As mentioned in our press release that went out on June 2, 2010, Allegiance announced the winners of the Allegiance Engagement Awards. The Engagement Awards were given to organizations that demonstrated high customer or employee engagement based on customer and employee surveys collected through the Allegiance Engage platform in 2009. Awards were broken into two different categories:

1. Overall engagement score
2. Honorable mention

Some of the recipients of the awards for Customer Engagement are:

• Empower Credit Union
• Bennett International Group
• Lifetime Fitness
• Frost Bank
• Vectra Bank

Some of the winners of the Employee Engagement award are:

• Lifetime Fitness
• Mountain America Credit Union
• Empower Credit Union
• North Shore Bank
• Vectra Bank
• Sun Loan
• And more…

We would like to thank everyone who attended the sold-out 2010 Engage Summit. Many attendees were quoted as saying this was the best customer experience conference they had attended in years and attendee satisfaction was an outstanding 9 on a 10-scale. The overall theme this year was “turn status quo into status go” and included presentations geared towards helping customers analyze their data, create actionable and deliverable insights, then implementing programs and processes to ultimately increase profitability. Keynote addresses were given by:

• Billy Beane, GM for the Oakland A’s
• Robert Stephens, Founder of the Geek Squad
• Rama Ramakrishnan, MIT Sloan School of Business
• and others…

Attendees enjoyed three information packed days of workshops, breakout sessions, panel discussions, training sessions and keynotes in the beautiful Deer Valley Chateaux resort in Park City, Utah. During off hours, participants enjoyed shopping and dining on beautiful Park City Main Street. If you were unable to attend this year, you owe it to yourself to get the 2011 Engage Summit in your budget.

Everyone’s talking about Voice of the Customer: What it is, why it’s important, and why companies would be crazy not to listen to their customers. Plenty of organizations have taken the steps the past couple of years to open up their ears and listen to customer feedback in an organized and focused effort like never before. We are even seeing an expansion of channel options for listening to the customer voice. Surveys can be fielded via email-to-web, telephone, IVR, mobile devices and point-of-sale receipts. Vocal customers are making themselves heard by calling or emailing companies they do business with, filling in “contact us” comment boxes, speaking out through feedback tools like Allegiance Voice and even via social networking outlets. In short, many companies today have become sufficiently skilled at listening to the voice of the customer.

Now it is time to respond and act.

No one benefits from the customer perception that all their valuable input is falling into a black hole, being collected for the sake of collection and not to spur real action. Below are a few best practices for reminding customers they are being heard and their feedback is valued and for proving to customers that their input is being put to use driving lasting change within your organization. We include concrete examples and ideas that can be put in place today to add vigor to our voice of the customer programs by bringing the feedback full circle.

Share the Survey Results: By reminding customers that their results are being aggregated and seriously considered, we can help assure fears that their feedback is a wasted effort. Sharing a few charts of survey results or some carefully screened open ends can satisfy the curiosity many customers have to see how their opinions “stack up” against others. By sharing with customers a sub-set of relatively benign survey results we help them feel like they are a part of a two-way feedback process, that their voice is appreciated.

• Example: At the end of a web-based survey, instead of taking responding customers to a bland Thank You page, send them instead to a “Thank You—here’s what our customers have to say!” page that includes a chart illustrating “What’s important to our customers” and even some basic demographics charts (such as “Country” or “Region” or respondent).
• Example: Some companies regularly communicate with your customers through a newsletter (paper or electronic). In each newsletter, perhaps on a quarterly basis, include a brief summary of “What you are telling us.” Even include a few verbatim quotes highlighting what customers think you are doing well and where they think you can improve their experience.
• Tip: Just be cautious not to post any sensitive results that could be leveraged by competitors, such as “How our company stacks up against the competition.”

Look for the second installment of this article titled Using VOC Data to Drive Change.

New Features available late July include clickable/drillable charts, and new filter capabilities on standard reports. Product features also include upgraded reporting capabilities with multiple views of your data with just a single click. You also get a simplified user experience, powerful filters and dashboards to help you do more with your data, easy custom reporting, and simplified workflows.

Aside from the big picture of the Engage7 platform and its new enhancement and features, here are some best practices to be mindful of when using the product:

One of the most common questions customers ask about is how to reduce the “white space” between the very last question of the survey and the navigation bar.

• The best practice to reduce this white space is to move your mouse to the very bottom of the gray border so that the resizing arrow appears. Then use the resizing arrow and shrink the survey window in the builder to the smallest size possible. After you save the IQS file and publish it, you will find that the white space is no longer present.

Best practices on branching.

• Branching works by enabling pages, not skipping to pages. For example, if you want a respondent to see page 5 after answering a “no” to a yes/no question on page 2, you would essentially enable pages 3 and 4 for the “yes” response.
• All pages that are not enabled within a survey will be visible to all respondents. For example, if in the above example page 4 was not enabled for the “yes” response then all respondents would see page 4.
• The last page of the survey should not be included in the Branching Schema. This page contains the Finish button which allows respondents to submit their survey.
• The Branching Report can be useful when troubleshooting Branching problems. This report is available by selecting View | Branching Summary from the Inquisite Survey Builder.

Summary of a CSM Role

What is a Customer Success Manager? Customer Success Managers partner with clients to:

• Tailor solutions that address their unique business needs, (b) ensure that their program objectives are achieved
• Provide expert guidance on strategic actions to take as a result of the feedback collected
• Ensure that they are satisfied

Our Support team handles inquiries from clients who require assistance with resolving technical issues with Allegiance products; inquiries are received over the phone or by email. They also respond to questions or issues that respondents may have as they participate in client surveys.