Allegiance Blog

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.

Here at Allegiance, we continue to see more companies choosing to rescue customers in real time rather than wait months for the results of a large customer satisfaction survey. These businesses are embracing a new approach to traditional customer research.

This approach gives companies the ability to collect feedback from social media, engage customers in real time and use advanced analytics to understand what makes customer tick and predict what they’ll want.

By helping companies to implement this approach and realize the benefits, Allegiance is growing fast. In fact, we just learned that Allegiance was included on Software Magazine’s 28th Annual Software 500 ranking of the world’s largest software and service providers. The ranking positioned Allegiance as number two in the Top 10 Growth Chart of companies in its revenue category and number four in the Top 10 in Software/Services Revenue Growth category for the overall Software 500.

Adam Edmunds, president and CEO of Allegiance, stated: “The Software 500 is a validation of our continued focus on helping organizations drive growth and increase profitability through improved customer and employee loyalty and engagement. We are honored to be recognized and thank our employees and customers for helping us to be included on this prestigious list.”

Today’s companies are turning to real-time customer feedback because they want:

• Direct access to their data
• To engage customers through many channels, including mobile, social media, web and more
• To analyze and create actionable insights from mountains of customer data
• The ability to act upon their data in real time and improve the customer relationship

The Allegiance team is committed to helping companies use this new approach to achieve their business objectives. We appreciate your support and welcome your feedback.

My Facebook status today reads, “I’m hoping this morning’s travels will inspire another interesting blog post.” Right after I posted that, a thought popped into my head:  it’s not my travels today as much as my destination that has inspired me. I’m on my way to our headquarters in Utah to meet with my team for our Quarterly Business Review. This got me thinking about how our clients might review their businesses…especially as it pertains to their Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives.

Gathering feedback from your customers helps you understand what you’re doing well and not so well for them. However, if that’s all you do, it’s like living in a bubble. It’s important to put all of your scores and feedback into the broader context – how well do you do stack up against your competitors? This is applies not only to financial/operational metrics, but also with your VOC data.

I’m talking about benchmarking, which means making comparisons to help you understand the perception of your business relative to the competition in the minds of your customers.

1. Competitive Benchmarking helps you determine your performance relative to a primary competitor or a set of key competitors. Competitive Benchmarking data can be obtained in several different ways.

          Third-Party Surveys:  Engage with a third party to conduct a blind competitive survey. This is the cleanest survey approach, but it’s also the most expensive.

          Your Surveys:  Add some questions to the end of your relationship survey that ask your customers to rate one or two of your competitors with which they’ve done business. This approach is a little less clean and perhaps even a bit biased because you’re asking these questions only of your customers. As long as you view the responses in that light, you can still get a decent benchmark.

          External Metrics:  Get access to syndicated results for ACSI, JDPA indexes, NPS, Forrester CxPi Customer Experience Index, etc. that are relevant for your industry, product, etc. Ask a comparable question or set of questions in your own survey(s) to benchmark.

2. World Class Benchmarking is a slightly different approach where you’re not necessarily interested in benchmarking question to question or score to score. In World Class Benchmarking, you ask your customers to tell you about a “world class experience” they had with another company – any company, regardless of industry. What you’re looking for is a way to identify who your customers look up to when it comes to service, products, literature, training, etc.  You then study that company inside and out – you might even partner with them or find a mentor in that organization, depending on who it is – to identify best practices that you can put to work in your own company.

My final thought about how clients review their businesses brings me to Internal Benchmarking, which entails taking the feedback you’ve gathered and comparing scores, ratings, or indexes internally – within your own business, i.e., benchmark business units, locations, sites, etc. against each other. Identify your stars and your dogs, compare practices, and have your stars mentor your dogs.

Ok, it’s time to go update my Facebook status to “another one’s in the can.”

Getting executive buy-in is crucial to any successful VOC program. Here are three main points to keep in mind when working with your executive team.

1) Give the executives an opportunity to provide feedback, before the program goes live.

Keeping executives informed will help to ensure the success of any program and will allow you to make necessary corrections early in the VOC process. Often the executives will empower you to make decisions. However, keep them apprised of the program’s progress to avoid any delays later in the process.

2) Make sure the executives know and understand the goals and objectives of the VOC program.

Understanding the strategic direction of the organization and knowing what is expected with the VOC program is crucial to the success of the program. Having clear goals and objectives will ensure that you stay on course and make the right decisions for your organization.

3) Understand how the executives are being measured for a successful VOC program.

To ensure future career advancement, it is imperative that you know the metrics by which you will be measured. Therefore, a successful VOC program should include specific benchmarks for evaluating the performance of you and your team. To support the program success, keep the executive team connected with the customer by continually sharing customer comments and feedback gathered through the program.

These three key points will help you ensure executive buy-in for your VOC program. By focusing on the primary business needs and the value the VOC program will bring to the organization, you will ensure a successful outcome.

In a recent blog posting, Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group stated: the ultimate goal for any Voice of The Customer (VoC) program should be to infuse customer insight into every decision within an organization. However, he went on to say that not many companies had achieved this goal.

In fact, finding customer data is not a problem for most companies. The world is swimming in data. If you don’t have it, you can buy it, rent it, or collect it.

There is no shortage of survey and data gathering methods either. By last count, there were more than 300 survey vendors. Yet most companies with Voice of the Customer programs are struggling to gain insights from survey and feedback data.

That is because most of their time is spent sampling, surveying, and managing feedback. That includes setting up feedback channels, establishing survey frequency, etc. Attempting to find the ‘ah-ha’ insights often begins with an export to Excel and hours of cross tab work.

But not everyone is a statistician or computer scientist, and not everyone wants to sift through large data sets. Remember: The goal is not to gather gigabytes of data, it is to create actionable insights that drive change. If you work with a vendor that thinks gathering more data is the end-goal, turn and run!

And by all means, use technology for what it’s best for; making complex things simpler. In this case, turning mounds of data into insights. The right technology is ideally suited to bring all your VOC and operational data together, to easily pinpoint relevant trends, and to reveal actionable insights.

“What’s ubiquitous and cheap?… Data.  What’s Scarce and Expensive?…The talent to analyze the data and tell the story.  Data: understand it, process it, transform it, visualize it, communicate it.”  Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

Today’s theme at the Allegiance Engage Summit was analyzing patterns in data to find insights that can improve your operations. For those who were unable to attend, here are a few of the highlights from today’s keynote speakers.

 Bill Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics

Billy Beane shook up the world of baseball when he hired a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and starting using data to run a sports team. He looked at statistics that others in the business had ignored or under-valued to find new insights and gain advantage. Some of the key points of his talk can apply to any business:

• Don’t accept the status quo; take a fresh look at data from new angles and perspectives
• Use data to look for inefficiencies throughout the service delivery process
• Analyze data to determine the value of specific actions on your ultimate goal
• Base your decisions on analysis of statistics, not on emotion or subjective reasoning

The bottom line: Do you know what data drives your business? Analyzing data in new ways can give you an edge on your competition.

 Vicky Stennes, VP of In-Flight Experience, Jet Blue

Jet Blue set out to “bring humanity back to air travel.” The company’s values and culture define the brand. Here are some key points you may find useful:

•  Analyze how actions or product decisions relate to the corporate culture For example, charging customers for checking the first bag would negatively impact Jet Blue’s customer-focused culture.
• Identify what is getting in the way of providing first rate service
• Use NPS as one metric of customer satisfaction, but rely on market research to understand how to impact results
• Practice “visible leadership” in which managers spend more time in the field with employees and customers
• Having supported, informed and engaged employees are key to customer loyalty

 Bruce Temkin, Temkin Group

According to Bruce, most companies are not using customer feedback, which makes Voice of the Customer (VOC) an untapped asset. He presented some best practices for implementing a closed loop VOC program. These include:

•  Analyze both structured and unstructured VOC data, including freeform comments, to get a full view of customer feedback
• Deliver insights, not just data, and be clear on specific actions that need to be taken
• Make VOC data available widely throughout the organization and its partners
• Use VOC data to take action both in immediate problem solving and in long term operational planning
• Don’t obsess about a single score, but put data in context; Interpret results separately for different customer segments or regions.

We thank all of our presenters and look forward to another exciting day on Tuesday.

We are looking forward to the upcoming Allegiance Engage Summit 2010 on May 16 – 19, 2010 at the Chateaux Resort at Silver Lake in Deer Valley, Utah. It’s not too late to join us! This year’s user conference will bring together inspirational speakers, customer and employee loyalty experts, industry leaders and Allegiance customers to uncover ways to solve today’s most pressing business problems.

More than 60 percent of the conference agenda consists of panels and presentations by Allegiance customers, who will share insights and experiences on improving Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) and Voice-of-the-Employee (VOE) programs. For professionals in market research, feedback management, VOC, customer retention, loyalty or human resources, the Engage Summit 2010 will provide critical information, best practices and peer-to-peer networking on ways to capitalize on customer and employee engagement.

Keynote Inspirational Speakers

•  Billy Beane, VP and general manager (GM), Oakland Athletics
• Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad
• Rama Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

 Industry Leaders and Loyalty Experts

•  Todd Rowe, Group VP and General Manager, WW Mid-Market Division, SAP
• Bruce Temkin, VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Experience Management, Forrester Research
• Vicky Stennes, VP In-flight Experience, Jet Blue
• Gary Rhoads, Ph.D., Loyalty Expert, Co-Founder Allegiance, Inc.

 Session Topics

•  Creating value and ROI from your survey/feedback data
• Customer and employee panels on engagement wins
• Customer case studies: Zions Bancorporation, Life Time Fitness, others
• Making insight out of the social media boom
• Market research panel on advanced data collection techniques
• Survey Design and Analytics boot camps

To register for the Allegiance Engage Summit 2010, to find out more about this year’s speakers, and to see the conference agenda, please visit http://engagesummit.com. We hope to see you there!

We hear it from businesses every day – how can they gather customer feedback from surveys, social media, Web, e-mail, call centers, etc. and respond quickly to avoid losing customers? And what is the best way to turn feedback into insights that can be acted upon to improve their business?

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

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.

My last business trip resulted in no less than four feedback opportunities: the airline, the hotel, the rental car company and the travel agency.  Each of these organizations sought my feedback to help improve my customer experience.  Marvelous!

It seems every time I buy a product or service, the provider offers the opportunity to give them some feedback through a customer survey. Although the feedback opportunities are wonderful, my service providers are mired in the details of asking about the logistics of their service. Executing flawlessly merely provides them feedback that they delivered what I expected. This is useful information, yet often empty. In fact, we call these feedback surveys “happy charts,” meaning that an extremely high percentage, as high as 90%, of customers, are “happy” with the experience they just had unless a significant service failure occurred or an expectation went unmet.

In the early stages of truly understanding what drives loyalty and advocacy, many of my clients focus on the details of executing a process without failure. Basic service/product quality is really the metric being captured. Yet meeting basic quality expectations isn’t enough today to enchant customers.

Voice of the Customer programs fall behind by focusing primarily on the quality of an experience. Knowing if a customer was greeted properly, if reservations were in order, and if the rental car had fuel are measures of basic service quality, core expectations of value for money. Today’s leaders take the next step and tease out what drives customers to extol the virtues of the experience.

Last year a colleague stayed at a hotel that was very close to the airport and provided a pickup service. He arrived and contacted the hotel for pickup, but they never arrived. Being tired and hungry, he jumped in a taxi. While he was checking into the hotel, the desk clerk asked if he was the gentleman that had requested pick-up. Finding out that he was, the clerk reimbursed his taxi fare. Wow! More than six months later, he still talks about how delighted he was with the hotel and recommends it constantly.

Does your organization know what customers love about you?

The whole love thing sounds a little squishy doesn’t it? That’s the challenge. Gaining the emotional connection with customers is truly the goal of any business. Emotional connection drives loyalty and advocacy. The Walt Disney Company knows what guests love about their experience; Apple knows what users love about their products. Do you?

The next time you review customer feedback results, see if you have the answer to these questions:

1. What did your customers love about their experience with you today?
2. Is there anything that they’ll tell their friends not to miss about their experience with you?
3. If customers could change one single thing about their experience, what would that be?

Look beyond the basic quality of the process to discover the heart of the experience. This will help you build an experience that truly enchants your customers.