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8/6/2019 VoviciWP EFM Best Practices Customer Loyalty Leaders

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i Enterprise Feedback Management: The Best Practices of Customer Loyalty Leaders

Feedback that drives vision.

vovici.com45365 Vintage Park Plaza, Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166 t: 703.481.9326 f: 703.783.0069 e: [email protected] vovici.com45365 Vintage Park Plaza, Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166 t: 703.481.9326 f: 703.783.0069 e: [email protected]

Enterprise Feedback Management:The Best Practices of CustomerLoyalty Leaders


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vovici.comii Enterprise Feedback Management: The Best Practices of Customer Loyalty Leaders

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Feedback Management Pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Strategic vs. Tactical EFM Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Feedback Management Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Co-Creation Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The Role of Systems, Processes and Software in EFM . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Change to CRM Best Practices and Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Feedback & Operational Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Enterprise Feedback Management Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Incorporating Competitive Benchmarking in EFM Frameworks . . . . . 12

Communicating Results Throughout The Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Making Customer Research & Insight Actionable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Discovering Trends in Customer Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Trends and Future Directions in the Area of EFM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

About Vovici . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20


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vovici.com1 Enterprise Feedback Management: The Best Practices of Customer Loyalty Leaders

Introduction

With todays economic pressures it is more critical than ever to deepen existing customer relationships

its much more cost effective to keep your current customers than it is to gain new ones.

The recent global downturn has put a dramatic new focus on measuring the customer experience. In

2009, 63% of survey respondents in the Vovici/CGA Customer Experience IQ (CEIQ) study of over 200

companies around the globe said that customer experience management (CEM) was important to their

business, up from 47% in 2008.

Many organizations recognize the importance of engaging customers, employees and partners but nd

it difcult to establish sustained interactions across multiple channels. Market research departments

manage projects to gather input for specic initiatives. Marketing departments analyze the metrics of the

web site and other marketing campaigns. IT departments coordinate customer relationship management

(CRM) systems, tracking attributes and customer purchases but not customer attitudes. Surprisingly, few

organizations today are treating the actual customer feedback itself as the asset.

Customer feedback management is a foreign concept to many organizations. The majority of businesses

dont treat customer feedback itself as an asset. A formal customer feedback program is much more

than just surveys. In this whitepaper we will discuss how enterprise feedback management (EFM) helps

organizations leverage feedback to increase loyalty, facilitate innovation, and inuence critical business

decisions. EFM provides a mechanism to centrally manage the deployment of customer, employee and

partner feedback programs. An integrated approach includes survey systems, panel management and

online community solutions that enable you to listen, interpret, act and monitor feedback. These are the

building blocks, the tools you will need to successfully build a truly comprehensive feedback program.

The Feedback Management PyramidEFM

Enterprise Feedback Management provides a

solution to establish sustained interaction across

multiple channels with customers, employees and

partners. Moving from survey tools to enterprise

feedback management helps organizations build

customer loyalty, with the adoption of EFM solutions

having a 49% correlation to the customer loyalty

index of the Vovici CEIQ study.


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vovici.com2 Feedback Best Practices for Chief Customer Ocers

Research Community Management

When no one owns feedback, disparate practices, tools and standards begin to arise across different

teams, departments and divisions. This is largely because survey tools provide for gathering customerfeedback but not for organizing it. Today, most large rms have dozens or even hundreds of separate

accounts with survey tools. Employees conduct online surveys to solicit the information they need to answer

specic questions. In the process, they degrade the research process. Response rates decline, as too

many individuals send out too many survey invitations. Respondents are confused, as questionnaires are

published with leading questions and ambiguous lists of choices. Its easy for do-it-yourself researchers

to collect data poorly, leading the business to the wrong conclusions and the wrong decisions.

Panel Management

Panel management is the recognition that customer feedback is an asset and should be treated as such.

In order to preserve customers willingness to respond to surveys, organizations need to control andconserve access to customers for survey research. Too often, organizations survey all or most of their

customers rather than a random sample which, at the cost of modestly lower statistical validity, enables

many more surveys to run in parallel. Good panel management practices treat survey respondents as an

ecosystem and make sure not to hunt respondents to extinction.

Survey Tools

Surveys are a great way of gathering data that is representative of customers as a whole: quantitative

information. Market research online communities (MROCs), are a complementary research technology

that allows researchers to monitor and initiate rich conversations between customers: qualitative

information. In 2008, 95% of qualitative research was gathered ofine, compared to only 50% ofquantitative researchMROCs represent a signicant opportunity for realizing the time savings and cost

advantages of online research. By moving to research community management, rms are able to gather

more extensive qualitative information than can be collected with focus groups, on a continuous rather

than an ad-hoc basis. This enables rms to turn to customers for both strategic and tactical decisions.

Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) unites surveys and research communities to provide a fuller

picture of customers, in numbers and in their own words. The marketing research department now

mentors and assists employees as they conduct research; research data is pushed out to employees in

hierarchical reports that tailor it exactly to their responsibilities. The marketing department learns the Voice

of the Customer and hears ideas and issues raised directly by customers. The IT department integratesCRM with the panel management capabilities of EFM: professionals can then easily target groups of

customers for particular surveys, and customers themselves see shorter and smarter questionnaires,

with information they have already provided the organization embedded behind the scenes.

Moving from survey tools to enterprise feedback management helps build customer loyalty. According

to the Vovici CEIQ review of 24 best practices, the worst practice is simply collecting market research.

Firms with highly loyal customers are more likely to distribute research data to employees, co-create


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new products and services with customers and prospects, and link CRM and EFM systems to build

360-degree views of customers. Moving from survey tools to enterprise feedback management helps

organizations better listen and act on customer feedback.

Strategic vs. Tactical EFM Activities

According to the CEIQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers have a formal customer

experience strategy and the tactical plans to execute against it. In fact, out of 24 best practices studied,

having a formal customer-experience strategy in place had the highest positive correlation (0.59) to the

customer loyalty index.

But its not enough to just have a strategy: you must also have planned programs and tactics in place to

achieve the strategy through practical, measurable changes (0.44 correlation). Further, to be effective,

a strategy and plan must have the support of senior leadership and be communicated throughout the

organization (0.42 correlation).

While three quarters of respondents to the study say that they have a CEM strategy, fewer than half have

formal CEM programs in place along with compensation programs that align with CEM objectives. Many

organizations appear to be paying lip service to the importance of CEM, with only 42% of respondents

reporting that senior executives compensation is tied to the achievement of CEM goals.

A formal customer-experience strategy is in place.

Our customer-experience strategy and tactics deliver

practical, measureable changes to the way our organization operates.

Customer-experience measurement has the active support

of my organizations senior management team.

Loyalty

Correlation

Our organization behaves towards customers

in a way that matches our brand promise.

% Strongly Agree Average Agreement

0.59

0.44

0.42

0.37

22.9%

13.4%

26.9%

9.2%

7.1

6.0

7.1

5.4

Does your senior management

team have a customer experience

objective as part of their

personal objectives?

Are any of your seniormanagement team eligible for

bonuses based on achieving customer

experience objectives?

YesNo

YesNo

Over two-thirds of

senior managers

have formal CEM

objectives...

...But fewer than half have

their compensation tied to

achieving CEM objectives

42%

58%

67%

33%


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Having an executive sponsor and the buy-in of the senior leadership team are indispensable components

of success, but they may take time to achieve. Ultimately, this commitment to a CEM strategy and plan

must translate into the organization in a way that allows the brand promise to be fullled (0.37 correlation).

Feedback Management Best Practices

Another conclusive nding of the CEIQ determined that organizations that have the most loyal customers

have approached primary research with a coordinated strategy of feedback management.

Standardizing on a common feedback management solution throughout the enterprise provides manybenets for organizations. First, they can use the platform to coordinate activities across different

departments and functional areas, helping to eliminate duplicate activity. Second, a common platform

enables the use of guidelines and guardrails that empower users with the ability to capture data within

pre-approved parameters and branding standards. Finally, it enables easy information sharing among

internal stakeholders while eliminating redundant costs for multiple platforms.

Once the platform is in place, organizations must agree on a set of metrics that will be used to evaluate

the customer experience. These metrics can be drawn from one of the many existing CEM metrics that

already exist, such as Net Promoter, ACSI, the Apostle Model, Customer Heartbeat and many others, or

they can utilize a proprietary model. While researchers can critique each measure, and some are better

than others for different industries and different organizations, consider this: The most important element

of success is to agree on a set of metrics and then apply them consistently throughout the organization.

We have a standard feedback management solution used

throughout the organization.

We have a standard customer satisfaction, loyalty or

experience measure used across the organization.

We coordinate feedback eorts across all parts of the

organization.

Loyalty

Correlation

We track over time how customers perceive the experience

we are providing them.


0.49

0.47

0.47

0.40

9.4%

16.2%

8.6%

15.5%

5.2

6.1

4.9

5.7

Organizations with the highest customer

loyalty use a common feedback platform and

use standard metrics across the organization.


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Co-Creation Best Practices

Organizations with the most loyal customers actively engage their customers in co-creation.

A new breed of customer now exists that demands to be heard and who wants to engage in a two-way

dialogue about issues that are important to them. As a result, organizations that have the most loyal

customers include customers in the ideation process around product and process improvement. Very

closely related to this practice is having a formal process for placing customer input into the planning cycle,

instead of relying on ad-hoc methods. Fundamentally, these organizations are engaging customers at

every step in the process and, importantly, are providing customers with status updates on the ideas that

they have submitted, as well as informing them if their ideas have not been put into an implementation

plan.

In fact, each of the four co-creation best practices we examined in the CEIQ study are in the top nine best

practices with the highest correlation to customer loyalty out of all 24 practices reviewed.

How can your organization apply these best practices to build customer loyalty? First, create a formal

process to engage in co-creation activities with customers, through quantitative surveys and through

qualitative means such as social media and online communities. Share with your customers what steps

your taking based on their input, closing the feedback loop so that your customers are motivated to

provide information on an ongoing basis.

We include customer ideas for both strategic initiatives and

tactical process improvements.

Our planning cycle includes formal processes for obtaining

customer input.

We approach the design, development and improvement of

products and services with customers as co-creators.

Loyalty

Correlation

We systematically prioritize customer ideas into short- and

long-term roadmaps.


0.56

0.55

0.54

0.51

11.2%

14.7%

13.2%

12.9%

5.3

5.7

5.6

6.0

Successful organizations include customers

in the ideation process.


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The Role of Systems, Processes and Software in EFM

SystemsEFM within CRM

Enterprise feedback management is typically considered within the context of customer relationship

management systems. In the independent report published by Forrester Research, Inc., TechRadar for

BP&A Professionals: The Extended CRM Application Ecosystem, Q3 2009, EFM is placed at the center

of all the applications that integrate with CRM systems. The report sorts 19 application categories into ve

broad areas: Customer Understanding (the hub, containing EFM, Customer Business Intelligence (CBI)

Customer Data Management (CDM)), Customer Targeting, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention

and Customer Collaboration.

Forrester Research, Inc. recognizes the central role that EFM can play in extending the capabilities of

traditional CRM. Clearly, customer understanding is critical to each of the other segments:

Customer targeting works best

when organizations understand

the types of customers that are

most satised and most loyal, as

discovered through EFM surveys.

One could argue that customer

targeting without customer

surveying is like shooting in the

dark.

Customer acquisition works

best when deploying sales force

automation. And sales force

automation works best when

integrated with the customer

understanding that comes from

transactional surveys into new

and lost accounts. Acquisition

is also supported when EFM is

used to audit, measure and alert

issues in Contract Life-cycle

Management (CLM) systems.

Successful organizations include customersin the ideation process

Customer targeting

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Customer retention

Customeracquisition

Customercollaboration

Customer understanding

Enterprise feedback management (EFM)

Customer business intelligence (CBI)

Customer data management (CDM)

Product life-cycle management (PLM)

Enterprise marketing management

(EMM)

eCommerce

Customer communityplatforms (CCP)

Customer forums (CF) Sales force automation

(SFA)

Partner relationship

management (PRM)

Congure, price

and quote (CPQ)

Revenue and pricingmanagement (RPM)

Order management

Contract life-cycle

management (CLM)

Electronic billpresentment and

payment (EBPP)

IVR/speech portals

Contact center infrastructure

Field service management

(FSM)

Customer service and support (CSS)


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Customer retention is a key focus of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty studies. By using

surveys with email alerts and triggers, EFM systems help organizations intervene to improve customer

loyaltynot just measure it.

Customer collaboration has been a particular area of focus for EFM vendors. Vovici integrates with

third-party customer forums and customer community platforms, as well as offers our own MROC

platform specic to research.

Back at the center of the hub, few EFM systems have yet been integrated with third-party BI (Business

Intelligence) systems. A BI/EFM system that uniquely combines survey and operational data is a powerful

tool for creating highly analytical and segmented reports on the y and sharing relevant, personalized

reports across internal boundaries.

Change to CRM Best Practices and IntegrationAccording to the Vovici CEIQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers make sophisticated

use of their CRM systems.

Nothing undermines the loyalty of your customers more than when your organization demonstrates that

it doesnt know who they are, what they have bought or how they have interacted with you. Too often

survey authors ask customers to provide basic details about themselves rather than cross reference thatinformation from a CRM system.

By associating known information about the customer such as name, company name, product/service

history, support interactions and other relevant data with requests for unknown transactional, attitudinal

or experiential data, organizations can engender much higher degrees of customer loyalty. This approach

achieves two ends: rst, it shows customers that youre treating them as individuals and not as numbers;

second, it allows organizations to ask fewer questions but get better data. By no longer needing to ask

customers to provide answers to questions which you already have answers to in a CRM system, its

possible to ask fewer questions but get better data by further reducing feedback fatigue. How valuable

was this practice? With a 0.57 loyalty correlation, it was second only to having a strategic commitment tocustomer experience management.

Unfortunately, many organizations have not yet standardized on a single CRM system. And, those that

have often fail to integrate other applications with the CRM system where appropriate, and miss the

opportunity to establish the CRM system as the central data repository for customer information.


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Only by appending CRM data to attitudinal information can organizations build a complete 360-degree

view of their customer and their customers experience with the organization. These four practices truly

leverage CRM to build customer loyalty.

The majority of organizations with an EFM platform do not integrate it with their CRM system, which was

the CEIQ best practice with the lowest adoption of the 24 practices studied. CRM integration with EFM is

a classic case of 1+1=3. Integration is easier to do than ever before (thanks to web APIs), and the small

added investment in integration can pay both tangible and intangible dividends, while leveraging both

systems that you already have in place. The return on investment (ROI) comes from higher customer

retention, more accurate data and cost savings.

Higher customer retention: Out of 24 best practices studied in the Vovici CEIQ study, integrating

CRM data with customer feedback responses was one of the top two practices with the highestpositive correlation to customer loyalty. By integrating what you already know with what you want to

know, your organization treats customers as individuals. Failure to integrate means that you have to

ask questions that the customer believes you should already know the answer to (e.g., what products

and services they buy), creating a sense of distance between you and the customer, degrading their

trust in your brand.

More accurate data: Integration gives your surveys access to more accurate information and

improves response rates, also increasing accuracy. Most organizations with CRM systems invest

regular resources in cleaning and validating the data in those systems. By using this data with your

survey feedback, you develop more accurate analyses. The data is often more reliable than whatcustomers could recall (they dont remember the date of rst purchase, when their contract is up or

exactly which product conguration they use). Youll get greater response rates from personalized

emails and from shorter surveys (shorter because many of the questions are hidden and populated

by the CRM data).

Cost savings: Typically customer contact records are exported manually from the CRM system

and then imported as temporary mailing lists into the EFM platform. By setting up automated

synchronization, you remove this ongoing labor cost.

We integrate data from our CRM system with

customer feedback responses.

We integrate other application with our

CRM system as appropriate.

We have a standard customer relationship management

system used across the organization.

Loyalty

Correlation

We have a 360-degree view of the customers experience

with us and attitudes towards our organization.


0.57

0.49

0.47

0.41

7.7%

6.1%

4.3%

6.0%

4.1

3.8

4.0

4.4


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Feedback & Operational Processes

Closed-Loop Feedback Process

The closed-loop feedback

process starts with choosing

the metric that your

organization seeks to monitor,

understand and improve. When

you measure a variable, you

will pay more attention to it.

Which metric to use as the Key

Performance Indicator is an

important decision, depending

on which aspects of customer

loyalty are most important

to you (repeat purchases,

upselling or retention see

the Vovici white paper, The

Customer Satisfaction Survey

for more details).

The closed loop is about resolution. For example, after visiting an Apple store for a transaction, you

could be sent a survey. Typically, complaints within a survey are forwarded to the relevant store within an

hour. Closed-loop feedback is not treated as traditional research (consulted rarely), but is an embedded

operational metric, and is consulted daily.

The four steps of the process:

Collect customer feedback data

Make changes

Communicate feedback to customers and employees

Rene the changes

A closed-loop feedback process transforms market research into operations. Multiple Vovici customers

have reported improving customer loyalty within days of implementing this process, as at-risk customers

identify themselves and receive follow-up to rectify their issues.

Collect customerfeedback data

Make changes

Communicatefeedback to

customers &

employees

Refine thechanges

Closed-Loop Feedback Process

The core of

the VoC process and

change management


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Even a simple closed-loop process drives improvement of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), promotes

active listening to customers and prioritizes customer-centric decisions. Some of the benets:

Improve your integrity with your customers

Engage employees and customers

Identify opportunities rapidly

Prioritize based on customer needs

Generate an ROI from the research

Feedback drives change: organizational and cultural change that produces growth and prot, driving

superior business performance.

Panel Management Quality Processes

Panel management provides an excellent framework for improving the quality of an organizations

feedback collection and customer insights.

1. Dont abuse your customer. Many in-house panels are created in a response to rampant Do-

It-Yourself surveying, which is often done with little oversight or quality control. Develop detailed

guidelines that all panel surveys should observe in order to improve the consistency and reliability

of the surveys your organization is elding. Use random samples rather than inviting every

customer. The Market Research (MR) department should create policies that govern how often

customers can be surveyed and by what means, in order to safeguard the long-term health of

customer participation in market research.

2. Have research departments vet questionnaires. What decisions are being made on the

basis of results from amateur surveys? These amateur surveys can lead the organization astray,

often incorporating biased questions or unrepresentative samples. Many research departments

have on-staff experts at questionnaire writing, specialists who can tease out key insights from

respondents, and professional researchers with decades of mastering the survey process. But

these are experts who arent available to their coworkers. Its time for market research departments

to rethink their mission. They should not simply be project managers, overseeing large outside

research efforts; they should be mentors to their coworkers, assisting fellow employees with the

deployment of surveys. To do this, MR departments need to expand, hiring additional staff with

the appropriate research skills and knack for teaching.

3. Embrace continuous process improvement. The initial guidelines should be looked at as a

foundation to build upon and improve over time, as the organization comes to new realizations

about what types of research work well for its specic customer base.


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4. Common resources. The market research department should create, maintain and eld

research resources to be used in common. The research department should create questionnaire

templates with standard question wording and scales for other departments to use, to support

internal benchmarking.

Enterprise Feedback Management SolutionsDeclining response rates, rampant oversurveying and poorly designed questionnaires are symptoms

of organizations where departments have led the bottom-up adoption of survey tools. This frequently

happens in an organization where no MR function exists or where MR concentrates primarily on strategic

or outsourced projects.

With market research uninvolved, surveying starts as an individual activity, where each individual may

have selected a different survey software application to use. Over time, these individuals begin working

together, and survey research within the department turns into a collaborative effort. The requirements

become increasingly complex as users knowledge of surveying increases and the complexity of

requirements grow.

Each department or division often evolves through four stages in its use of survey systems:

1. Survey activity using simple survey tools is widely distributed.

2. De facto survey-domain experts emerge through experience with these tools and through peer

recognition. Only rarely do these experts have any formal training in market research.

3. Survey development, deployment and analysis changes from a solitary effort to a collaborative

approach within the department and occasionally across departments.

4. The need quickly arises for more sophisticated survey systems, greater collaborative capability

and wider information sharing.

While enterprise feedback management systems are intended to provide cross-departmental

standardization, they are adapted frequently for standardization within a department. Departments often

have all the same problems as the enterprise does when it comes to survey research, only smaller in

scale.


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Incorporating Competitive Benchmarking in EFM Frameworks

External benchmarking

Extensive academic research into customer-satisfaction and customer-loyalty metrics in the past 20

years has provided valuable insights into the best questions to ask to measure satisfaction and loyalty.

Yet it is as if this research was never done. Most organizations are not aware of these ndings and cobble

together their own metrics. In fact, according to the CEIQ survey, 83% of respondents reported that their

organization was not using any standard customer experience metric.

Vovici provides extensive consultation to the use of popular external benchmarks, especially:

The ACSI Score

The Forrester CxPi Customer

Experience Index

The Customer Effort Score

In addition, Vovici promotes the public domain CSAT question, the Apostle Model, the TNS Loyalty Model,

the Business Over Broadway RAP (Retention/Advocacy/Purchasing) model.

Internal benchmarking

One of the reasons organizations need enterprise feedback management is to standardize on the same

question wording and scale across your products, departments and divisions. Whichever measures you

decide are best for your organization, use them consistently. This will enable you to compare and contrast

different parts of the business. Internal benchmarking can help different groups learn from one another.

Unfortunately, such standardization is the exception rather than the rule. In a review of 29 customersatisfaction questions used by one Vovici partner, for instance, we identied eight different scales in use

with nine different ways of wording the question.


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Communicating Results Throughout The Company

When it comes to reporting, the two keymistakes of traditional market research have

been to provide a static summary of research

results and to design it for one audience.

Top-down reporting

Bottom-up reporting

Managerial reporting

For instance, for one retailer with 900 branches, 100 districts and 10 regions, the same survey is reported

over a thousand different ways:

The branch manager and assistant branch manager can drill down on the survey data for their

retail location in detail.

The district manager can compare each branch in their district and can dive into the details for

each branch, looking for what one branch management team is doing better than another.

The regional vice president and assistant regional vice president can compare districts and

branches, looking for best practices that can be applied across the region.

Corporate executives get dashboard reports showing high-level trends and comparison of regions

and can drill down in detail to the results for any branch, district or region.

Employee-Customer Engagement Best Practices

According to the CEIQ study, organizations with the most loyal customers not only measure and monitor

employee interactions with customers but also share that feedback with employees (a strong correlation

of 0.54 to the studys loyalty index). This creates a closed-feedback loop that allows customer-facing

staff members to understand the impact of their interactions on customers and enables the creation of

programs that allow employees to improve those interactions over time.

In addition, companies with the most loyal customers also periodically share Voice of the Customer

(VoC) information with employees across the organization, ensuring widespread understanding of the

customers point of view. Taken a step further, these organizations also engage customers in two-way

dialogues through online communities. This allows a wide variety of individuals within the business to

interact and engage with customers. CEOs always talk about making their organizations customer

centric. By talking to customers and evangelizing their viewpoints across the company, the organization

truly becomes centered on the customer.

Execuves

Management

Front-Line Staff

Tailoring Research Results to Different Audiences

Top-Down

Botom-Up

Source: ConsumerContact


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Finally, organizations with the most loyal customers also recognize the link between satised employees

and loyal customers by measuring employee satisfaction on a regular basis. Satised and loyal employees

reect their positive attitudes and good behaviors to customers, who in turn increase their loyalty to the

business.

Averaging these four best practices together, the resulting index has a 0.65 correlation to customer loyalty,

the highest of any of the six practice areas examined. Clearly, employee-customer engagement is key to

unlocking greater customer loyalty.

Making Customer Research & Insight Actionable

Taking action on survey data is driven by tailored views of the data (as described above), the closed-

feedback loop and and the service recovery process.

Service Recovery Process

As Chief Customer Ofcers drive actionable survey results, one of their challenges is that the market

researchers who work for them have not traditionally concerned themselves with using surveys to

intervene on behalf of individual customers, because of the tradition of respondent anonymity and the

interest in measuring rather than affecting customer satisfaction. But applied feedback techniques require

designing processes that include service recovery after a dissatised respondent completes a survey.

This prevents negative comments and sentiment from getting buried in the data and facilitates direct

action while there is still an opportunity to recover.

Employee interactions with customers are regularly

measured, monitored and reported back to the employee.

Our organization regularly looks at the relationship between

employee satisfaction and customer experience scores.

VoC insights are periodically shared with

employees across the organization.

Loyalty

Correlation

Employee representatives from most departments interact

with customers in an online community.


0.54

0.50

0.50

0.48

15.4%

10.2%

6.0%

8.6%

6.1

5.1

4.0

4.8


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Similar to customer satisfaction surveys, social media research is not anonymous when your monitoring

tools report back feedback, you can identify people (or at least their online personas) and either thank

them for that feedback or try to get them assistance if they need it. Some organizations are expanding

their customer service teams to monitor social media directly, so that they can respond as issues are

tweeted and blogged. The market research department is then free to collect the feedback simply for

aggregate analysis.

Email triggers highlight two key aspects of enterprise feedback management: 1) transforming surveys from

projects and integrating them into processes; and 2) distributing survey data to employees. Typically, a

web survey of customers is set up with triggers or alerts that are red off to staff each time a respondent

gives a low rating to customer satisfaction or loyalty questions.

For instance, through an automated process, each call to a contact center generates a follow-up emailsurvey within 24 hours of the issue being marked as resolved. This survey is short andbehind the

scenes, thanks to CRM integrationincludes data about the transaction being rated. If the customer

rates the service poorly on one of several key measures, an email is triggered. This notication of a poor

rating is sent to a contact center manager, and includes within it the customers answers to the survey as

well as data about the customer, product line and call-center transaction.

By receiving this notication moments after the customer has completed the survey, the manager is able

to begin customer recovery with a call or email. The actual manager notied might vary depending on

other elds contained within the survey, such as location of the contact center or location of the customer.

An EFM solution allows quick and real-time triggers to alert managers of potential issues based on customer feedback responses.


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Of course, the survey response is compiled and aggregated for reporting purposes, as with a traditional

survey. However, thanks to the user of email triggers, measuring satisfaction has been transformed into

intervening to improve that satisfaction.

Discovering Trends in Customer Data

Trend reports and dashboards

In research conducted into the best practices that distinguished loyalty leaders from loyalty laggards,

survey research company Business Over Broadway, surveyed 227 customer feedback program

professionals: 86% were with B2B rms, 80% were in North America and 36% were with rms with

1000+ employees. Each professional completed an organizational self-assessment of 28 best practices

and rated their organizations customer loyalty across two outcome measures.

From this, Business Over Broadway calculated an industry percentile ranking of customer loyalty for each

organization and contrasted the average percentile for organizations that had adopted a best practice

against those that hadnt. Importantly, the average loyalty percentile for organizations that hadnt included

customer feedback in executive dashboards was 43%, compared to an average loyalty percentile of 70%

for those rms that had. In other words, organizations that integrated feedback into dashboards scored

27 points higher (27) than organizations that didnt. For more information on this research, please refer

to Beyond the Ultimate Question by Bob E. Hayes (Quality Press, 2009).

Pracces that Disnguish Loyalty Leaders from Laggards

METHOD RESEARCHREPORTING

GOVERNANCE

INTEGRATED BUSINESS PROCESSES

STRATEGY

Source: Business over Broadway

CF included in vision/missions/goals 19

CF important as finance in decision-making 21

CF included in exectuive dashboards 27

Web surveys used for CF

15

Results widely shared

9

Operaonal linkages

22

CFP integrated into process & technology 14


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Trends and Future Directions in the Area of EFM

Multichannel

What channels should you be tuning into to receive the Voice of the Customer? A Walker Information

survey revealed the following primary channels for customer feedback:

Surveys (97%) Almost every attendee uses surveys. VoC started with survey research, which

remains the structured-feedback cornerstone of any Voice of the Customer program. Let the

availability of text mining change your approach to questionnaire design and use text analytics

for survey analysis as well, but surveys ask the questions that your customers arent talking about

on their own.

Contact Centers (78%) Chris Jones of Intuit said that the contact center is one of the key

listening posts for Intuit. Chat logs, email correspondence and web-form submissions to service

portals each provide an excellent source of information about customer frustrations, in their own

words.

Employees (53%) Front-line employees can be a transmitter for the Voice of the Customer.

Use surveys and employee communities to enable staff to share what they are hearing from

customers.

Online Communities/Panels (47%) - User forums and online communities for Intuit software

applications are another of its listening posts for VoC. Chris said, The business as a culture lovescustomer feedback, and this gives them all the data we can. Its fun to now know what you didnt

know.

Social Media (31%) - The blogosphere and microblogosphere (e.g., Twitter and its competitors)

provide timely information into what a select group of your customers and prospects is thinking

and saying to one another.

Customer Councils (28%) Advisory groups consisting of large accounts (for business-to-

business (B2B) rms) or randomly selected consumers (for business-to-consumer (B2C) rms)

whether meeting ofine or online can provide a rich set of ongoing information about customer

perceptions.

Reviews - Unlike social media streams, reviews provide rich sets of additional information. Rory

discussed harvesting customer reviews from e-commerce sites, extracting ratings, structure,

value, qualities and metadata along with the reviews and comments. You hear what customers

are telling one another in public about your products and services.


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Research management

Sometimes the best survey is not doing a new survey at all. And sometimes the best questions are the

ones you dont ask. Enterprise feedback management should encourage wider use of past surveys: the

business user with a research question can review past studies to see if any have answered the issue at

hand.

Sometimes a study will have most of the information needed to answer a new question and with a bit of

added data integration will be able to answer everything. For instance, a new customer segmentation

or view of customer data can be applied to old survey results if those responses tie back to individual

customers; if the sales organization is testing a new industry model, an analyst can integrate that industry

coding into the survey results and do a cross-tabulation on the added eld.

Social listening

When an organization hasnt asked customers about a specic issue, they may have talked about that

issue on the Web. Enterprise feedback management needs to grow to integrate social listening.

For instance, according to HotGrinds, a listening platform:

81% of Internet users have done online research on a product at least once

20% of Internet users do online product research on a typical day

73 -87% of readers of online reviews of restaurants, hotels and others services report that such

reviews signicantly inuence their purchase 32% have provided an online rating of a product, service or person

30% have posted an online comment or review regarding a product or service

Consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rate item than a 4-star-

rated item (varying by product and service category)

Text analytics

Prior to text analytics, analysts could not read all the verbatim responses for surveys with tens of

thousands of responses. For such surveys, companies would draw a random sample of the responses,

read them to develop a coding sheet of common categories of responses, then code or categorize each

sampled response to develop some quantitative estimates of the frequency of occurrence of these codes.

For large coding sheets, sometimes budget or time constraints would limit the coder to only manually

classifying the verbatim responses according to the most frequent codes; in effect, ignoring the long tail

of categories on the coding sheet.


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Text analytics decreases the cost of coding high volumes of comments and increases the quality of that

analysis. Text mining now lets you categorize every single response, which was impossible before when

tracking hundreds of thousands of satisfaction surveys a month. Further, you can now categorize theentire coding sheet, since the work is automated. You can now identify low frequency negative customer

experiences, picking up on rare events that would have been lost if coding was done manually.

In summary, text mining is decreasing the cost of analyzing large quantities of verbatim responses,

increasing the depth of verbatim analysis, and providing greater exibility for adapting to changes in the

data.


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About Vovici

Vovici is the leading provider of online survey management and customer feedback solutions. Powerful,scalable and easy to use, Vovicis solutions help companies engage customers, employees and

partners to increase loyalty, facilitate innovation, and inuence critical business decisions. Thousands of

organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500, rely on Vovici to turn information

into action. Visit www.vovici.com for more information.

We have nearly two decades of industry experience

We have over 1,500 customers, including 50% of the Fortune 500

We invented the term Enterprise Feedback Management and persuaded leading analysts rms

and our competitors to adopt it

We have helped our customers execute over 200 million surveys to drive their Voice of the

Customer programs

About the Author

Jeffrey Henning, PRC is the founder and VP of Strategy of Vovici. Henning has

been a market research consultant, analyst and writer as well as a software

developer. He writes regularly for the Market Research Association blog, The

Researchers Perspective. Henning co-founded Perseus Development Corp.,

developed SurveySolutions for the Web and led the marketing and software

development teams that pioneered the concept of Enterprise Feedback

Management. Earlier, he worked with BIS Strategic Decisions (now part of Forrester Research, Inc.) in

the U.S. and Europe managing survey-research projects for the Fortune 1000. He writes regularly on the

Vovici blog and has written the e-book Survey Software Success.

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