In the past, your job duties consisted of gathering data – and you were good at it because today there are mountains of data piling up at your firms. You spent hours combing through the data to glean a few useful insights to share. Exhausted, you would quickly regroup to do another deep dive in the data to find a few more insights. This repeating cycle was the way you operated – every day!

But there’s something fundamentally wrong with this. Your main value to an organization is expressed when you reveal actionable insights to the right people at the right time. This was the thing you wanted the most, but it was the least-delivered portion of your jobs.

You may have been in the data gathering business in the past, but the future lies with data insights. You cannot gather more data only to deliver tepid insights. Your value and your place at the highest levels of the company is weakened by this result.

Your job is really about delivering insights. To do this, you need automated programs. Sometimes, less robust programs work better. Sometimes asking fewer questions in surveys, and even sending less invitations can help to streamline what you do and how you do it. Less can equal more.

My challenge to You – Become a Story Teller

The fast track to success in any organization is always granted to those who have the most consistent insights. That should perfectly describe you – you have access to incredible data, and if you know how to read the data to tell a story, you have a magic opportunity to succeed.

The best stories come from the best data, and you are at the crossroads of the best data a company can have: voice of customer data (surveys, unsolicited feedback) and operational data (CRM, financial data, etc.). Combining these two data sets together is powerful, and they provide the best ingredients for true, automated customer intelligence that exists today. 

Allegiance is 100% in the business of combining what customer say (VOC/feedback data) with what they do (data from CRM and financial systems). Our passion is to help you tell a powerful business story by finding insights automatically in this data, and enabling you to share it quickly with the right people who can do something about it.

You are in the insight delivery business, not surveying, or research or experience mapping. Your value is highest when you deliver insights to the right people and help them act upon them. The good news is that when you do this, it’s one of the most important things that can happen at a business – so your value will skyrocket!

Make this year about transitioning your daily duties and your program focus to delivering insights. You’ll be glad you did.

Both Forrester Research and Gartner have predicted continued annual growth of between 15-20% for the customer experience and voice of customer industries. At Allegiance, we certainly see this growth happening. But what kind of changes will occur as more corporate boards, c-suites and leadership teams add savvy VOC pros? How will business change as a result of the insight that comes from these experienced people adding their voice to the mix, and sharing the data they produce?

The future of business will change dramatically with executives from the VOC world helping to shape decisions. An organization with greater actionable data is fundamentally different, and better. More actionable insight in the hands of the right people means a business is better able to act quickly. Of course, more money is likely to be made, which is usually the primary goal of business. But even better (I think) is that employees will feel more empowered, see the value of data in action and feel the joy of making smart decisions. And customers love a business that listens and then responds.

 So 2012 will bring a lot of opportunity to the VOC/CX industry. Business will improve as a result. And, I hope that each of you realize the value you bring to your company. When everything is exposed in a business, it’s really people and processes that make things happen. With better VOC, people can be more effective and processes improve.

Far from a sinking ship, our industry is healthy and growing for many reasons. Thanks to all of you for helping to make that happen. Here’s my challenge to you: Think Big. You can change your organization for the better by bringing together business data, feedback and survey data, and creating more actionable insights.  

Although the idea is not new, companies are now actually achieving competitive advantage by using customer feedback. Together with price and product, customer voice has become the accepted third tool that top companies use to beat out the competition. These companies are doing more than merely measuring customer satisfaction or driving marketing campaigns. They are using customer feedback to drive change among their many business units. For example:

Operations:  JetBlue has used customer feedback from a wide variety of channels to drive operational changes that resulted in improving the compliment to complaint ratio for Flight Attendants by 300%, reducing the number of passengers with LiveTV issues by 10%, and dramatically improving customer satisfaction scores at specific airport locations.

Call Centers:  By collecting both structured and unstructured customer comments, Nicor National was able to restructure their IVR tree, reduce the amount of customer wait time, improve first call resolution rates, and increase by 30% the number of calls an agent was able to take, which lead to an additional 18,000 sales per year.  This higher employee productivity led to a decrease in the cost per sale by 20%.

Product Development:  Using feedback to identify the customer’s perception of product quality, companies are re-designing their products to improve customer satisfaction, which lowers the volume of technical support calls they receive.  Based on its Voice of Customer program that provides customer-focused quality metrics, EMC has implemented a variety of improvements to its products and services, communications, employee training, and product packaging.

If you head your company’s customer experience, survey, feedback or satisfaction programs, and you would like to achieve the same type of results as the companies mentioned above, then start where they started. Sit down with other department heads and ask them what type of customer data would help them revolutionize their department and what insights they need to make a bigger impact.

Your customers are comparing experiences as they deal with top-notch customer-focused organizations. It is important to determine how your organization’s customer experience stacks up against other experiences your customers are having on both the business and the consumer sides. The following three steps will help  you begin to plan the best experience for your customers:

Step 1: Look to your customers. By this, I mean find out what your customers expect from  you and from other companies. What do they consider to be great customer service? What sets one experience apart from another in their minds? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask! Your customers will tell you which companies they believe provide stellar (and not-so-stellar) customer experiences.

Step 2: Look in the mirror. Do detective work within your organization. What does it feel like to be your customer? Either do some “mystery shopping” or bring someone in who can do it for you with an unbiased perspective. Start with these questions:

• What is your organization’s customer experience? Will it meet or exceed customer expectations?
• What happens when you call your customer service department?
• Where does the phone number listed in your marketing campaign really connect to?
• Do your Web sites direct customers to the right places?
• Are your social media activities creating an experience that is consistent with the rest of your brand?

Step 3: Look at competitors from your customer’s perspective. Find out which organizations are competing for your customer’s attention and dollars, both inside and outside your industry. How do their customer experiences compare to yours? Perhaps there isn’t anyone in your industry yet who offers a standout customer experience; however, your consumers may have experiences outstanding customer service at, say, Nordstrom or Southwest Airlines. Your business clients may be serviced by Accenture, a management consulting, technology, and outsourcing organization that has been recognized as a leader in connecting with their customers by Gartner and 1to1 Media. How do the customer experiences in your industry compare to those  your customers are having with award-winning organizations such as these?

Once you have done the legwork to understand customer expectations, audited your company’s customer experience, as well as reviewed that of your customer experience competitors, you are ready to begin creating the experiences your customers want to have with your business. Planning the customer experience based on your customers’ needs and expectations, as well as on best-in-class experiences both inside and outside your industry, will strengthen your brand and lay the foundations for stronger customer relationships.

Becky Carroll is the author of the newly released 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!.

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.

So, where do we begin? Let’s go back to a blog I wrote a couple of months ago about the brand promise. Recall that the brand promise is the expectation that you set about your brand with your customers. Each of your touchpoints reinforces and fulfills the brand’s promise. Creating a customer interaction map forces you to think about the customer lifecycle and to consider or visualize the experience at each touchpoint – and ultimately, it identifies where the brand promise is broken.

During this process, it is important to remember that the customer should always be at the heart of any decisions made or actions taken by your company.  The experience cannot be designed without giving the customer a seat at the table.

Before you begin to create your interaction map, you must first identify who your customers are. Do you segment your customers? Do you cater differently to different types of customers? Do different customer types have different interactions or touchpoints with your organization? Will the map look different for different customers?

Next, identify the touchpoints along your customer lifecycle. Start not with the purchase, but long before that – when you’re just a thought in the customer’s mind, part of the consideration set. End with the customer’s exit or cancellation; remember that, even when a customer cancels your services or terminates usage of your product, it is an important interaction to do well.

Finally, identify the following for each individual touchpoint. Lay out the map in such a way that you identify which of these are customer-facing and which are behind-the-scenes.

• which specific interactions occur at that touchpoint
• which processes support that touchpoint
• which people support those processes
• who owns the touchpoint and its related interactions and processes
• who the customer interacts with what the specific outcome for that touchpoint should be
• which tools are used during the interaction at the touchpoint
• what customer data are gathered at the touchpoint
• which metrics are tracked at the touchpoint
• which pain points you’re aware of, and
• what the ideal customer experience ought to be

From a practitioner’s viewpoint, this map clearly helps you understand when, where, and with whom interactions occur; it’s important to do prior to designing surveys (both customer and employee) for each touchpoint. It also helps you to identify other customer and operational data that you’ll want to pull into the initiative in order to make your surveys, analysis, and action planning more relevant, personalized, and actionable. It might also identify other customer feedback inputs besides surveys (e.g., online communities, tech support forums, support calls, etc.) that should be tied back to the survey data for that touchpoint.

The customer interaction map is important to introduce as you roll out your program to the larger organization. It can help the various departments and business units understand the customer lifecycle while helping to break down silos and pull the organization together to work toward one common goal: a superior customer experience.

It’s simple. Start with the brand promise, identify touchpoints and determine which are most important/influential (not all touchpoints are created equal); outline the optimal experience (from the customer’s perspective) at each; and rally the organization to deliver it!

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.

When times get tough, it’s tempting to put “customer-centricity” on the back burner. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are a few tips on how to weather the economic storm:

Reach Out
Do you know what’s driving your customer decisions now? If not, reach out to your customers and have a real dialog with them. You may find that they’re looking for a better deal, but dig deeper and you’ll discover that experiences are still important and can swing decisions in your favor and help retain customers. Show them you care. Learn what’s most important in the solutions they need. These conversations will not only help you make better decisions during the downturn but will also strengthen relationships that will pay off in the future.

Fix Lose-Lose Problems
Budgets cuts may be a painful reality, so instead of building a customer experience plan around growing revenue, build it around efficiency and retention. For example, advanced analytics tools can help you ‘mine’ customer feedback to get to the root cause of what’s frustrating your customers and costing you money.

Personalize the Business Case
When it comes time to allocate funds, many customer-centric champions find themselves face-to-face with executives asking: “Why should I do this?” and “Who else is on board?” In other words, is the initiative going to help a key functional area, and is that manager willing to back the effort? To succeed, get the key people involved to believe that the project will be personally helpful to them.

Now What?
Once you have funding, the next step is to consistently deliver a more effective and efficient experience. As part of this, remember to give appropriate tangible and intangible rewards to encourage the behavior you seek.

Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and founder of CustomerThink.com.

(Adapted from my article “Building the Case for Customer-Centricity: How to Make Your Customers and the CFO Happy“)

• Know your customers – Who are they? What’s most important to them?  Etc.
• Make sure your employees’ point of view matches up with your customers’ point of view (and that all of your employees understand why each customer is important as well as the role that each of your employees play in retaining customers)
• Unite your marketing and operations teams and ensure they have a shared vision
• Realize every customer counts – Treat them that way; reward your employees for doing so
• Understand your leaky bucket (why customers are not coming back) and fix it (i.e. Identify your customers’ breaking points and decision to return points. In addition, go through the customer experience yourself and see and feel the pain through the eyes of your customers.)
• Improve and enhance your customer experience

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing,  Allegiance

As part of today’s online Engage eSummit, Gary Tucker, SVP and General Manager of JD Power and Associates, talked about the importance of delighing your customers in the current economic environment, as well as the resulting increases in financial performance for companies that come with improving their customer satisfaction.

Tucker recommended five steps that organizations can use to pursue customer delight, including: 

1. Focus – Who owns the customer experience? Is everyone traveling down the same road? The companies that really stand out have a very clear understanding of who in their organization owns the customer experience. The companies that perform best have engrained that sense of ownership in everyone across the organization.

2. Quantify – What is most important to your customers? (It varies by company and brand). Companies often spend a lot of money in areas that don’t pay back. What are the drivers of customer satisfaction in your industry? Look at it through the lense of the people, presentation, price, product quality, and the process that a customer goes through. Each one of those five Ps represents an area of opportunity for your company to improve. Know what your drivers are so that you can focus your improvement on things that are going to have the most value to your customers–and the greatest payback for your company. 

3. Prioritize actions based on benchmarks – Who/what are my target customers comparing me to? Why are they defecting? Why are they shopping for an alternative solution? Knowing this information will help you understand and forecast your customers’ expectations and needs.

4. Define the business case upfront – What’s it worth to me in lower defection rates? Lower costs? Increased share? $$$$? Connect customer satisfaction activity with the same discipline and scrutiny is critical to getting the equation right.

5. Monitor and make course corrections – Getting good at delighting your customers is not an event. You’ve got to have a continuous customer feedback loop. Make sure that customers are feeling the changes that you’re making. If not, make course corrections. 

As Tucker pointed out, satisfaction is the path, but not the destination. The destination through an excellent customer experience is commitment–that part of a customer’s behavior that creates power for a brand. The primary input to commitment is the experience that customers have.

Kevin Mellander, Director of Customer Care, Allegiance