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.

With a solid VoC initiative underway and having firmly established their guidance as critical to their organization’s success, many mature VoC teams are turning to more sophisticated analysis, reporting and forecasting. They are looking for opportunities for continuous improvement. I applaud these efforts and will be thrilled to see what 2012 brings to these VoC pioneers and their programs. 

Remember to Sweat the Small Stuff 

This is a reminder, however, to continue sweating the small stuff. Specifically, I mean reacting to tactical customer feedback in a prompt fashion: Addressing customer concerns and complaints swiftly and sincerely with empathy, and responding quickly to customer compliments to reinforce their enthusiasm. 

That’s right. No fancy predictive modeling, no sponsored conference presentations, nothing to earn the kudos of the c-suite. Just plain old customer responsiveness. Actually picking up the phone to say “I hear ya” customer collaboration. It’s not glossy, but it’s simple and effective, and builds the bread-and-butter foundation to a solid, comprehensive customer voice program. Allow me to share a recent example. 

The Power of the Prompt Response 

Background: I had a large volume of “construction debris” and a broken-down pickup truck rendered me unable to remove this debris alone.  I called a national junk removal company, unsure of what to expect. 

Here is how events unfolded on pick-up day. 

Timeframe:  

9:30 AM:  Thirty minutes before arrival, the movers provide a “courtesy call” to remind me they are on their way.

10:00 AM:  Promptly at their scheduled time, the movers arrive in a clean, tidy truck.  They are neatly dressed and well groomed and greet me in a very professional manner.

10:20 AM:  My junk is loaded in a truck and we are finishing paperwork and payment.

10:31 AM:  A very delighted Sarah logs a short compliment on the junk remover’s website under the “contact us” link. 

I just used your service for the first time. Your movers were polite, courteous, professional and prompt. They quickly eliminated a bunch of junk we had collected. I am so pleased with your work, happy to have our junk gone, delighted with your customer service, and certain to recommend you to our friends and family. KUDOS! 

10:57 AM:  The junk hauler replies to Sarah’s commentary! 

Hello Sarah,
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide your positive feedback for the service you received today. We have shared your feedback with “Mitch” and “Rico” who helped remove your items today. We are extremely happy that we were able to assist you in cleaning up your home and look forward to providing service to you in the future.

Thank you and have a great day!  

Wow! Count the time elapse. Thirty-six minutes to reply to my website comment. That’s responsive customer service. That’s being open to customer feedback and passionate about providing the best experience for the customer. That’s taking a simple event and leveraging it to make a happy customer a delighted customer. This company could have just stopped at doing a good job with their core service (showing up and taking my junk away), but instead they went the extra mile to follow up on my commentary and prove they are a customer-focused, listening organization. In the weeks following this interaction, I told everyone with ears about this experience with this junk hauling company and recommended them with enthusiasm. 

Bottom Line: Keep Focused on Tactical Wins

As your VoC initiative seasons and matures, you may find yourself increasingly focused on big-picture design and strategy. Through this maturity process, don’t forget to also focus on tactical customer wins. In other words, don’t get your head so high in the war that you begin losing day-to-day battles.

If a junk-hauler’s front-line staff can get me promoting their services to anyone who will listen, just imagine what your company can do.

From our experience working with them, here are nine habits that make them successful:

1. Well-defined goals and objectives: Successful VOC managers know what overall business objectives are at stake, why they are collecting the data and how they are going to use that data to make decisions.

2. Executive buy-in and internal support: Successful practitioners work alongside the executive team in communicating and sharing important customer feedback and VOC program goals and objectives with all employees.

3. A formal VOC program: Managers who follow best practices set up multiple communication channels for customers to communicate with the company. They help create and implement formal processes to support customer feedback data collection and management efforts.

4. Centrally collected and managed customer feedback: Top managers use technology to not only centrally collect, store and manage feedback, but to also design and conduct surveys.

5. Customer advocate throughout the feedback process: Leading VOC practitioners rapidly and courteously respond to customer feedback. Serious complaints and unhappy survey responses are automatically escalated to the right senior person.

6. Communicate/share customer feedback with others: Best practices include quickly distributing real-time customer feedback and sharing reports and survey data findings with others in the organization—from the c-suite to top line managers and employees.

7. Collect real-time, ongoing feedback: Successful customer feedback managers make it easy for customers to submit feedback at virtually every interaction point and regularly conduct surveys to monitor customer needs and concerns.

8. Customer feedback is integrated into the business: Top managers also work with other departments throughout their organization to ensure that the customer feedback they collect is incorporated into the company’s strategic planning and goal setting efforts.

9. Tie customer feedback programs to business outcomes: The best VOC managers measure and monitor customer-related metrics such as customer retention, average number of products purchased, likelihood to recommend the company’s products or services, likelihood to purchase again, etc. They also benchmark their programs against other industry leaders.

Regardless of whether customer feedback is managed by a single person or multiple people in an organization, or even a third-party provider, companies need to ensure that they are putting the right VOC programs and processes in place to support their organization’s collection, management and use of that data. A well-organized VOC program will demonstrate a measurable improvement to the corporate bottom line.

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing and Products for Allegiance.

At last year’s Allegiance Engage Summit, Billy Beane gave attendees an insightful and entertaining presentation on the importance of analytics. With the movie Moneyball being released this week, it’s a good time to re-visit this blog post and how it applies to VOC. 

What do Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and your company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives have in common? At the basic level, you both have employees, operational metrics, and outcomes. But there are more similarities. Do these sound familiar?

 1. Traditional key metrics used to measure performance
 2. Undervalued or undiscovered insights that can make a big difference
 3. Analytics to aid decision making and resource allocation
 4. Competitors that have much larger budgets

On the heels of the Allegiance Engage Summit, I re-read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. This time, my copy was autographed by Billy Beane himself. Beane’s inspirational Summit talk reminded us that sports and business have much in common: metrics, analytics, and insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.

Quotes included below are from Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

Correlation analysis to understand drivers

“.. if you ran the analysis, you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. [Runs scored] correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage.”

“If this sounded compelling when baseball players were paid $150k per year, it sounded one hundred times more so when they were paid $15M a year.”

VOC programs capture a significant amount of structured data, such as satisfaction and loyalty ratings, demographics, segments, and operational data. Tools, such as Allegiance Engage, allow you to efficiently focus or filter these and understand the correlation between driver metrics and key metrics. These insights can help focus resources and investment on those drivers that are most significant or important to your customers.

Avoided costs

Correlation analysis also tells us how to avoid unnecessary costs. When Beane and his analytics team realized that bunts and stolen bases had little correlation with winning games, they stopped training on these. The time and money that would normally have been spent on perfecting stealing bases and bunting were diverted toward perfecting skills that correlated with winning more games.

Clearly, the metrics we capture in VOC have varying importance. It’s critical that we have tools that help us discover the metrics that make a difference. The impact of some metrics may be significant among a particular demographic and not among others. Our correlation tools should allow for a bird’s eye view of the entire organization, as well as help you to narrow or refine the results to a local business unit or a specific demographic.

It’s not enough to observe. You must measure.

“Think about it, one absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.”

Experience and gut feel may have their place. But it’s important to validate or measure purposely with metrics. In Beane’s case, he created winning teams by focusing on a prospect’s past performance, not appearance. He “systematically eliminated guys `you could dream on.’”

Numbers and stories

Bill James, a widely influential baseball statistician and writer, said “When the numbers acquire the significance of language, they acquire the power to do all the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry. The numbers also describe character, psychology, history, power, grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, success, failure, frustration, bad luck, ambition, and discipline.”

Sounds familiar. Does your VOC program have a dashboard and reporting that tell a story? Does your customer feedback management tool require you to export its data and have you spend time constructing charts and graphs, or is the “story builder” built-in?

How will you win?

In Beane’s case, he found on-base percentage to be the key driver that drove the team to win more games. But why did this metric win? Turns out, getting on base has a direct relation with wearing out the pitcher. The best batters force the pitcher to throw more pitches because pitchers work harder to avoid the skilled batters’ strengths. As a result, the good batters are often walked because the pitcher is working extra hard to keep the ball outside of the batters’ sweet spots. And when a pitch does hit the sweet spot, a careful batter will almost always make contact and get on base.

What’s your company’s advantage? Perhaps it’s customer service, employee attitude, or simply an amazing product. The key is to understand which advantage drives revenue and ROI. Once you know the aspect of your business that is highly correlated to revenue, make an effort to understand the root cause for that correlation. Dig deeper to understand the key customer values that are causing your consumers to ring your cash register.

Math and a chance

Rama Ramakrishnan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who spoke at the Allegiance Engage Summit, described how he built a company that optimized pricing and price adjustment timing for the retail industry. The analytics approach yielded many times ROI in a short period. He summarized the win, “…our retail customers didn’t build any new factories, and didn’t hire new employees. They just used our math to discover hidden patterns they could exploit.”

In Moneyball, there is example after example of players who got a chance to be in the big leagues because of math. The math exposed undervalued skills that made a real difference, which lead to more games won.

VOC is awash with structured and unstructured data. This abundance of data suggests there are hidden patterns to be exploited. Leading VOC management platforms, such as Engage7, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques to help discover new patterns that drive success in your business.

Measuring the advantage

Between 1999 and 2009, the average Cost Per Win for the New York Yankees was $1,736,754. For Oakland, it was only $579,246. The Yankees won 1,063 games in that 10-year span, while Oakland won 977. Beane knew the Yankees had an unfair advantage with their budget, so Beane set out to develop new unfair advantages with tools that didn’t require a lot of capital investment. He turned to analytics.

Leading companies with corporate-wide listening and measurement initiatives already know the value and importance in tracking their “unfair advantage.” They use a wide variety of metrics, such as average scores, box scores, NPS, and Engagement index. Winning companies optimize the drivers and their operations that correlate with revenue generation. Analytics enable any company to compete with rivals with larger budgets.

Hollywood

Moneyball, the movie, starts filming this summer. Brad Pitt will play Billy Beane’s character. Analytics makes a great story. Analytics will be sexy again. What will be your story?

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.

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. 

Jeremiah Owyang, Social Technology Expert 

• The customer of the future is armed with information and empowered to share their brand experiences with others.
• Market research must expand to include socialgraphics, which is the understanding of how customers use social technologies.
• Registration forms are dying as customers move to social signups using their Facebook account.
• Businesses need to apply social strategies to each phase of the customer experience. 

Attendees also heard from experts about Voice of Employee (VOE) and employee engagement topics, including how to connect employee engagement to customer loyalty and business outcomes as well as employee survey and feedback topics. Leaders in data analytics, Voice of Customer and employee program start up, market research, demographic studies and social business also presented practical case studies and shared thought leadership.

Be sure to search #VOC on Twitter to see the variety of comments from attendees. Join us for next year’s event, renamed VOCFusion, which will be held at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas in 2012.

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.

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!.

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

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.