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.  

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?

• Ability to leverage CRM to the Voice of Customer.
• Integrate multiple sources across customer communication channels, so that social surveys, e-mails etc., are able to be pulled in, in an integrated fashion. 
• A better way to ensure smart dissemination of information so that the data isn’t sliced and diced down to levels that don’t make sense. 
• Access to applications that go beyond surveys and reporting. 
• Higher ease of use especially, as we work with champions who aren’t analysts. (Apple-ize it.) 
• Rolling up both the transactional and loyalty data that we’re collecting over time into some sort of cold, warm, or hot type of flag for sales.  
• Automated way to have the system go through segmentations and give something at the end that says “this went up, this went down” instead of having to go through the same charts every quarter to figure it out. 
• In those cases with very targeted feed back systems on accounts, we need a way to audit who was surveyed and when, and flag inconsistencies. 
• Being able to prepare the 360 degree view of the customer. “I don’t want an account rep to go out on an account, not armed with information that is in the transactional survey aboutan issue that has been brewing for 6 months.” 
• Consistent tool set to eliminate all the manual work and eliminate bias.  (Different people code the same thing differently, based on their bias.) 

Allegiance conducts these regularly to gain feedback and incorporate it into our product planning. How about you? What is on your VOC wish list? Please share your thoughts.

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing and Products for Allegiance.

Actionable data is data that you can use to improve the operations of the company.  It goes beyond answering “what” to understanding “why.” 

VOC programs fail most often because they provide just scores, changes in scores, or data that is only part of the solution. This only tells business managers that their SAT scores are down this month without telling them the reasons why or pointing out comments and stats to help them see the impact of fixing the problem. 

If you present your VOC results as 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 your job scope, and thinking like an executive. 

Unfortunately, many VOC practitioners place their efforts on the collection side, improving surveys and feedback mechanisms. They need to think more strategically about VOC data.  More surveys are not the answer, but more strategically designed feedback mechanisms that yield actionable data is what is needed.

How does data become “actionable data”?

Actionable data actually points to a specific condition or state within a customer’s experience that the company could have an immediate impact on, such as a specific product problem. Another example is an issue with an operational procedure or policy that causes some customer frustration, or perhaps a poor interaction with a customer service agent regarding a refund. These are specific types of insights that can point to specific actions a company can take to keep customers from leaving or to directly increase loyalty and satisfaction.

To have the most impact, actionable data needs to be shared with others in the company. However, many companies are collecting VOC and operational data solely on a departmental basis. They may be using several different tools that are not integrated, which causes them to have an incomplete view of customer experience. If you are able to combine VOC and operational data, you not only have what customers feel and say, but you can compare it to what they actually do. This gives you the most complete understanding of customer intelligence. 

What types of VOC data should be included?  

The optimal VOC solution is able to incorporate and process both structured and unstructured VOC data. When you combine structured data with unstructured data, such as freeform replies to open-ended survey questions or comments on the Internet, you add another layer of depth that can give you a complete picture. For example, you can see what customers are saying about a poorly performing product, why customers in a specific region for a specific type of product and for a specific time period are unhappy, and what were the key issues that drove low satisfaction. Text analytics is the key to understanding these questions. 

Incorporating text analytics into a VOC program helps companies understand the meaning of the comments and suggestions coming from customers so that they can effectively act on them. VOC systems are available today that provide a dashboard for analysis and reporting of structured data from call centers and customer surveys. The best approach is to treat text data just like structured data. This allows you to automatically process and analyze it, instantly seeing the top ten issues, suggestions or reasons customers left the company, and more. 

Making VOC data more actionable should be the focus of any successful VOC program. Incorporating structured and unstructured data, using strategic thinking in designing feedback mechanisms, integrating with operational data such as CRM, and sharing the data throughout the company will ensure the greatest positive impact for your organization.

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing and Products at Allegiance

For Voice of Customer data, the combination of data mining and text analytics provides the best analysis method. Text analytics turns comments on social media or the web into structured data that can be analyzed. Data mining can be applied to uncover the hidden value of the information or link it to other sources to compare trends and relationships. 

Ideally, the variables culled from text analytics are used alongside structured and transactional data from many other databases (such as customer satisfaction scores, geographic data, demographics, purchase and usage histories, product-feature data, etc.) 

Through data mining, we can identify and refine patterns and trends among the hundreds, even thousands of variables that often come with “big data.” We can then make predictions based on information obtained from analyzing and exploring this data. 

For example, a successful software company gleaned some surprising insights after analyzing text and data from multiple sources, including NPS scores, structured survey data, demographics, customer experience data and freeform answers to open-ended survey questions. After completing the text analytics phase, all the data were merged into a data mining model. In addition to identification of highly concentrated subgroups of customers, the company discovered: 

• Those customers who mentioned “feature set” within their freeform answers were six times more likely to be a “promoter” of the product and company.
• Those customers who made a negative comment about “reliability” were most likely to be non-promoters.
• Of the variables found to be most predictive of the NPS score, the least important predictor was the number of times a customer had used the software in the previous three months.

In short, text analytics/data mining solutions help us connect “big data” to business practices and obtain insights that will make a difference. The results are insights that can be acted upon to achieve specific business goals in the areas of operational efficiency, customer engagement, product innovation and more.

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.

However, this time, I thought I would let you hear what a couple of leading practitioners in the VOC space are saying. 

Some time ago, Allegiance began hosting weekly broadcasts (that turn into podcasts) on BlogTalk Radio.  Yes, talk radio on the Internet.  The topics have ranged from survey design best practices to social media, and I have to say, Allegiance is gaining quite an audience.

Recently, at the Allegiance Summit, I took the opportunity to host some interviews of some of the leaders and trendsetters in the VOC world. So this month, rather than read my blog post, I’d like you to listen to my blog post.

1. Arkadi Kuhlmann: Chairman, President and CEO of ING Bank.   http://tinyurl.com/64veskq
2. Jim Bampos: Vice President of Customer Quality at EMC corporation. http://tinyurl.com/6z4t6q8 

This is what they are saying; what led to their success(es).  I invite you to take a listen, take good notes, and learn from those who are actually doing it, not just pontificating about it.

Oh, and by the way, tune in to Allegiance Radio on BlogTalk radio each week. It’s free and it’s a lot of fun engaging, learning and sharing best practices for success.  And by the way, if you would like to appear on our show, please feel free to email me at jeff.olsen@allegiance.com.