Allegiance Blog

My Facebook status today reads, “I’m hoping this morning’s travels will inspire another interesting blog post.” Right after I posted that, a thought popped into my head:  it’s not my travels today as much as my destination that has inspired me. I’m on my way to our headquarters in Utah to meet with my team for our Quarterly Business Review. This got me thinking about how our clients might review their businesses…especially as it pertains to their Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives.

Gathering feedback from your customers helps you understand what you’re doing well and not so well for them. However, if that’s all you do, it’s like living in a bubble. It’s important to put all of your scores and feedback into the broader context – how well do you do stack up against your competitors? This is applies not only to financial/operational metrics, but also with your VOC data.

I’m talking about benchmarking, which means making comparisons to help you understand the perception of your business relative to the competition in the minds of your customers.

1. Competitive Benchmarking helps you determine your performance relative to a primary competitor or a set of key competitors. Competitive Benchmarking data can be obtained in several different ways.

          Third-Party Surveys:  Engage with a third party to conduct a blind competitive survey. This is the cleanest survey approach, but it’s also the most expensive.

          Your Surveys:  Add some questions to the end of your relationship survey that ask your customers to rate one or two of your competitors with which they’ve done business. This approach is a little less clean and perhaps even a bit biased because you’re asking these questions only of your customers. As long as you view the responses in that light, you can still get a decent benchmark.

          External Metrics:  Get access to syndicated results for ACSI, JDPA indexes, NPS, Forrester CxPi Customer Experience Index, etc. that are relevant for your industry, product, etc. Ask a comparable question or set of questions in your own survey(s) to benchmark.

2. World Class Benchmarking is a slightly different approach where you’re not necessarily interested in benchmarking question to question or score to score. In World Class Benchmarking, you ask your customers to tell you about a “world class experience” they had with another company – any company, regardless of industry. What you’re looking for is a way to identify who your customers look up to when it comes to service, products, literature, training, etc.  You then study that company inside and out – you might even partner with them or find a mentor in that organization, depending on who it is – to identify best practices that you can put to work in your own company.

My final thought about how clients review their businesses brings me to Internal Benchmarking, which entails taking the feedback you’ve gathered and comparing scores, ratings, or indexes internally – within your own business, i.e., benchmark business units, locations, sites, etc. against each other. Identify your stars and your dogs, compare practices, and have your stars mentor your dogs.

Ok, it’s time to go update my Facebook status to “another one’s in the can.”

I’m a little late working on this blog post because of a family emergency, but it seems fitting that I write it this morning – and on this very topic – as I fly from Long Beach to Salt Lake City, using both this airport and JetBlue for the first time. After driving 40 miles to the airport, I’m hoping for a smooth experience as I make my way through these “firsts.”

As JetBlue is well known for its brand promise of bringing humanity to air travel, I am looking forward to the “JetBlue experience,” to find out what it’s all about. The company touts more legroom, free DIRECTV and XM Satellite Radio, and free-flowing snacks at no charge. (What? No WiFi?) It also has a Customer Bill of Rights, should we be delayed and stuck on the tarmac for some reason. (I hope we don’t have to experience that portion of the promise.)

So what’s all the hubbub about a brand promise? A brand promise is the expectations you set with your customers.  It’s a combination of the brand purpose and the reality of what the brand can deliver. It defines the benefits a customer can expect to receive when experiencing your brand – at every touchpoint. It must be delivered consistently at every touchpoint so as to create predictability. Customers will select your brand because they know that, every time they choose your brand, they will have the same experience. This doesn’t happen on the first interaction – it takes many interactions for customers to begin to trust your brand.

And that introduces another concept related to the brand promise – trust.  The brand promise sets expectations, and expectations are aligned with trust. Predictability begets trust, and trust begets loyalty. Over time, I expect that I will trust JetBlue to deliver the same excellent experience every time.

Expectations are an integral part of your customers’ satisfaction levels. As a matter of fact:

Expectations – Performance = Satisfaction

Let’s think about that for a second. Customers try your brand with a set of expectations (your brand promise) in mind. How you perform against those expectations leads to some level of satisfaction. If performance meets or exceeds expectations, then customers have a higher level of satisfaction and/or loyalty. If performance is less than expectations, then the brand promise has been broken – no explanation needed on what that means for your company. One sidebar to note here: consumers have higher expectations of iconic brands.

A critical and required component of delivering on the brand promise consistently is to socialize it with your employees. We have all heard that engaged employees drive engaged customers.  In order for employees to hold up their end of that deal, they must first know and understand the brand promise. It needs to be communicated to employees (starting with the employee onboarding or orientation program), and it must be reinforced regularly.

JetBlue’s brand promise is to bring humanity to air travel.  I read that the company defines humanity as friendliness, flexibility, and caring.  JetBlue’s founder and former CEO David Neeleman was quoted as saying, “The JetBlue brand promise dictates how employees execute at the various stages of the customer experience, from the time customers check-in at the gate to the time they land and claim their luggage. And consistency in the experience is key, or else the brand suffers.”

Has JetBlue lived up to its brand promise for me? Well, as I said earlier, it takes time and several interactions before you feel that brand predictability. It’s too early to tell. The flight attendants are friendly, but their service hasn’t really been unique relative to other airlines I’ve flown recently (including Southwest, Continental, Delta, and American). As I write this, about half way into the flight, the DIRECTV system is still not working…stay tuned!

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a real trend, and the chief evidence of this is the rapid adoption rate of Chief Customer Officer and Chief Customer Experience Officer.

Companies today recognize the importance of creating a positive customer experience, from the moment the customer comes into contact with the company and is undecided to when the customer reaches a fork in the road and is considering leaving. Companies can no longer buy customer loyalty and assume customers will stay. It is easy for customers to “click away” and buy from another vendor.

CEM is now a formal program that involves multiple processes and departments. It requires the mapping of customer touchpoints, and combines operational and CRM data with customer service and marketing information.

Organizations that have a great CEM program have been able to increase sales and revenue from repeat sales, customer rescue, cross sells and up sells.. They discover better operational efficiencies and revenue from happy customers. However, if companies go about CEM on a superficial level, they can create a branding train wreck. Customers are savvy and quickly see through hollow statements about customer satisfaction.

Any organization can benefit from CEM, but the prime candidates include companies that have a large customer base and one that can easily switch to another supplier. Also, companies that sell direct to customers rather than through channels are better candidates.

CEM in today’s business world is just as important as measuring customer satisfaction was 20 years ago. CEM has become more formalized, and customer satisfaction is only a small component of CEM. In addition, CEM can now be measured the same as accounting and financial metrics.

In fact, there is a movement to watch companies that are doing it right.  Stock analysts and traders are tracking companies with good CEM and finding that their stock performs better than others. This posting from Bruce Temkin’s Customer Experience blog provides some insights on this.

CEM is a trend that is here to stay. Smart companies are using technology to monitor and improve the customer experience, which translates to increased revenues and profits.

I recently returned from the Gartner Customer Relationship Management (CRM) conference in London. While there, I was encouraged to hear about the growth of the Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) market. It seems that the EFM market, in conjunction with CRM and Customer Experience Management (CEM) has been growing, despite the economic climate, at a rate of about 20% in 2008 and is projected to hold the same in 2009.

We certainly have the same optimistic view for the industry. The root cause of growth appears to be increased customer retention through real-time voice of the customer (VOC) programs. EFM promises to efficiently bring the voice of the customer from across the enterprise closer to executives who need to make critical decisions. Listening to customers today certainly makes it easier to find a winning balance between products and services created and marketed, and those that customers are willing to buy. And customer retention improves when companies listen and respond to feedback.

There is more talk this year about feedback programs and not just survey programs. The inclusion of both explicit and implicit (solicited and unsolicited) is gaining visibility. Social networking is driving the implicit portion. The fact that this is being talked about so much is evidence that the market has matured significantly in the past 12 months.

According to Gartner, the top 3 reasons that companies are choosing EFM today are:
1. The importance of improving the customer experience has risen to the board level
2. The number of channels through which feedback can be collected has risen (Web, email, IVR, SMS, etc.)
3. The number of users and departments using feedback has grown

Gartner says there are two newer areas of feedback to consider adopting in a comprehensive feedback program: operations and behavioral. Operational means gleaning feedback from already-installed operational systems like IVR, email response and web analytics. These systems already touch the customer thousands of times a day, and can be used to gather feedback or for right-time marketing. Behavioral means the implied feedback customers give by their actions.

I believe the next big step for VOC programs will lie within the analytical side. Collecting data through surveys, comments and other means (through the means that customers decide) is going to be required by any serious solution. But using the data to create insights is critical. What is the current sentiment of customers, and what should be done about it? Are all comments being managed and responded to quickly to create a positive customer experience? How is the EFM data being fused with CRM and CEM data to create a holistic real-time customer view? Once these questions can be answered with positive solutions, solutions elevate to the next level. I know our product teams are working hard on these ideas now. The future is certainly exciting for vendors, companies and the customer.

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing, Allegiance