Allegiance Blog

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.

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

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are equally important to the success of your company.

Keeping tabs on customer information is an important piece of your company’s operations. Can you imagine what would happen if your company had to manually monitor and file all of the customer information that has been gathered over the years? This is why CRM software was developed – to ensure that critical customer information is managed and handled efficiently. CRM simply helps corporations capture, manage and store their customer’s personal information.

Where CRM’s fall short, though, is in their ability to analyze data. This is where EFM software comes to the rescue. EFM – a relatively new industry – helps manage customer and employee feedback company-wide. While CRM helps you capture , manage and store your customers’ personal information, EFM helps you capture, manage and analyze your customer and employee feedback – making your organization more customer and employee-centric.

In the age of advanced information technology, automating the process of gathering each and every type of customer information is vital to a business’s success. This is why CRM and EFM software are both important.

The right CRM software will allow your company to:

• Increase productivity
• Develop effective marketing strategies
• Reduce production and operational costs through proper information management
• Improve the customer’s overall experience with the company

The right EFM software will complement your CRM software by:

• Helping you manage feedback company-wide
• Quickly route and manage your company’s feedback
• Predict where in your company you can focus to improve customer and employee loyalty
• Gauge how satisfied your customers and employees are

Aside from these benefits, the right CRM and EFM software will allow you to identify your company’s most valuable clients and customers. This way, preferred and loyal customers can be given more priority so that their business can be retained. In the same vein, customers who have a good potential of remaining loyal to the company can be given incentives to stay with the company.

On the administrative side, these software packages will make customer interactions flow smoothly and data analysis can be done more efficiently. With all these advantages and more, CRM & EFM software is truly something that major corporations in any industry cannot do without.