Allegiance Blog

A sold out attendance of more than 250 Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and Customer Intelligence experts gathered Monday at the Allegiance Engage Summit to share experiences and discover new ways to leverage customer insights to drive business growth.

Here are some highlights from today’s speakers:

Adam Edmunds, President and CEO of Allegiance

• Enterprises are spending $80 billion on market research each year to understand customers, but only 10% of the data is being used.
• Business Intelligence, CRM, VOC, CE, EFM and Social Media are all part of managing and improving customer interactions. The ultimate goal is customer intelligence.
• Voice of Customer data combined with operational data is the best way to uncover true insights that can be turned into actions that impact revenue and sales. 

Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and CEO of ING DIRECT USA 

• ING DIRECT recognized customer frustrations with banks and set about to simplify financial products.
• It is important to not only engage with customers, but to engage with the right customers. Not everybody is the right customer for your business.
• Create an emotional connection with customers. Start simply by answering the phone, responding to email, and make a good impression.
• Define your principles and open up a conversation within the company. Create a culture of service. 

Bonny Simi, Director of Customer Experience & Analysis, JetBlue Airways 

• JetBlue focuses on bringing humanity back to travel. The company says it doesn’t know what is right, only its customers know what is right.
• The four elements of the JetBlue VOC program are: Listen across multiple channels, measure Net Promoter Score, apply robust analytics and create actionable insights.
• JetBlue combines solicited survey responses with unsolicited feedback from email and social media to create actionable insights that make a difference in the customer experience. 

Bruce Temkin, Managing Partner, Temkin Group 

• Traditional market research is obsolete. Data provides no value unless it leads to action.
• Deep analysis is not required, one data point can lead to a positive change in customer experience.
• Customer experience directly relates to customer loyalty.
• Six out of 10 companies surveyed say they want to be the leader in their industry in customer experience. 

Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality, EMC Corporation 

• In setting up a VOC program, know who your stakeholders are and what is important to them.
• Customer metrics are as important as financial and operational metrics in measuring the success of a business.
• Don’t try to produce data to meet everyone’s needs. Instead focus on what is most impactful to customers and turn data into actions.
• Learn what your customer loyalty drivers are and measure your success against competitors in your industry.
• Create a forum for stakeholders to provide feedback, including the executive and operational levels.

Thanks to all the great speakers and attendees for making this event a success. Next year’s event promises to be bigger and better than ever. Hope you can join us in 2012 in Las Vegas for VOCFusion at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

As VOC practitioners, you need to ensure that the data you collect is actionable and relevant to other business leaders in your organization. To help you achieve that goal, join me and VOC practitioners and experts from around the globe on May 15 – 18, 2011, at the Engage Summit 2011. But hurry, we are almost sold out for the event.

At the Summit, we will be sharing best practices on driving business growth through customer intelligence, including using social platforms, data visualization and text analytics. There will also be some exciting, new game-changing products introduced that promise to help you provide your company’s executives with actionable business intelligence from VOC and operational data.

To that end, we have a great line up of speakers this year. Headliners include Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and President of ING DIRECT USA; Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, Inc.; Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality, EMC Corporation; and Bonny Simi, Director of Customer Experience & Analysis, JetBlue Airways.

Additionally, you will learn from Federico Cesconi, Director of Business Intelligence, UPC Cablecom; Zach Gemignani, CEO, Juice Analytics; and Lynda Smith, Senior VP of Marketing, Jive Software. Sponsors include JD Power and Associates, Jive Software, Attensity, 1to1 Media, CMO Council and Juice Analytics.

Experts Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group, Andrew McInness of Forester Research and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group will also offer their insights. A variety of business authors will also be on hand, including Lisa Nirell, author of Energize Growth Now and Becky Carroll, author of The Hidden Power of Your Customers. The full agenda is here: http://engagesummit.com/agenda.html

To register for the Engage Summit 2011, please visit http://engagesummit.com. We look forward to seeing you on May 15 at the Chateaux Resort at Deer Valley in Park City, Utah.

Chris Cottle is EVP of Marketing and Products at Allegiance, Inc.

Being a sort of a junkie of the stock market and economics in general, I noticed today that the CCI (consumer confidence index) was up. This is good news. But just what is the Consumer Confidence Index and what does it have to do with VOC?

Each month The Conference Board (an independent economic research organization) surveys 5,000 U.S. households. The survey consists of five questions that ask the respondents’ opinions about the following:

1. Current business conditions
2. Business conditions for the next six months
3. Current employment conditions
4. Employment conditions for the next six months
5. Total family income for the next six months

Survey participants are asked to answer each question as “positive, negative or neutral.” The preliminary results from the Consumer Confidence Survey are released on the last Tuesday of each month at 10am EST.

Through a complex system of analysis and weighting of answers, the CCI is calculated, and this helps to formulate major economic policy for the US and for the world. These results affect everything from jobs, production and warehousing of goods, right down to how much a bushel of corn may cost. All this from one simple five question survey.

The CCI can be used as a “leading indicator” or an indicator that influences other fiscal decisions. If the CCI is trending upward, manufacturers make more cars.

The ultimate VOC survey? Maybe. 

Now lets take this down to a more personal level. Could your loyalty, satisfaction and engagement surveys also behave as sort of “leading indicators” that affect performance in other areas of your company?

If customers are more engaged, will they buy more product? Will they recommend you? Will this have any bearing on inventory, staffing or R&D?

Making this data real, and applying it to the bottom line aspects of your company is vital. Using tools such as Quad Charts, Correlation Analysis and trend charts, help you do what the US Government does with the CCI survey.

A 5000-response survey helps to dictate major US economic policy. Think about designing your VOC program with the intent that the data can trickle down to show relevance in your day-to-day operations and business outcomes. Otherwise, its just another survey.

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.

Customer relationships are dynamic, never static.  Customers’ perceptions and beliefs are continuously evolving.  Each customer interaction with your company (either direct or indirect) has the power to strengthen, weaken, or destroy customer relationships.

Each customer experience affects your customers’ beliefs and perceptions – their realities.  The changes can be subtle, unrecognizable at first; but they will continue to evolve in a positive or negative direction until they manifest into tangible change. 

The slow evolution of customer relationships can be out of your control to a great extent, which is why it’s imperative to your B2B company’s success that customers are given a consistent voice.  Proactively engaging customers to understand their realities through Voice of the Customer insight enables companies to have more control over their customer relationships.

Issues and misconceptions are normal because we’re all human, and communication breakdowns happen frequently as the intended message communicated is not heard and understood as expected.  Add to that the barrage of uncontrollable external influences that by their nature you are unaware of their occurrence and impact on your customer relationships.

Without a voice, issues and misconceptions can be left undiscovered.  Seemingly small infractions accumulate and aggregate into larger issues, disappointments and resentments.  Left unspoken and unresolved they become time bombs threatening to annihilate customer relationships and their long-term revenue streams at any moment. 

Can you afford the risk of not capturing your customers’ voices on a regular and consistent basis? 

Voice of the Customer (VOC) objectives are vital for any organization and provide a roadmap to a successful VOC program. It’s like going into a new city and trying to navigate without a map or GPS. Without having clear directions to the address, you can spend a lot of time, resources, and energy trying to get to your destination. The same applies to your VOC program objectives.

How do you determine your objectives, and what are some of the red flags or pitfalls to avoid? VOC objectives are intended to understand your customers’ needs and prioritize their importance. Providing well-executed VOC objectives will result in actionable insights that will help your customers have a great experience with your organization. 

There are a couple of red flags to be aware of when determining your VOC objectives. First, know the DNA of your customers and why they continue to use your organization or buy your products. If your current VOC program satisfaction scores have not increased for years, this could be an indication that the current objectives need an overhaul. Another red flag is seeing the satisfaction reports in your organization, but not seeing anything being done with them. If an organization is going to ask for information, it’s imperative to act on the information so that customers see changes and improvements. 

There are many things to consider when developing your VOC objectives.  For example, it’s important to develop objectives that match your company culture and make sense to implement. Be sure to develop VOC objectives that can be realistically implemented throughout the organization.

No matter what level of sophistication your VOC program is at today, the important thing is to do something now to make incremental improvements. As you understand your customers more, you can continue to look for ways to improve, tweak or update your VOC objectives.

Bret Butler is Enterprise Program Manager for Allegiance.

This is no longer your father’s VOC program. Many VOC professionals have realized that in order to add value to the organization, they must spend less time telling a VOC story and more time telling a business story. Let me explain.

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.

In 1894 Marchese Guglielmo Marconi built his first radio equipment, a device that would ring a bell from 30 ft. away.  In December 2010, Allegiance hosted its first of what will be many weekly radio shows hosted by blogtalkradio.

Why?

Allegiance has been a thought leader in the use of social media to gather feedback and respond to customers.  The release of  Allegiance Engage7 was a big step into the arena of using social media as a building block in an overall VOC program. With that in mind, Allegiance is also reaching out proactively to provide thought leadership and training on a variety of topics.  With the advent of internet “talk radio,” Allegiance is using the tried and true medium of communication and linking it through social media to provide ongoing idea forums and discussions on many topics such as:

• Survey Design Best Practices
• Use of Incentives
• 5 Steps to Building Great Survey Questions
• Text Analytics
• And the list keeps growing…

How it works

Every week, Allegiance will announce the weekly topic and time along with the URL to connect to the live broadcasts.  These will come as tweets on the Allegiance Twitter account or Allegiance on Facebook. You are invited to “call in” to chat live on the air, or you can listen after the airing of the broadcast via podcast on iTunes or any other audio playback device.  As you listen to each broadcast, you can choose to “mark as favorite” the Allegiance Talk Radio site, and you will be automatically notified of upcoming broadcasts. 

 This healthy blend of Mr. Marconi’s innovation, coupled with an up and coming medium like blogtalkradio, is designed to keep you informed and connected to Allegiance, while benefitting from our ideas and expertise. We hope you will tune in 2011!

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

After months of client meetings, focus groups and quantitative studies, one thing stands out: data is everywhere, and VOC pros want help making decisions from their mountains of data. That’s why we are committed to accelerating the delivery of actionable business intelligence from VOC data. It’s not about gathering more survey data, it’s about the insights business leaders need to move the needle.

Our focus will be on helping voice of customer, survey, feedback administrators, and customer experience professionals to easily gather, analyze and act upon their data in a more prolific way. Our approach is to build powerful tools to automatically deliver greater insights from VOC data. This will help our clients to be more successful without having to spend as much time looking for the golden nuggets in their data.

The Business Intelligence (BI) industry has done a decent job of taking disparate operational, ERP, finance and CRM data and turning it into automated actionable insights. We think the best of BI practices combined with real-time, VOC program data creates an exciting new space that companies will use to run large parts of their business. This “VOCi” space is the best direction for VOC leaders to be successful, and we think it’s the best direction for the industry to grow.

Look for many exciting announcements from Allegiance in 2011, including product, partnership, alliances and client news that will showcase the benefits of shifting away from a focus on gathering more data to a focus on creating actionable business intelligence from the combination of VOC with other data sources.

VOCi is the future, and we invite you to join us on the journey there.

Adam Edmunds is President and CEO of Allegiance, Inc.