Customer Satisfaction Surveys

At the recent Walker B-to-B Customer Experience Summit, we asked over 100 Customer Experience professionals what business strategies will have the greatest impact on their business in the year 2020. Attendees were given cards representing the following strategies (all color coded) and picked the top three for their business.

• Making Better Mergers and Aquisitions (Smarter, more accretive acquisitions)
• Better Targeting of Prospects (Closing more new sales and more efficient sales cycles)
• Improving Customer Retention (More growth from existing customers)
• Building a Strong Channel Network (Identification of the best partners that prefer your products)
• Entering New Markets (More efficient market penetration)
• Innovating Faster (Anticipation of customer wants and needs)
• Providing Superior Service (Proactive approach to anticipate and address issues)
• Improving Quality (Early detection and prevention of problems)
• Becoming Easier to do Business WIth (Streamlined procedures that are more profitable)

We collected the cards and created a wall display. All of the strategies were picked, but the top three winners were:

1. Providing Superior Service
2. Becoming Easier to do Business With
3. Innovating Faster

The year 2020 will be upon us in the blink of an eye and Customer Experience professionals must consider how they contribute and align with the corporate strategy.

Which customer strategy will you support?

Several years ago, I wrote a blog about weird things to say in an interview.  Recently I have been helping out by interviewing some candidates for a position at Walker.  Several of them have been pretty good but several were not.  I recognize I just wrote a blog that the job market for skilled individuals is in great shape, but candidates should still be polished and prepared in an interview. 

As I interviewed these people, I discovered I have several pet peeves when I interview candidates:

1.  Don't try to dodge questions, given an open and honest answer and nothing else, most of the time we can see through the dance.

2.  Anyone here knows it really bugs me when a candidate does not have any questions for us.  We are a consulting company and what I believe we are hired to do is to be inquisitive, ask questions and seek out answers.  Not having any questions in an interview makes me question one's ability to be insightful with our clients.  It also makes me question the preparedness of the interviewer. 

3.  When asked what you know about Walker, DO NOT say, "Nothing really".  At least take 30 seconds and go online and come up with something. 

4.  Don't write a novel as a resume, keep it to key facts and key accomplishments, a resume is not to share everything you have ever done since high school. 

I saw this article recently and thought it might be time for anyone reading this blog to brush up their interviewing skills if they are one of those almost 25% that plan to look for a job in the next six months. 

What pet peeves do you have?  What have you seen work well?

So with that, good luck and happy job hunting. 

Validation involves demonstrating how customer initiatives are impactful on other authoritative sources of information that drive companies’ business success. Characteristics of world-class validation include:

• Financial linkage is actively understood and used in account planning and decision-making, such as forecast refinements.
• Integrated metrics (customer/operational/financial/quality/employee) are actively managed as indicators of overall business health.
• Clear employee-related goals are linked with customer/partner-related goals, which are aligned with strategic goals.
• Feedback is customized by area and included in incentive compensation plans.

A few weeks ago I had a truly extraordinary customer experience. The Chris Tomlin Burning Lights Tour came to town. The concert was fabulous and we had a wonderful time!  But, that wasn’t the extraordinary part. My story is actually about the process of getting tickets.

Wanting to surprise my husband, I went online to the Ticketmaster website in search of tickets.

• They make everything easy to do yourself online. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• Having a question, I called customer service and spoke with a representative who was able to help me and ensure everything was taken care of. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• The tickets were sent electronically, just as promised. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• Then I received something in the mail from ticketmaster. Here it is...the extraordinary part.

The customer service representative had sent a handwritten note thanking me for my patronage and saying to have fun at the concert. Wow! That note was above and beyond anything I expected. Because of that experience I have an extremely favorable impression of Ticketmaster and I want to tell everyone I know about it. That doesn’t just happen.

So, how does an extraordinary experience happen?  One place to start for your customer strategy is with creating a journey map of the customer experience. By investing time in understanding the path a customer takes, the people and functions they interact with along the way, and enablers and obstacles, a journey map will provide a complete picture of the customer experience. Insights from your customer feedback program will help you in this process. The next step is to identify the opportunities and changes needed to provide an extraordinary customer experience. 

What are you waiting for? According to Kerry Bodine at Forrester Research, one prediction for 2013 is that emotional insights will take center stage. “The idea that happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, try new products and services, and spread good news about their experiences, has started to catch on.” 

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President
 

Customer experience professionals are often called upon to share customer insights and recommendations. Consider these four must-haves for your next presentation:

1. Compelling & Relatable: Your audience is looking to learn something new; something they don't already know. Highlighting an unexpected insight will grab (and keep) the attention of your audience.
2. Concise & Relevant: The recommendations must be well thought out. Focus on the elements that tie to your customer retention & growth strategies and the activities that are important to the audience. Be on-point and specific with your recommendations.
3. Balanced:  Try to avoid using customer survey research terms and use terms your executives uses. This will help make the information relevant for the audience.
4. Actionable:   Frame your recommendations with the Call to Action(s) clearly stated, prioritized and obtainable.

When designing a voice of the customer (VoC) program, one common desire is to have some perspective of how your performance stacks up. Here are three options:

1. Add benchmark questions to your survey: Ask the customer to evaluate a benchmark company – this could be direct competitor or a "best supplier."
2. Benchmark against yourself: Companies can answer the “good or bad” question by looking at key segments within their business and creating a "best-in-class" score.
3. Look at scores over time: As a customer survey research program matures, it is natural to look at changes over time – evaluate your performance based on how your own scores are improving.

Are channel partners interested just in incentives, profits, and compensation for their efforts with customers? The direct compensation VARs receive in return for their investment in a provider relationship is no doubt important, as it contributes to the viability of a partner today and in the future, but will partners recommend a product purely based on the incentives associated with it?

Across several partner-focused studies conducted by Walker that look at aspects driving preference of one provider over another, the Product Quality has much more influence than margins, rebates, and other incentives. This suggests that providing Products that VARs can count on, contribute to fewer implementation problems, require less ongoing support, and are interoperable across platforms are most effective in guiding partner recommendations.

VARs stake their reputation on the trust being placed in them by their customers, and regardless of the compensation associated with a particular provider or product line, Quality wins out most of the time, over other aspects like being Easy to Work With, Sales Enablement, or even Profitability.

Interestingly, while many customer feedback efforts allot significant focus on gathering product-specific feedback, most partner feedback initiatives only scratch the surface in identifying perceptions of the partners on Product Quality. Much more attention is spent on feedback related to Onboarding, Enablement, Training, and new or evolving Marketing Programs and Incentives.

Given the strong influence that partners play in their customers’ decision making process, more time should be spent understanding the concerns VARs have with individual products, and where their biggest successes are found. This information can be combined with customer feedback to identify the biggest areas of potential growth that will appeal to both partners and customers.

In addition, if partner perceptions are preventing new products from reaching large groups of customers, identifying and removing those barriers, with the help of product groups and engineers, will allow for additional customer feedback opportunities in the future.

Are you getting the right feedback about the quality of your products? Or, are you spending most of your time reacting and responding to feedback based on the incentives you provide to VARs?

Through our employee loyalty program here at Walker this year, a priority that was identified was an increased focus on mentoring.  As such, we have charged an internal team to re-energize our mentoring program.  There are three primary objectives for this:

1. Stay Competitive: increased competition drives the need for continuous learning, and talent development can yield competitive differentiation in a crowded market.
2. Stay Connected: increasing remote/virtual communications, social media, etc. are decreasing human connections and relationships, and mentoring offers proven ways to share our knowledge, experiences, and best practices (often in face-to-face, personal methods).
3. Stay Ahead: mentoring is shown to improve leadership elements such as retention rates, employee morale, individual self-confidence, trust, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, accelerated leadership development, reduced stress, stronger/more cohesive teams, and heightened learning.

A 2011 Sun Microsystems survey (a study conducted over 5 years) cited additional statistics to support the advantages of mentoring:

• Mentors are promoted 6x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Mentees are promoted 5x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Retention rates for both mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) are significantly higher than those who did not participate in mentoring (49%)

In addition, our own exit interviews and employee survey results show people want to stay when they are invested in relationships within the company.  With its impact on employee satisfaction and loyalty, mentoring contributes to the Service Profit Chain linking internal development investments to business success:

As the diagram depicts, mentoring can be a contributor to higher Employee Loyalty, which translates to better customer service and customer experiences, which influence stronger Customer Loyalty, which aligns with and impacts a company’s improved financial performance leading to success of the business.

Bottom line, not only is the decision to invest in mentoring reap internal benefits (such as retention, morale, trust, stronger teams, and deeper talent), but it also is strongly related to external advantages that give a company a competitive edge and a leadership advantage.

Please share your own experiences where being mentored or mentoring someone else led to a positive outcome for you in your career.

Brad Linville,

Walker Information

If you aren't already adding unstructured data as a part of your customer strategy program, consider the following benefits:

• Combining the unstructured data with the structured data, such as financial information, operational metrics, and customer survey responses allows an organization to prioritize the areas that drive customer behaviors. Without it, a company might be tempted to act on the loudest voice, which might not influence future purchase decisions.
• Most business decisions require evidence and validation before resources are allocated. Leveraging all sources of customer information builds confidence that the organization is dedicating resources wisely and allows them to take action on issues that may otherwise have been dismissed as "anecdotal."
• The words customers use to describe a company, product, problem, or positive experience adds context and can be helpful in developing customer communications.

In a recent HBR article, the authors give five things companies need to be doing to retain employees.  You might be wondering why employee loyalty is important right now.  It is important because they found 40% of employees plan to start looking for a new job and 69% are passively looking for a new job right now.  Obviously there is a big difference between looking for a new job and actually leaving a company.  However, I have found once someone starts to disconnect by seeing what is available, their loyalty is impacted and they eventually believe the grass is greener somewhere else.  I know there are some who find out what they have is pretty good, but I believe many have the perception that somewhere else is better than where they are so they begin to disconnect and ultimately, leave the organization. 

The authors give five things (and I think these five are a great summary) to do to keep employees:

1. Responsibility. This does not mean you pile on to what the employee is already doing, but find strategic things that help the company, while developing the employee. 

2. Respect. I think this is pretty straightforward conceptually, unfortunately not always executed daily.

3. Revenue-sharing. I have blogged about this before, I love this, and ensures everyone has skin in the game and motivates employees at all levels to help the company be successful. 

4. Reward. While this is similar to revenue-sharing, this goes beyond just compensation but finding ways to reward the employee on a more personal level.

5. Relaxation Time. I have blogged about this before with ROWE or in companies that don't have formal time-off policies.  Employees need to have time to get away and relax as it will ultimately make them more productive. 

Like I said, I think this is a great, concise way to remember key things that will drive employee loyalty and ultimately organizational success. 

Seven approaches that world-class companies use in communicating with customers.

1. The Role of the CEO – To be the chief communicator and believer. Use capabilities such as video and social to showcase this communication.  It’s inexpensive and high impact.
2. Walk the Talk – If you talk about being committed to customers, make certain your actions reinforce that.  This is what we heard, this is what we are doing about it, this is how it will impact you.
3. Create Two-Way Dialogue – Be certain you are communicating back. Communicate with the audience in a format/medium that aligns with how they communicate. (Go where your customers are talking).
4. Face-to-Face Communication – Customers want you to close the loop and to do it in a way that is personal.
5. Having a Shared Plan of Communication – All employees should be aware and committed to the messages.  Use the Intranet as a source of Communication around the branded strategy.
6. The Bad News/Good News Ratio – It is tempting to focus on what is working well; however, you should plan to share some of the less-than-stellar feedback – it will illustrate that you are listening and are intent on improving.
7. Tailor the Content to the Audience – Consider who your intended audience is and what methods work best for them. Communication is a process, not an event –Communicate the what, why, and how, be timely, and make certain the message is relevant.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, researchers set out to determine which types of hotels are more likely to post fake reviews on websites such as Yelp!, TripAdvisor and Expedia. They found that independent, small-owner, and small-company hotels appeared to be more likely to manipulate reviews on websites.

What is the key lesson for this finding for customer strategists? I would argure that it is less about these specific findings and more about a basic aspect of a customer listening program – that is, are the results accurate and reliable? In other words, do the results reflect the overall population (and, by extension, what population do the results represent)? I have written on numerous occasions about the importance of the quality of customer lists (see here, here and here for examples); what I would add today to the discussion is the point that diversification matters.

There are two ways to define diversification in this context – first, how much variety is included in the customer list within a given account? This clearly aligns better with a B2B customer listening program – for example, do we have a good mix of end users, decision makers, and executives for each account in our listening data? Having a variety of contacts from the same account will yield, in the words of James Surowiecki, the “wisdom of crowds.” This means that the group in total is generally smarter than any one participant in that group. Sampling theory tells us that as the base size of a study increases, the error around the mean estimate will be minimized. This is applied in the context of a total sample, but it can also apply to the findings from an account – think of each account as a sub-sample. By getting a variety of perspectives from customers within each account, we increase the likelihood that we will be getting a clearer picture of the health of those accounts. This can provide clues to astute strategic account managers – for example, if there is significant variance in the scores from within an account, it may speak to confusion that should be teased out and/or managed; this can often lead to incremental sales opportunities.

The second type of diversification relates to how we listen – when customer loyalty research was in its infancy (called customer satisfaction research at that time), we asked customers for feedback because there were no other mechanisms to gather those perspectives. CRM systems did not exist that allowed us to tie together disparate data to arrive at “the big picture.” This is why we had to ask about which products a user was familiar with, even though the customer would (rightfully) argue that we should already know that information – there was no way to tie all the data together.

The world is changing, though. Not only are CRM systems providing a more well-rounded view of customers, there are new and different ways of listening to – and analyzing – customer feedback. In the same HBR article, the authors talked to doing a “web scrape” to gather data on the hotel ratings. In addition, we can scan data in Twitter, look at Facebook pages for the number of “likes” a company has, and so on. Operationally, we can link customer behavioral metrics as well as internal quality indicators to our listening data. We can literally swim in the data.

All of this data prompts some pundits to proclaim that the need for customer listening via surveys is gone. I could not disagree more. It is certainly getting more difficult to gather customer feedback – response rates are more challenging to achieve, and the proliferation of DIY survey tools means that anyone can send a survey, regardless of how bad it is – but to say that surveys are dead is a bit extreme. I would argue that this diversity of data sources provides an opportunity to gather, analyze and understand customer sentiment from a variety of perspectives, which is valuable. My colleague Jen Batley recently wrote about the uses and challenges of this. The bottom line: we have many sources of customer data to rely on, and we should be wary of focusing on just one. Making the connections among these sources means we increase our odds of understanding what makes our customers tick.

Mark A. Ratekin
Sr. Vice President, Consulting Services

Customer insights are becoming an increasingly important part of how service organizations are measuring their performance and driving improvements.  Transaction satisfaction programs are a standard, and these enable a broad range of customer analytics that integrate perceptions of services with hard operating metrics about specific services interactions.  They also allow one-to-one follow up with customers who are reporting significant issues – follow up which has been proven to increase future satisfaction with the company overall.

This is great for those customers who DO respond to the voice of customer programs that companies have in place … but my guess is that for every customer who responds to your transaction survey there are four, five, or even more who chose NOT to respond.  What about these non-responders?  How can we respond to a voice that isn’t audible?

Customer analytics are enabling organizations to get predictive about this group of customers by identifying a set of them who, based on how they profile relative to those who did respond to a survey, are most likely to have had a negative service experience.  Armed with this list of customers, service leads can get proactive, reaching out to these customers to preempt further erosion in their perceptions and in their business. 

Imagine the impact of contacting a customer to resolve an issue that they never even told you about… this is customer delight!

This is the power of customer analytics. 

And this is Voice of Customer without the Voice.

Many companies overlook branding their customer intelligence program. What often occurs is the program being called something generic like, “The Customer Survey,” or even “The Walker Survey.” If this sounds familiar, consider these three reasons to brand your program:

• Companies today have an overwhelming amount of information. Customer intelligence is no longer just about surveys. It’s about harnessing all of the information to support decisions throughout the organization.
• Companies who develop a thoughtful name for their customer initiatives provoke an emotion that is consistent with their corporate brand, sending customers a positive and consistent message.  
• A strong brand for your customer intelligence program will increase awareness and communicate to customers and employees that it is an important, strategic initiative.

If your engineering organization craves more granular customer insights, think about trying these 3 approaches -

NPI Feedback – NPI stands for New Product Introduction.  In companies with a large product development focus, a lot of highly valuable information can be collected from customers early on in their use of a new product.  That information can help a company assess whether the product is living up to the "sales pitch" and helping customers accomplish what they had hoped with the product when they purchased it.  An NPI-focused customer feedback process can also help identify systemic issues earlier, help assess the growth potential of new products, and gain assessments around the professional services and support provided to customers during setup and testing.

Support Case and Customer Feedback Analysis – Your organization likely already tracks the number, types, and content of support requests by major product line and uses that insight to help develop patches and new releases.  But, are you feeding support-oriented VoC back to engineering?  If not, this is a great place to look – find the common questions, concerns and needs for your major product lines that are raised through service/support transactional studies.  Package and share that information with the product engineering teams.

VOCE, or Voice of Customer through the Employee -- Build a process for your front-line employees to pass back customer feedback in a systematized way.  Cataloging and mining the feedback from sales, delivery/install technicians and service professionals will yield more granular feedback about what’s working well and where there are opportunities to improve customers’ perceptions about your products.

Krista Roseberry
VP, Consulting Services
Walker

Although often overlooked, an essential element of well-run customer-focused initiatives is good communication. Too often, companies can get caught up in the details of gathering customer insights and analyzing data, but forget to really get the word out within the company. This leads to weak engagement, inaction, and a lack of measurable ROI.

Here are three quick ideas to avoid having your customer initiatives getting lost in the clutter of all the other things going on in your company.  

Brand it. Come up with a good name and even a logo to represent your customer initiatives. Too often companies resort to just calling it the customer satisfaction survey or the customer loyalty program. Not very inspiring is it? Here is a previous blog to help generate ideas.

Plan it. Too often, a good communication plan is an afterthought. Create a plan that identifies the audiences, the messages, and the vehicles you are going to to use to get the word out.

Deliver it. Communication is not one-size-fits-all. You need to develop customized reports for various stakeholders. Each individual needs to understand the customer insights they receive and know what action needs to be taken.

Companies today have so many important initiatives that are all competing for attention. For customer strategists to implement results-oriented initiatives, communication is an essential element.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

A quick, true story -- when delivering buyer insights years ago to a global manufacturing client -- a name we all would recognize -- the client leaders in the meeting were stunned by one of our key findings. Their products were top-notch as expected, but customers of all stripes were unhappy for a different reason. Many hadn't known who to contact for questions or service, and then struggled to access human contact in customer service calls.

On the spot upon hearing this, the COO asked his quality/Six Sigma executive, "What projects do we have in Customer Service?" The quality executive pulled up the file, glanced through it and had to respond that out of more than 100 formal improvements under way, zero were in Customer Service. Talk about a gap in priorities! Let's avoid the cliché, "What gets measured, gets done," and just say, "What was never initiated or finished is not getting done."

To add a powerful metric to any corporate scorecard, why not track the progress on customer-focused initiatives across the company? Then you keep senior managers abreast of projects enhancing customer experiences. Here are five tips to make this work:

1. Carefully select projects according to:
   • The impact on customer loyalty/experience and/or on vendor choice
   • The effort and cost of making the enhancement -- highest priority being projects of high impact/low cost, but high cost initiatives undertaken when impact deemed high enough
2. In B2B, have initiatives underway at three levels – key accounts, business units (product or regional), and corporate or cross-functional.
3. Report upward the # of projects on schedule/late or at-risk. Or with a small number of major projects, report progress.
4. Tie some compensation to goals for individuals/teams responsible for the projects.
5. Include the new metric in a scorecard or other metrics portfolio receiving monthly or quarterly review by senior management

Businesses tout customer-focus as a go-to-market strategy, but can they do that without accounting for customer-focused initiatives?

I'd say no -- no customer initiatives, then no customer focus.

So let's start counting our customer initiatives.

The "tangled web" woven in this famous poem is about practicing deceit. Integrity makes life much easier in account managment too, but  the "tangled web" in B2B is the complexity of roles and relationships that must be developed.

For example, large customer-side relationships include purchasing, corporate executives, key decision-makers and influencers by function and BU, and of course end-users. Channel partners add layers of relationships, including for customers behind the channel.

This complexity makes journey mapping the B2B customer experience quite challenging. The array of personas have varying expectations themselves, not to mention within unique customer segments or verticals served. For example, Purchasing and Decision-makers may well have total cost or ROI more top of mind than influencers and end-users, who care more about the core product's ease of use and product quality. Channel partners tend to look more for training and marketing support than direct customers, who seek technical support. But some of these priorities adjust according to buyers in markets as distinct as, say, telecom vs. financial services.

The myriad of relationships and expectations in B2B makes creating the maps all the more valuable, because they help clarify the internal message about what key customers want, from the the variety of personas. Which are the real "moments of truth" to emphasize, for not only account managment/sales, but support, marketing and R&D as well?

B2B journey mapping helps untangle the web.

Customer due diligence can be a powerful exercise that can add value not only during the negotiation and purchase of an organization, but also during the subsequent integrations (where most acquisitions begin to fall short of expectations.)

My colleague Phil Bounsall recently blogged on how to do customer due diligence the right way. Having reflected on the programs we have conducted for customers, I wanted to add to this narrative by providing a list of lessons we have learned. There are six themes that are prevalent that I would advise clients to consider if they really want to maximize the value of their investment in customer due diligence. This is the first of six.

Lesson 1: Acquiring the right list of customer contacts is critical (and hard)

Over the last twenty years, I have yet to see a customer listening program in which acquiring the customer list was not an issue. As CRM and other centralized databases become more common, the barriers to data are slowly coming down (thank goodness we don’t get customers records on paper anymore; I am not kidding when I say that early in my career I received some customer data written on the back of a napkin!).

However, in spite of centralized databases, there is a world of difference between having access to data vs. good customer information. The M&A process adds some additional wrinkles – for example, the target wants to protect this sensitive information from the acquirer, the target wants the potential deal to be on a need-to-know basis only (which can impact who in the target organization is involved with the program), and so on.

Our guidance to customers is to use Walker as a resource – as an independent third party, we can help navigate this terrain in a way that keeps the target comfortable; moreover, by leveraging this initiative as a customer listening program, we minimize the opportunities for the pending deal to leak to customers and employees.

In addition, expect that this process will be more complex than you would expect, but resist the temptation to cut corners – it is simply too important to not give this the attention it requires. The level of risk that the acquirer assumes is inversely proportional to the quality of the customer database; stated differently - garbage in = garbage out.

This is the first in a series of lessons learned conducted advanced customer due diligence. Watch my blog in the coming weeks for other key lessons.

Setting goals based on customer insights is an effective way to create action, but be aware of these common traps:

1. Make sure you have the right metric(s): Plan for some testing to ensure the metric predicts the desired outcome. Typically, goals for various parts of the organization align with metrics that are specific to that area, while the overall company goal (e.g., revenue growth) is tied to a high-level metric (e.g., customer loyalty).
2. Pick just three goals: While customer survey research can identify many opportunities, it is best to limit the focus to a handful of initiatives to avoid stretching too thin.
3. Allow enough time: In order for a metric to move, action needs to take place. Allow for enough time to ensure action happens and the desired change has been felt by customers.
4. Set goals that are realistic: Make sure the goals aren’t too challenging or not challenging enough. The goals should engage the organization.
5. Data quality: Make sure the goals are built with a solid understanding of the quality and reliability of the data.