOC data already). Other data sets include operational data, financial, CRM, ERP data. The other barrier is finding a platform that will help you easily analyze data from multiple sources, including 3rd party databases. When your platform contains the proper analytics and reporting tools, it can reduce the amount of manual number crunching and pivot tables you need to create.

This will be tricky but stick with it! Combining VOC data with operational data produces something unique and exciting: actionable business intelligence derived primarily from VOC data. This is called VOCi™, and your success will thrive if this is your goal.

In 1894 Marchese Guglielmo Marconi built his first radio equipment, a device that would ring a bell from 30 ft. away.  In December 2010, Allegiance hosted its first of what will be many weekly radio shows hosted by blogtalkradio.

Why?

Allegiance has been a thought leader in the use of social media to gather feedback and respond to customers.  The release of  Allegiance Engage7 was a big step into the arena of using social media as a building block in an overall VOC program. With that in mind, Allegiance is also reaching out proactively to provide thought leadership and training on a variety of topics.  With the advent of internet “talk radio,” Allegiance is using the tried and true medium of communication and linking it through social media to provide ongoing idea forums and discussions on many topics such as:

• Survey Design Best Practices
• Use of Incentives
• 5 Steps to Building Great Survey Questions
• Text Analytics
• And the list keeps growing…

How it works

Every week, Allegiance will announce the weekly topic and time along with the URL to connect to the live broadcasts.  These will come as tweets on the Allegiance Twitter account or Allegiance on Facebook. You are invited to “call in” to chat live on the air, or you can listen after the airing of the broadcast via podcast on iTunes or any other audio playback device.  As you listen to each broadcast, you can choose to “mark as favorite” the Allegiance Talk Radio site, and you will be automatically notified of upcoming broadcasts. 

 This healthy blend of Mr. Marconi’s innovation, coupled with an up and coming medium like blogtalkradio, is designed to keep you informed and connected to Allegiance, while benefitting from our ideas and expertise. We hope you will tune in 2011!

Last month I received a survey about a service experience. The support organization sent the survey to me within a day of the call and the questions pertained to my experience (so far, so good). At the end of the survey, they asked if I would like to be contacted by a representative. I didn’t really have any major issues to discuss, but I was curious to see what would happen, so I marked yes. I waited a day, then 2 days, and then weeks passed with no contact (by email or phone). My expectation had been set that I would be contacted, so that left me disappointed by an otherwise positive experience.

The experience that I described above is an example of tactically closing the loop (or not closing it, in this case). The design of any world-class customer feedback program should include a closed loop process that makes customers feel that they have been heard and promotes learning about what to do to improve the business in ways that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

There are three primary processes that comprise a comprehensive closed loop program:

 In addition to understanding the different types of closed loop processes, there are other factors to consider, such as:

• What is the goal of the follow-up process? Are you trying to learn from detractors, leverage promoters, or assess root cause problems? Or is your goal some combination of the three? Determining your overall goals and objectives is a necessary step toward designing an effective closed loop program.
• Which customers should be contacted, and who should conduct the follow-up? Your business model and capacity for follow-up will help guide your decisions in this area. Make sure there is clear ownership and that the follow-up involves all relevant functions. Then choose the appropriate contact method/channel (phone, email or corporate communications, for example) and establish and train employees on the process.
• When should the follow-up occur? Typically, front line follow-up will happen within 48 hours. However, a reasonable period of time depends on client perspective and operational limitations. Closing the loop on issues (e.g. detractors or service problems) or specific requests for follow-up should occur quickly. Follow-up for root cause investigation can happen over time.
• What are the key touchpoints in the customer experience, and how can we better manage them cross-functionally? Understanding the key touchpoints from the customer’s perspective and aligning goals cross-functionally will help you better understand the customer experience and make end-to-end improvements that will improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. This involvement at the management level will further optimize investments in ways that will directly impact customers and your bottom line.
• How should our executives be involved? Executives drive business outcomes and define overall company strategy. By establishing a customer-centric company culture and reinforcing that culture through internal and external communications, they can let the customers and employees alike know that customers are the first priority. Executives can communicate to customers that they are listening and acting on their feedback by explaining the actions taking place based on that feedback. Within the company, executives can foster customer-centric behaviors and use customer feedback to drive business strategy through initiatives, target-setting and employee recognition programs.

At Allegiance, we encourage clients to get more out of their data. Listening to your customers and analyzing the results are important steps in understanding your clients. However, effectively closing the loop with your clients is another critical component of a world-class customer feedback program. Listen, respond and act – your customers will thank you!