In this first installment in the Results Oriented Customer Listening Series, I’ll introduce the key elements of Best-in-Class Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programs.  We’ll discuss five levels of organizational maturity around VOC measurement.

1. In the Game

2. Solid Foundation

3. Causal Prediction

4. Action Orientation

5. Best-in-Class

While your organization may have some elements that we’ll discuss as being part of a more mature VOC program, if you don’t have all of the antecedents discussed in prior maturity levels, you aren’t taking full advantage of the great work you’re doing.  Each of the elements we’ll discuss has a compounding effect, and when you’ve covered off all of these bases, you’ll have transformed your VOC program from hand-written map on the back of a napkin to the latest, greatest GPS money can buy.

Why do I use this analogy?  Well think of your VOC program as a navigational tool with your destination being delivering a truly best-in-class customer experience that differentiates you from competitors.  The tool won’t do the driving for you, but it will tell you where to turn.  And a more sophisticated tool such as a GPS system is going to do so with far greater results than Uncle Buddy’s recollection of the drive from 20 years ago.

With that, let’s jump right in to the first level of organizational maturity around VOC measurement…

In the Game:

You have a survey program

Good job!  Seriously.  A major first step in trying to get somewhere is recognizing that you don’t possess the requisite knowledge by yourself to make all the right calls.  You’ve effectively stopped and asked for directions, and as several of us men can attest, this isn’t always easy to do.

Now survey programs can take many forms and at this point we’ve just established that you’re asking someone some questions about at least some of their experiences.  Whether or not you’re asking the right questions of the right people and processing that information in the right way will determine where your organization is at in the subsequent stages of maturity.

Are you measuring the entire customer experience, or is it very transactional in nature?  Ideally, the answer is “yes”, meaning you have tactical measurements around each individual customer interaction that guide improvements to those touchpoints, but you also have a program that’s more strategically-oriented and covers the end-to-end customer experience.

Does the program clearly identify where the organization needs to focus to have the greatest impact on customer buying behavior, or are you just shooting for the lowest scoring items?  Do you know how much benefit investing in billing processes provides relative to investing in customer service?  What’s the appropriate measure of this benefit… is it higher revenue per transaction, increased lifetime value through extending tenure, or increased organic growth through referrals?  Can you quantify these benefits?

Think carefully about the answers to these questions.  As we discuss the later stages of organizational maturity around VOC, these answers will determine how far along your organization is and consequently how much value it’s getting out of the VOC measurement program.

In the coming days, we’ll discuss the second phase, the “Solid Foundation.”  Until then, please use the comments to pass along any feedback or questions, and I look forward to the discussion!

Over the weekend, we took an evening to relax by renting a movie.  I’ve been a big fan of Amazon Video on Demand for the past several months and, like many nowadays, rarely leave the house to rent a movie anymore.

Building up goodwill through positive experiences

Throughout all of my experiences with Amazon, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the service.  In this case, I’m using the term “satisfaction” to mean that each time I’ve used the service, it worked as expected.  The movie I ordered played almost instantly, the streaming was uninterrupted, I was billed the correct amount, and incurred no problems whatsoever.  So by “satisfied,” I’m meaning to say that I received what I expected when I paid for the movie rental.

And then the problem…

This weekend, however, I had an unfortunate experience renting from Amazon.  About 10 minutes into the movie, the streaming stopped.  Fortunately, it restarted again within a minute or two.  This wasn’t a major pain, as it picked up where I’d left off in the movie without much work on my part.  A few minutes later, this happened again and then again another 2 or 3 times.

Tapping into that bank of goodwill

Now as I said, I’ve had several good experiences with this service, so I gave Amazon the benefit of the doubt on this one.  Because of all of my positive experiences, I even started troubleshooting my own network, assuming that it may have been an issue on my end.  Eventually, we were able to finish the movie with only a few minor headaches.  Because of Amazon’s history of delivering repeated positive experiences to me, I brushed this one off.  I did not complain, tweet, etc. because Amazon had built up some goodwill with me based on past experiences.  And let’s be honest, the effort it would require to complain wasn’t worth the $3.99 to me.  After all, $3.99 worth of gas these days barely gets me home from the gas station.

If this had happened a second time, I probably wouldn’t have been as forgiving, but I expect there are a lot of customers out there like me.

The surprise service recovery!

As I mentioned, I had not complained or communicated in any way to Amazon that I had encountered problems.  So much to my surprise, I received an email today that read as follows:

Hello,

We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental(s) on Amazon Video On Demand:

Tangled

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount(s):

$3.99

While Amazon Video On Demand transactions are typically not refundable, we are happy to make an exception in this case. This refund should be processed within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear on your next billing statement for the same credit card used to purchase this item.

Please visit our troubleshooting page for tips on ways you can potentially improve your viewing experience: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200256920

We hope to see you again soon.

Amazon Video On Demand Team

How great is that?  I didn’t complain.  Honestly, I wasn’t even that annoyed by the initial problem.  But this message very clearly communicated that Amazon wants my business, and they did it PROACTIVELY!

From Amazon’s perspective, this communication was a soft push to their troubleshooting site so that both parties (me and Amazon) can avoid this again.  They said “hey, we’ll take care of it this time and here’s how you can prevent it in the future.”  It seems simple but it’s really refreshing given what we expect from the companies we do business with today.

The Result – A Tweet, A Blog, and Many Recommendations

I may have recommended Amazon Video on Demand once or twice prior to this experience.  But now I feel compelled to praise the service and recommend it to my friends, my family, and obviously on the Internet.  For less than $4, Amazon:

• Created an opportunity to educate me on causes of potential technical problems
• Did so by diffusing any ill will with mention of the refund first – a very effective strategy
• Turned a generally satisfied customer with one less-than-stellar experience into an extremely satisfied evangelist

Simple but brilliant.

About the author

Brian Backer is an experienced consultant in Customer Experience measurement, insights, and management. As a Director at CFI Group, Brian and his team consult blue chip organizations in optimizing customer satisfaction and loyalty, utilizing customer metrics to drive process improvements that deliver positive ROI.  Contact Brian at 734.623.1375.

An introduction to The Insighter’s multi-week series on designing Results-Oriented Customer Listening programs that drive action.

Are you measuring the customer experience effectively?

Chances are your organization has some type of survey program branded as the Voice of the Customer (VoC), Customer Experience Program, Customer Satisfaction Survey, Net Promoter Score, and the list goes on.  Every company of significant size has one.  Some serve as a rock-solid foundation for customer experience decision making, while others exist because “big companies measure satisfaction.”  Think about your organization’s program for a second and ask yourself the following question:

Is this tool driving positive change to the customer experience?

Over the course of my career, I’ve come across a number of organizations that have great intentions of differentiating on the customer experience.  The fact that these organizations reached out to our team at CFI Group is evidence of that.  They were committing to the customer experience but lacked the tools to properly measure the current state of affairs, prioritize improvement opportunities, and monitor their progress towards true best-in-class customer experiences.  For every company I’ve had the pleasure of working with throughout my career, there are hundreds of others saying to themselves:

“We’re committed to differentiating on customer experience, but somehow we’re just not getting there”

If this sounds familiar, then this series is for you.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the key success factors of a best-in-class Customer Listening program, one that is no longer just a line item on the scorecard but a change agent driving your organization to customer experience wins.

Throughout the series, we’ll touch upon a number of key success factors for customer experience measurement programs that will help you to:

• Evaluate your current survey program to determine if it has the key elements to be a truly best-in-class VoC program
• Gain buy-in and sell VoC results to your organization
• Define the role of front line employees in understanding your customers’ experiences
• Use VoC programs to prioritize customer-facing initiatives
• Use VoC to make the business cases for investing in these customer experience initiatives
• Get past silos to focus on cross-channel customer issues

Check back in the coming days for the first installment of the Results-Oriented Customer Listening Series, “The Best-in-Class Voice of the Customer Program.”

As always, this series is designed to spur discussion and questions, so please comment!

About the author

Brian Backer is an experienced consultant in Customer Experience measurement, insights, and management. As a Director at CFI Group, Brian and his team consult blue chip organizations in optimizing customer satisfaction and loyalty, utilizing customer metrics to drive process improvements that deliver positive ROI.  Contact Brian at 734.623.1375.

Last night I received via email a survey invitation from a national Telecom provider, administered by a well-known global market research firm.  The email itself was very apologetic for the experience I had and said everything a proper email invitation should.  As I’m reading through it in more detail this morning, I’m thinking about my experiences and with this Telecom and decided that I would share my feedback.  As a customer experience advocate, I enjoy sharing my experiences particularly when it may contribute to improving that experience for myself and others.

“We value your feedback.”
-Email invitation from national Telecom

When I clicked on the link to share my honest feedback, in the hopes it will indeed provide value to the provider, to my amazement all I saw was the branding of the global MR firm and a message that stated:

“This survey is now closed.”

That’s it.  My feedback is no longer valuable.

To be clear, I received the email at 9pm last night and went to take the survey at 8:30am this morning.  There is no language that the survey invitation expired.  It just closed… they don’t need my feedback.  Now as a fellow researcher I can only assume that the survey is now closed because the MR firm reached some preset quota, but it begs the question of what the survey invitation really is.

Yes, to a researcher a survey is a measurement.  It’s a data point.  I’m assuming this company had a preset target of how many “data points” they needed.  But the flip side to that is that I, as the customer, now feel like just a “data point.”  MY feedback is indeed NOT valuable to this particular organization because I wasn’t one of the first 500 to click the link.

As a customer, I view this as a touchpoint.  This organization values my feedback, and I was more than willing – even happy – to provide it to them.  I had a bad experience, and this company wants to listen to me.  That’s at least some consolation.  But now they slammed the door on me and teased me with their offer to listen.  That makes me even that much more dissatisfied with this company.

As you can probably take away from this, I’m pretty adamant that surveys are not just a measurement tool but are an important customer touchpoint.  I, however, have seen far too many instances where they are not treated as such.  So I’ll close with a few questions to my fellow researchers, as I’m most interested in varying perspectives:

Do you close out web surveys once you’ve reached a quota?  Why or why not?

If so, how do you address a customer like myself who wanted to participate?

Are surveys measurement tools or customer touchpoints?

You can’t manage what you don’t understand, and you can’t understand what you don’t measure. Heard this one before? Chances are you have, but how well do we really practice this simple philosophy?

If we can accept this simple adage to be true, then poor measurement leads to faulty insights and, ultimately, less-than-ideal corporate performance management. Conversely, good measurement leads to valuable insights and successful corporate performance management.

So, why do so many companies shortchange themselves when it comes to their performance measurement systems? With capital markets being as they are and pressure constantly mounting to demonstrate good measures of financial performance, more focus must be given to measurement systems to both explain and predict customer behavior, brand health and ultimately financial performance. In short, any successful corporate performance management system must be backed by organizational support for a strong corporate performance measurement system.

Notice the repeated use of the term “measurement system.” All successful companies have performance metrics by which they manage. Examples of such include everything from defect rates and call center grade-of-service to customer satisfaction scores and return on investment. But what is a measurement system? According to The American Heritage Dictionary, a system is:

A group of interacting, interrelated or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

So, a true measurement system is not only a simple collection of performance metrics, but one that quantifies how these individual metrics are “interacting, interrelated or interdependent.” The latter highlights where many collections of metrics such as business scorecards fail. So, why is this system concept important in how we look at performance metrics?

Well, consider the fact that we place so much emphasis on metrics to quantify what happened. More often than not, the consequences of making a bad decision on such information are too high to leave to speculation, so we measure such things as defect rates, first call problem resolution, on-time delivery, etc. If we find it important enough to quantitatively measure what happened, we should find it just as important to understand why it happened.

Measurement systems that utilize statistical techniques to quantify how all of these metrics are “interacting, interrelated or interdependent” help quantitatively explain why a certain phenomenon we observe happened. If the consequences of leaving what happened to mere guesswork are too costly, why do companies so often leave the why to speculation? By taking our collection of metrics and building a model that quantitatively shows how they interrelate, we have the foundation of a system that helps better understand each facet of how our businesses operate.

Taking a step beyond this, if we are able to better explain how something occurred in the past, we’re better prepared to predict what may occur in the future. If we can quantitatively explain how Metric X impacts Metric Y, we can begin to understand how to spend budgets to provide maximum benefit, better utilizing each dollar spent. Measurement systems, as predictive models, help to prioritize improvement and innovation efforts, while facilitating contingency planning based on internal, industry, or macroeconomic conditions.

In short, better measurement leads to better insights leads to better decisions and better performance.

About the author:
Brian Backer is an experienced researcher and consultant in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and utilizing customer feedback programs to drive process improvement and market innovation initiatives. He has a strong background in satisfaction and loyalty measurement as well as in business intelligence and process improvement methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma. For more information, e-mail brian@theinsighter.com.