Still siloed after all these years…

Nice article from Intelligent Enterprise on the importance of having ongoing customer feedback programs. It compares the various technologies out there – communities, survey feedback platforms, comment analysis, etc.  – and comes the the conclusion that they are all useful for a holistic program, but no silver bullet yet exists.

In addition, companies should create customer interaction redesign teams that look at key touch points and find ways to improve them by using customer feedback. “What can these teams do? Design processes that avoid issues, recover from problems, and delight customers,” Forrester said.

Finally, Forrester advises organization to develop a customer insight and response platform. Unfortunately, firms will need to piece together their own CIRP that facilitates the four key customer feedback processess: listening, interpreting, reacting and monitoring.

That’s because no one vendor offers a comprehensive solution. Providers come at the market from a number of different perspectives, including market research frms like Taylor Nelson Sofres interaction specialists like ForeSee Results, OpinionLab, and iPerceptions; survey-centric Vovici and SurveyMonkey; and more operationally focused Allegiance and Confirmit, Forrester said.

An integrated customer strategy is needed to create a vision, change company culture, employ the technologies in alignment with best practice, interpret results, and facilitate strategic changes.  Hey, we do that!

Satmetrix 2009 Annual Net Promoter® Benchmark Reports

New NPS rankings are out, for purchase. From John Abraham

“With the economy in turmoil, companies are focusing on customer experience and retention more than ever,” said John Abraham, general manager of Net Promoter programs at Satmetrix. “These benchmarks give companies a way to compare themselves against other companies in key industries and understand who is best-in-class when it comes to customer loyalty and organic growth potential.”

Vonage, Apple, USAA and Adobe are stars. I wonder what they are doing right? Check out the press release for more highlights.

Qwest is Twittering

“Qwest’s focus is on perfecting the customer experience, and Talk to Qwest is a program that embodies that vision,” said Brian Stading, Qwest vice president of sales support operations. “When we listen to our customers, contribute to the conversation and share what we learn in the process with all parts of the business – that’s when we begin to see the success stories.”

More info here.

10 Second Book Review

From Wall Street Journal….Inpire! by Jim Champy and Hit the Ground Running by Jason Jennings. Case studies from Stonyfield, ZipCar, and others.  Moral: Understand the needs of your customers and make stuff that they want = great customer experience.

Pretty simple really

Twitter: the NPS missing link?

Super article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the ways that airlines are beginning to use Twitter to establish one to one relationships wth customers.  Like most people (and organizations) that dabble with the medium Jetblue, Alaska Airlines and Southwest (to name a few) are using their Twitter accounts to blast “all points bulletins” to flyers about discounts, weather events etc.  Beyond that, some have dedicated resources to answering simple questions, and scanning the Twitter community for the latest complaints and suggestions:

Other airlines have had Twitter accounts for awhile, including jetBlue and Southwest. With public relations staffers in the cockpit, these airlines use Twitter to monitor consumer gripes in their tweets. They also field questions from Twitter-savvy fliers who find that they can often get a faster response from the airline via tweets than over e-mail or the phone.

For instance on March 26, one Twitter user pinged jetBlue at 10:49 a.m. asking, “I am flying on a red eye flight with my wife tonight. Are you charging for pillows and blankets?” Six minutes later the airline responded saying “Our Pillow and Blanket kit is $7 and includes CleanRest pillow, fleece & $5 coupon to Bed Bath & Beyond http://tr.im/shuteye.”

With over 300,000 followers, organizations like Jetblue can quickly determine what the latest customer issues might be on any given day, and also know have an idea of what their advocates (e.g., promoters) are saying about the brand. Here is what came up on a quick Twitter search this morning for Jetblue:

and this…

So, how can this kind of real time feedback inform a Net Promoter program? NPS can tell you the proportion of Promoter and Detractors in your customer base, and with some additional questions, a quantitative understanding of what part of the experience is driving loyalty. What it can’t do is keep track of exactly what your promoters (or detractors) are saying about your brand on any given day, and allow you to interact with them and make course corrections right away.  Companies need to take an integrated look at all the VOC tools at their disposal – NPS, Blogs, Communities, Twitter, and leverage them in different ways as part of a unified strategy of listening, learning, and acting.

Listen to this excellent (and brief) podcast to learn more about the latest efforts of Jetblue, Southwest, an Alaska Air.

Oh, by the way: Twitter @colinbrogan

Purple Cows create WOWs

This is an interesting, and intuitive post on the NetPromoter blog by Paul Marsden. Here, he talks about why just creating an adequate experience is not enough to make people loyal advocates of your brand:

But in order to cut through today’s recessionary caution and marketing clutter, brands – more than ever – need to be truly remarkable, in the same way a ‘Purple Cow’ would be, truly remarkable.  This is pure Net Promoter thinking, and backed up with Net Promoter evidence – in a pan-European multi-category study last year, we found that nearly 80% of all variation in Net Promoter Scores is explained by how remarkable your customers find your product or service experience. Which explains why 80% of the 30 newest entrants to Interbrand’s top 100 brand list owe their success to selling remarkable experiences rather that advertising clout.  Experiential brains, not advertising braun is what you need to succeed in marketing today.

Companies embarking on Net Promoter think somehow they will magically lift their scores through the act of measurement itself. In fact, they mistakenly believe that the score is an end in itself – it ain’t. Forgotton is the “Promoter” part of NPS. You can’t create customer WOW’s without a focus on improving the experience beyond what it takes to simply fix the gaps. Companies need to combine knowledge of customer needs, customer value, and their own creativity to build armies of promoters.

No, that’s not loyalty

Interesting article today on Search CRM on the topic of customer loyalty (see Leveraging customer loyalty in a down economy).  It’s great to hear stories of “customer centric cultures” and customer experience as a differentiator.  It’s even better to hear people talking about both “Operational loyalty” with long term (structural) approaches.  But we should be clear that an Operational Loyalty program is not about locking-in customers through “points.”  Real loyalty generates positive word-of-mouth and cross-sell opportunities; lock-in drives retention only until a better deal comes along.  So true Operational Loyalty programs must deal with engaging the operations – which often is your company’s front line – in the customer experience.  Your front line must be able to establish a customer dialog.  Far too many companies seem more interested in watching what front line employees (e.g. sales, call center) do or say, when instead they should be more interested in what they heard. 

Where does the most profitable source of growth come from in your business?  I’m not debating in this entry whether it’s a good idea to provide free services to get customers to come back (more on that in future posts).  But please don’t call that loyalty.

Finding excuses not to act on VOC

Nice, provocative post by Swantje Drescher here in the 1to1 blog.  She makes a point that some organizations can rely too much on gathering customer feedback that they are afraid to act, or postpone acting without reams of data gathered over long periods of time.

Companies are developing voice of the customer programs that take a structured approach to capture, catalog, and analyze the data. Many, however, are implementing supporting processes that, particularly in the early stages, can take weeks if not months to get from information gathered to useful insight to action taken.

The result? One waits and waits and waits. Someone develops an idea for a new product or service or a process improvement, for example, but no action is taken because the customer was not asked her opinion. A problem is identified, but the solution is not implemented because the process is to first ask the customer if the solution meets his needs.

Where is the courage to make a decision and take a stand? If one really knows the customer, if one really knows one’s service or product offering, one should be able to make a logical guess.

I agree. In my comments I point to my own experience, where companies forget to develop quick and efficient closed loop processes to turn insight into action, and they predictably question the value of the program.

Nice to see the old Peppers & Rogers folks are still rockin’

Telephone: The Alpha – Omega of Customer Experience?

Customer Experience means different things to different people, much like “Loyalty Program” could 3 or 4 meanings.  I have noticed that when CE pops up on Google alerts, most of the time it is in a call center context. Case in point, this posting from Inside CRM: First Call to First Contact, Measuring the End to End Customer Experience.  It makes the case for measuring first call resolution in the call center and via other channels as a way of gauging the end to end customer experience. By having effective measurement, you will begin to solve for retention and improved profitability.  I have no argument with first call being a good operational metric, but my key question is – what if the contact center is not the key driver of loyalty?  My response below:

These are certainly worthy operational metrics, but what if first call resolution is not what really matters to the customer? In complex businesses, solving a problem on the first call may not be practical. The drivers of true customer loyalty might be professionalism, knowledge, empathy or proactive status updates. Further, the contact center might not be the most important aspect of the customer experience. Account management might be more meaningful, or the sales to installation process.

It would be interesting to see how loyalty metrics like CSI or Net Promoter interplay with first call resolution. In many cases, they track together. In others, it may not be a significant indicator of customer experience quality at all.

Thoughts?

Predictive Modeling Genius

Dr. Artun at Agilone discusses here the right way to use customer data to determine repurchase likelihood and figure out which products the customer might buy next.  I would be interested to see how well NPS maps with the predictive analytics.  One trick here would be to identify super advocates among these frequent purchasers and get them to activate their friends and neighbors.