Allegiance Blog

In our professional lives, surveys are an indispensable tool in our enterprise voice arsenal. When combined with operational data, business performance metrics, social media chatter and other less-structured forms of customer voice (e.g. call center logs, online comment cards, in-bound emails and letters), survey results form the critical foundation of a rich and robust voice of the enterprise choir.

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.

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.

The goal of any survey builder is to get responders to stay for dinner and finish the conversation. After all, isn’t a survey just a conversation? You ask engaging questions and expect the responder to give you a full, satisfying response. Here are some basic best practices for keeping respondents engaged in dinner/survey 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.

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 [...]

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. This blog talks about some of the most important things that companies can do to increase their employee productivity and loyalty in this environment.

Preparing your survey data for analysis can be a messy process. But it needn’t be. In this article, Allegiance unveils a tried-and-true, five-step process for cleaning up your survey data.

Response rates to e-mail surveys can sometimes be low. Here are some tips for improving them.

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 [...]