Allegiance Blog

I co-presented with Andrew McInness of Forrester last week in a webinar with the American Marketing Association (AMA). With more than 1000 registrants, the discussion was both lively and diverse. Based on the high volume of emails I received after the event, I thought it made sense to summarize a few points for our VOC blog followers. The topic struck a nerve, and people were clearly energized.

The webinar topic was Customer Intelligence, the New Frontier of Customer Voice. I’ll summarize only three main points (from many) and refer you to the recorded webinar for the whole presentation from Andrew (by the way, nice job Andrew) and yours truly.

More surveys/data is not the answer! The focus of VOC is not to gather more surveys and data; it is to create actionable business intelligence that moves the needle. VOC practitioners are not great at this second part today, but getting better, and quickly. This is the reason VOC programs are gaining quick adoption now when they have stalled in the past. VOC best practices require a shift from data gathering, creating charts and reports, to providing prescriptive and predictive outcomes that support a business story.

Tell a business story: VOC programs fail most often because they provide just scores, changes in scores, or data that is only part of the solution. Don’t leave business managers hanging. Don’t tell them their SAT score is down this month without telling them the reasons why, and pointing out comments and stats to help them see the impact of fixing the problem. If you present your VOC results as a broader business story, rather than just a VOC/SAT report, success will skyrocket. It is hard to do, and requires thinking big, being ready to tackle processes beyond our job scope, and thinking like an executive. Tip: when’s the last time you met with a few key execs and said, “I want to provide data that is really relevant to you – data that you would die to have every week – can you tell me what that data is?”

Combine operational data with VOC data for VOCi. There’s an exciting new space that combines the best of Voice of Customer (VOC) data (from all forms and places in an organization) with operational data (CRM, financial, etc.) for traditional business intelligence (BI). This new space, and opportunity, is VOCi. I submit that it should be the new ‘north star’ goal for VOC professionals. The ultimate goal of VOCi™ is to provide actionable business intelligence derived primarily from VOC data sets, but with other data sets integrated, that tells a powerful story executives buy into and want to see regularly. The industry needs to move away from the focus on gathering more data (so what, who needs more data) to creating actionable insights. Let’s make it happen!

Please watch the recorded webinar by visiting this link.

To learn more about VOCi, attend our Engage Summit in May, 2011. www.engagesummit.com

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing & Products at Allegiance

Action plans are in place in response to customer, employee and partner feedback initiatives. As a result, you are measuring increased satisfaction, loyalty and engagement among these key groups.  Driving improvements in these areas has been baked into the very culture of your organization.

However, there are limitations to approaching satisfaction, loyalty and engagement as end points.  Integrating business performance metrics into your feedback initiatives will enable you to leverage them to drive lasting performance improvement and bottom-line results. 

Emphasize the Bottom-Line Value of Your Feedback Initiative

The core objective of your feedback program is not to drive improved survey metrics.  The ultimate objective is increased business performance and improved results. 

Dutifully reporting to a senior executive or business unit owner that “customer engagement scores have increased for the past eight quarters” is nice. Telling that same audience that “in this same time period, quarterly sales increases of 8%, on average, and a steady decline in customer attrition of 24% have been associated with increased customer engagement” is a much more compelling story.

Linking business performance metrics with survey metrics not only provides greater decision support to key decision makers, but also underscores the vital role your feedback initiative plays in the success of the organization.

Performance Metrics Selection

In selecting meaningful metrics for inclusion into your program, the answers to these questions should help you formulate a plan to make this happen:

1. How does my organization measure success?  (What are the key measures of success?)
2. Who owns the metrics data?  (In many cases, multiple parties may own different pieces of the puzzle.)
3. What do I need to do to obtain the metrics I have identified as crucial to my program?

The typical organization has a database full of performance metrics that can be augmented to a survey invitation file.  Below are just a few examples from a small sample of industries:

Integrating Performance Metrics

The next step is to integrate business performance metrics with feedback results from your initiatives.  As covered in my previous blog post Linking Operational Data with Survey Data,  these performance data variables are uploaded to your survey database as part of the invitation process (or such variables may be back-augmented after data collection has taken place). These variables remain hidden to the survey taker and are pre-populated at the record-level (meaning each survey invite record contains unique values for each variable for maximum reporting flexibility). 

Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Data

Finally, put all this data to work! This recent Allegiance blog post Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Feedback has some excellent ideas for analyzing feedback program data and using it to drive lasting, positive change in your organization.

We all know the “oh man, am I stuffed” feeling we get after eating our favorite dinner dish.  And when we send out a survey, we hope to get back the data that gives us rich, tasty and analyzable answers.  The problem is, if we don’t properly cook the survey, no will want to finish what’s on their plate.  It just tastes terrible!

Needless to say, the goal of any survey builder or analyst is to get respondents to clean their plate or, in this case, finish the conversation. After all, isn’t a survey just a conversation?  You ask engaging questions and expect the respondent to answer with the intent of giving you a full, satisfying response. Here are some basic best practices for keeping respondents engaged in the dinner/survey conversation:

1. Keep it as short as possible

Your survey needs to capture the information you need. But the longer you stretch it out, the higher the risk of the “I’m tired of this survey, I’m done” syndrome, more commonly known as “drop out.” 

2. Warm them up

Most of us aren’t able to dive into a Shakespearean play the moment we step out of bed in the morning.  Don’t dive into the difficult questions right off the bat.  Start by taking them through the experience you are surveying them for.   Get them thinking about their interaction with you.

3. Keep your questions brief and clear

No one likes to have to read a survey question twice because it’s too long or because they don’t understand what you’re asking.  Avoid using compound and ambiguous questions. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?”  Um, yeah, not a good survey question.

4. Keep your list of answer options short

A respondent can experience fatigue not just by a marathon-like survey, but also by too many answer options to select from in one question.  Too many options can cause a respondent to select just the first or last option and not read your entire list of options. 

5. Keep it interesting

Though data collection is serious business, and you need to ensure you are gathering valuable, actionable information, remember that you’ll get better data if your respondent enjoys taking your survey.  That doesn’t mean you have to “fluff it up,” but make sure it’s relevant to your respondent.

6. And finally. . . . be considerate, keep your respondent informed

Tell them why they are taking the survey, what you discovered and what kind of actions you’re going to take with the results of the analysis.
 
While this article has a bit of a lighter side to it, I hope it conveys the seriousness of creating a good survey.  Contemplate and plan a better survey to keep your respondents participating in the conversation.

Transactional surveys are a great way to capture customer feedback immediately following a transaction or event. Companies can use them to gain a better understanding of a customer’s experience and perceptions of service quality while the service interaction is still fresh on his or her mind.

Dr. Fred Van Bennekom from Great Brook Consulting has created a list of eight practical items to consider when developing your transactional survey strategy.

Keep It Short. If you want to get a good response rate, then keep it short and to the point. For most transactional processes, 7 to 12 questions should be sufficient.  

Use Random Sampling. If you have ongoing customer transactions, you probably don’t want to send a survey invitation each time a customer has a closed transaction. This will promote “survey burnout” and lead people to complete the survey only when they have an axe to grind.  

Implement a Service Recovery (Complaint Handling) System Concurrent with the Event Survey Program. Complaint handling and event surveying are tightly linked in a customer retention program. If a customer voices a complaint in a survey and you don’t respond, it will just flame the fires of dissatisfaction.  

Consider Different Survey Administrative Methods. Transactional surveying can be done by telephone, web form, paper form, or using IVR. Regardless of the method, you want to get the data as quickly as possible to act on any business process issues. Web form surveys are the fastest and most inexpensive once the system is set up, but your target audience must have web access and be web savvy.

How Often & How Soon to Survey. Most retailers or dining establishments are surveying essentially at the close of a transaction. In situations where you have a database of customer contact information, you could do the surveying in batch mode every day or every week. However, if the period between transaction and survey is too long, you increase the probability of a process problem affecting more customers until you learn about the problem.  

Outsource Surveys Versus In-House Execution. There are many services that will conduct the survey program for you. They may give you real-time access to the results through a web portal, but you will pay for these features. With advanced technology tools, you can accelerate the design, set-up, execution and analysis of your transactional surveys by performing them yourself.

Pilot Test Your Surveys. A survey is a product that you as the designer should test before launching, just as a company should test any product before selling it to customers. The pilot or field test is critical to discovering flaws in the detail of the survey design before going live.  

Don’t Abuse The Survey and Your Respondents. Please know the difference between an event survey and a relationship survey, and be humble in your request for your respondents’ time. By attempting to make the survey serve two masters — the event and the relationship – you will compromise on both.

Not long ago, when customers had an issue with poor product or service, they had limited options. Either they could write a letter using pen and paper, or they could make a phone call hoping to talk with someone who could make a difference. Getting the company’s attention was only the beginning. Getting a response was another story.

Today’s world of customer feedback has evolved far beyond a phone call or a letter. A customer today can use a smartphone to make a complaint or use online chat. They can send an email or text to family and friends, or even tweet and blog negative news to thousands at a time. In fact, I recently learned that there are more than 100 million blogs and web forums in the English language alone — and more than 2 million Tweets in a typical day.

The point is, when customers are talking about your organization, do you hear it? And even more important, do you react and respond? Today’s customer really is in charge of the conversation, and businesses today must listen and respond to these new and critical communication channels if they’re going to stay on top of the issues and control the perception of their name and brand.

So how do you build a quality Voice of the Customer (VOC) or feedback program? What are the most important elements for automated feedback technology and solutions? Experts recommend the following:

• Do-it-yourself surveys are still critical for today’s enterprise. Departmental managers need to execute smart surveys on their own.
• Transactional surveys take many forms including receipt-based, IVR, Text/SMS, online, email or print. These are usually departmentally-based programs that rerun the same post-event survey with the intent of rescuing customers.
• More sophisticated VOC programs include relationship surveys that dive deeper into understanding customer attitudes and turnover risks. They usually involve one or many departments, sometimes CEOs or even the entire c-suite, and are part of the company-wide culture.
• New tools to pull unstructured comments from social media platforms are becoming critical to staying on top of unsolicited feedback. You should consider a VOC solution that has this function built in.
• Mobile and SMS surveys are the wave of the future and the way the younger generation communicates. Be sure to incorporate feedback tools that can interact with mobile devices.
• And don’t forget text analytics and text mining tools to round out your solution. These tools will simplify your efforts to understand the many verbatim comments that come into your organization. It’s timely and expensive to sort through them manually. Advanced tools can do this for you.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect VOC system to get started. Get going today. You can improve as you go, and be sure to build in your program a practice to close the loop with customers. They want to know what you did with their feedback, even if it’s not what they were hoping to hear. As Jeremy Whyte, Director of Customer Feedback with Oracle said, “It’s not enough to listen to the voice of the customer — the feedback must be acted upon.”

Customer loyalty is no longer driven by products but by experiences that create emotion. Emotion is created when the customer gets something they are not expecting. Listening to their needs and concerns and then creating an action plan to change your business practices will help you achieve this.

A survey recently conducted by Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm, reveals that the current economic environment is stirring widespread anxiety among U.S. employees about their job security.

For instance, nearly half (45%) of all survey respondents said they expect their job to change or be eliminated, and even more (55%) believe their future earnings will either plateau or decline.

In this environment, the most important thing that companies can do to increase their employee productivity and loyalty is communicate more with employees and gain a better understanding of their workforce—i.e. their employees’ attitude, opinions, motivation and satisfaction—so that they can help their employees successfully navigate change and increase their employees’ loyalty.

According to research conducted by Dr. Gary Rhoads and Dr. David Whitlark, Allegiance loyalty experts, there are four areas that drive employee loyalty. These are: 1) being helpful; 2) feeling confident and improved; 3) feeling accepted; and 4) feeling respected. Thus, by regularly asking your employees questions related to these areas through surveying, you’ll be able to get into their hearts and minds. And that can make a big difference in increasing employee loyalty and productivity in a down economy.

If you’d like more information on this topic, read our white paper titled “The Top 11 Ways to Increase Employee Loyalty.

Kyle LaMalfa, Best Practices Manager and Loyalty Expert, Allegiance

Preparing your survey data for analysis can be a messy process, mostly because data typically needs to be cleansed for various reasons. For example, respondents’ answers may not match pre-defined choices or they may answer questions that don’t really apply.

Using an online survey tool can eliminate many of the problems associated with paper surveys by limiting response choice and enabling participants to skip irrelevant questions. But even online survey data may contain records that exclude key variable or include duplicate responses from the same person. And if your survey is large, the task of cleaning up your data can, at first glance, seem a bit overwhelming.

However, it needn’t be. For instance, I recently completed a survey analysis with 35,000 respondents who answered about 75 questions, which resulted in a 2,625,000 cell spread sheet. Fortunately, editing and cleansing the data was fairly simple because I used a tried-and-true, five-step process that included:

Step 1: Make a copy of your data and use that version for data cleansing. This isn’t as much of a step as it is a warning. Even the best laid data cleansing plans sometimes have to be taken back to the drawing board. So, only delete records from a copy of your data and keep your original file on hand in case you need to put something back in.

Step 2: Conduct a few mini data cleansing trial runs. Export smaller subsets of your data to conduct data cleansing trial runs to refine your process. It’s a lot easier to get the process down with a data set of 2,000 than 35,000. Plus, then you’ll know the exact steps that you’ll need to follow when you export all 35,000.

Step 3: Identify “crucial variables” in your survey efforts and define what constitutes “complete”. – In the survey I mentioned above, senior-level executives wanted to identify high-performing managers in geographically defined regions. To the company, these geographical regions were a crucial variable in their survey efforts, as without them, survey responses were useless and had to be deleted. In addition, the scores for each region were based on answers to 7 questions. The company decided that in order for a response to be considered complete, all 7 questions had to be answered.

Step 4: Remove “speeders” and “flat-liners” – Using an internet survey tool, we were able to place a date/time stamp on each response and find out how much time it took each person to complete it. We know from past experience that respondents who complete the survey too quickly (less than 30%-50% of median time) and are likely not reading or answering the questions appropriately. The same is true for flat-liners (i.e. those who mark each answer the same), which are often speeders. They may have read the questions, but they don’t really think about their answers. Therefore, it’s best to remove speeders and flat-liners from your data to eliminate a lot of meaningless data.

Step 5: Eliminate duplicate responses – Usually, it’s hard enough to get people to respond to a survey once. But some people actually care so much that they tell you twice, especially if there are some particularly juicy survey incentives involved (which may tempt them to try to increase their odds of winning) and/or if your managers are informed that their scores are somehow tied in with response rates (which may cause them to flood the system with duplicate favorable responses). Fortunately, all you have to do in those cases is match the entry information with your survey list, and then use the date/time stamp to identify and delete duplicate entries later. I recommend keeping the first response and deleting any subsequent responses.

Once you complete these steps, you’ll not only have a cleaner and more accurate data set, but you’ll also be able to ensure that each person who takes your survey only counts as one response instead of several in the results.

Alan Bainbridge, Best Practices Consulting Specialist, Allegiance

Hopefully you have already read my previous blog entry on this subject [see Why Do Electronic (email) Survey Response Rates Seem so Low? I Have a Theory, and a Way to Help Improve Them.]. This next tip I will keep short and sweet. Consider this fact as researched by the ESP (email service provider) EmailLabs: 69 Percent of Business to Business (B2B) Subscribers Frequently or Always Use a Preview Pane; 45 Percent Rarely or Never Download Images

This fact means that you have very few lines for them to read before they make a decision. Make those lines count! Consider carefully that top 10% of your email. Is your company logo, a piece of stock photography or some puffy copy really the most important communication you want to have with that 69 percent?

I know it’s hard to do (I have fought designers on this issue for years). But you have to hold your ground and fight for that 10% of real estate. Let them do whatever they want in the bottom 10%, but you absolutely must make your first impression space matter. Tell your readers right there why their feedback matters to your company and how much you value it. Tell them exactly how much time it will take them to do your survey. You are fighting for that next action and that next click. And at this point, that’s all that matters.

Terence Fugazzi, VP Demand Marketing, Allegiance

Have you ever noticed that more people start your online surveys than finish them? It’s like they start clicking through the answers and then suddenly they have a heart attack and it’s curtains!

What is happening to those hapless survey takers?

Life insurance actuaries, the Census Bureau, and the Social Security Administration use a tool to understand mortality: life tables. Life tables measure the odds of dying at a particular age. Age 0 to 1 has a higher risk of death than age 1 to 5. Past age 5, our odds of death steadily climb.

One might assume that a similar pattern would be true for online surveys, and that the odds of abandoning a survey increase with each increasing page. So, I decided to check it out. Do survey abandonment curves match similar patterns to human mortality tables? I used one of Allegiance’s client surveys to examine the trends.

In the chart below I used one axis to plot the number of survey takers who had completed each page. On the secondary axis, the red line, I plotted the odds of abandonment. The odds of abandonment is the number of survey takers lost to page x+1 divided by the survey takers remaining at page x.

Turns out, survey abandonment curves are not quite as smooth as human mortality curves. Survey abandonment curves are spiky. It’s like the Grim Reaper inhabits certain pages but not others.

Clearly, one can see where the problem pages are, where abandonment spikes. It turns out that this survey has a bunch of open-ended questions on pages 2, 3 and 10. Answering open-ended questions is a lot of work. Rather than work, people abandon the survey altogether.

There is no way this client will get rid of their open-ended questions. There is nothing I can do to make the questions less prone to abandonment. However, what we can do is re-order the pages and put the low-abandonment pages at the front of the survey and the high-abandonment pages at the back. The thought is that with more survey takers sticking around for longer, we may get to gather more data.

We can measure the increased data the same way the census bureau measures “life-years.” I’ll call this measurement “page-completes.” If we accumulate more page-completes by the end of the survey then we’ve made an improvement. Below is a simulation of re-ordering the pages to put the high-abandonment pages at the end.

Sure, the same number of respondents made it to the end of the survey, 1910. However by re-ordering the survey, the page-completes grow from 28,828 before to 32,319 after. Re-ordering may help me capture more survey data overall.

Kyle LaMalfa, Best Practices Manager and Loyalty Expert, Allegiance

Many people think that surveys are just a bunch of questions, but they’re not. Every survey is a culmination of a challenging seven-step process. And each step of that process poses unique challenges to researchers. After all, sound business decisions much come from high quality information.

And here is a seven-step process that you can use to ensure you create a high-quality survey that will produce more accurate and informative insights:

1. Establish your goals and objectives – A good survey research project must start with clearly defined goals and objectives. Create project goals and answer the questions: what is unknown?; what has already been done; what decisions will be made based on the result?; what do you think the results will look like?’ and what if you’re wrong? What if the results are inconclusive?
2. Determine your audience – Contacting the right mix of respondents is critical to an accurate outcome – just as important as asking the right questions.
3. Design your questions – Use question design best practices to minimize bias and optimize the quality of response.
4. Do a pilot test of your survey – Always conduct a pilot test with a small group prior to launching the survey. Look for misunderstandings, extremely unexpected results, technology problems, and also evaluate the time it takes a typical person to complete the survey. Update and improve your survey. This process will help you catch problems before they become costly mistakes.
5. Launch the survey – Many modern survey projects are launched via email and completed online. Above all, make sure your email invitations are accurate, genuine and compelling. Even the best survey will fall flat if people don’t bother to take it.
6. Analyze the results – Prepare to analyze the data when you are developing the questions. Use techniques such as cross-tabbing and weighting to understand and contextualize data.
7. Communicate the results to others – Action may never be taken unless others know about your survey discoveries. Communicating results clearly and efficiently is the key to a compelling argument for taking action.

Kyle LaMalfa, Best Practices Manager and Loyalty Expert, Allegiance