Customer Survey Research

Another in my 140-word series.

As customer experience professionals, we often conduct customer surveys that primarily ask customers to provide answers from a defined set of response options. While I do believe we need to do more qualitative, ethnographic research, I want to take a different direction with this post.

Instead, my hypothesis is that our focus on closed-end survey questions leads us to ask "bad" questions outside of surveys. This hit me as I read this summary of Killer Questions by Phil McKinney. Good survey questions basically ask customers to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis (our support is great, do you agree or disagree?). These questions are fine in a survey, but we need to use more investigative, Socratic questions within our organizations to drive the learning and innovation necessary to create the customer-focused strategies our companies need to thrive in the marketplace.

While Channel Partners are customers too, unlike the traditional customer, partners are able to provide a unique perspective. When it comes to Voice of Partner versus Voice of Customer survey research, consider these four differences:

1 - Many Channel Partners sell competing products and services giving them a unique perspective on what drives customer purchase decisions. Their input can help companies understand what causes a customer to purchase one product over another competing product.

2 - In a similar manner, OEMs can use partner input to understand what drives a partner to recommend one product over another.

3 - Many partners are combining an OEM's products with other products to deliver a complete solution. Having a better understanding of solution offerings, can be valuable input for the product group.

4 - Customers who purchase from a channel partner often go to the partner for support. Partners can provide a unique perspective on what is needed to support the indirect customer. This input can also be leveraged for serving the direct customer.

Corporate business strategy can benefit from insights provided by the channel. The partner perspective can be used to grow market share, enhance the product roadmap, and deliver an experience that both direct and indirect customers value.

If you are working to create a customer focused leadership position, consider including the perspective from all customer types.

Photo credit: stevendepolo

What do the cloud, social media, and lean innovation have in common? Each are impacting voice of the customer programs and changing the way we measure, manage, and deliver an exceptional and differentiated customer experience.

Cloud computing: The cloud changes the way customers buy products. Customers move from product ownership to product subscription. In doing this, the switching barriers are lessened for the customer and the company is rewarded with recurring revenue. Cloud-based companies need to adapt their voice of the customer program to focus on predicting customer renewals.

Social media: Customers don't need to wait for a company to conduct a customer survey research program to share their thoughts and feelings. With social media, customers have channels to share their feedback with the company, not to mention their closest friends, fans, and followers. Companies are reacting to this trend by monitoring the discussion and engaging in the conversation on public and private social media forums. This has resulted in a voice of the customer platform that companies are still trying to understand.

Lean innovation: Have you ever thought that product development happens in a bubble with engineers, scientists, and innovators isolated in a building and left to their own devices? This paradigm is shifting and the voice of the customer is becoming more important throughout the product development cycle. In this article, Ravi Aron, senior fellow from Wharton's Mack Center for Technological Innovation implies, "[Lean] begins its journey when an organization attempts to hear the voice of the customer." As the innovation process looks to adopt lean principles to reduce time and costs, one essential ingredient is the customer perspective, putting the customer perspective in greater demand.

In a world where the only constant is change, our voice of the customer programs must be adaptable to support our ever changing customer retention strategies.

In this video, Allison Melangton, CEO of the XLVI Super Bowl Host Committeee, shares some of her lessons learned while planning and organizing the 2012 Super Bowl.

Allison's advice serves as a nice reminder for those in charge of developing and executing customer retention strategies. Consider these tips:

Be Bold: Allison says, "If you really believe in something, be bold about it, even though you might have some doubters." Are your customer strategies bold? If not, why?

Make it Different: Allison talks about how they decided to use a different approach to submit the bid for the Super Bowl. Instead of sending the bid to the NFL owners via UPS, they decided to have 8th graders deliver the bid. Are your customer retention strategies unique or are you delivering the same customer experience as others?  

Don't Let Logistics Stand in the Way: As a customer strategist, we often face logistical challenges such as, how are we going to train our entire sales organization, or how can we get the right customer names and contact information for our customer survey research program. We can no longer let logistical challenges stand in our way. What logistics are holding you back?

Focus on Your Strengths: Whether or not someone tells you that, "all of your work is self-inflicted," we must focus first on our strengths. What strengths are your customer retention stratgies focused on?

Add benchmark questions to your survey: Many companies have a couple of questions asking the customer to evaluate a benchmark company. This is an ideal approach for many because it focuses on the perceptions of your customers and allows you to compare what they think about you versus another company.  

Benchmark against yourself: Companies can answer the “good or bad” question by looking at key segments within their business. For this approach, identify the customer segments with high performance scores and use those as the benchmark. The benefit of this approach is the "best-in-class" score is most likely achievable with your existing products/services.

Look at scores over time: As a customer survey research program matures, it is natural to look at changes over time. This becomes a good source for perspective since it will highlight improvements and/or declines. In year one, you create the benchmark and then measure progress against it over time.  

Secondary Research: There are a variety of secondary research options. These secondary sources can be a good benchmark. However, they do have some draw-backs, which are: timing of the program, differences in the respondent profile (e.g., different geographies or customer roles), or different research designs (e.g., scales used or questions asked).

As you prepare to share results from your customer survey research, don't just share the score, add some perspective by using one of these four methods.

Today an Indianapolis Star article began with, “The machines ARE taking over.” 

According to the article, mobile phone use continues to grow, to the point there are now more mobile devices than human beings in the United States. In fact, some estimate mobile phone penetration is already at more than 80% globally.

Steve Largent, president of CTIA reinforces the importance of mobile devices, “Clearly, we’re using wireless more every day, and the consensus of experts is that demand will continue to skyrocket by more than 50 times within the next five years.”

As customer strategists, we need to pay attention. We have to consider the ramifications on how we gather customer feedback now and in the future. It is very likely that some of your customers are already using (or trying to use) smart phones for your Customer Listening effort. 

Take the impact of mobile devices into account for your 2012 Customer Program program to improve the customer experience: 

·         Make certain the survey system recognizes when a mobile device is being used.  

·         Ensure the survey format adjusts so that mobile users find it easier to navigate through the questionnaire.

·         Consider survey length and assess the need to have alternate paths depending on the type of technology being used. 

Some early research suggests that drop off rates are in line with traditional online respondents, however, given the nature of mobile phone use and potential connectivity issues, I recommend that you consider the experience from your customer’s perspective.   It’s even more critical to make sure the survey is relevant and keeps your customer engaged.

Our technology at Walker recognizes mobile users and has the ability to adjust the survey/research accordingly. Your Walker account team can help you with survey content. What are you waiting for? 

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services 

Companies can enhance their customer retention strategies by combining the solicited feedback from their customer survey programs, complaint management systems, and sponsored communities with the unsolicited feedback that is available through social media.

Doing this can create the following outcomes:

1. Appropriate resource allocation. By relying solely on one type of information the complete picture might not be visible. However, if both solicited and social media discussions are viewed together it will accentuate areas of the business that impact both forms of feedback.

• Their role
• Why it is important to follow-up with customers
• What you want them to share with customers
• What you don't want them to share with customers
• What you would like them to do after the follow-up

• How closely does this feedback align with your experience?
• Will these areas of focus have the greatest impact on your experience or are there others that would have a greater impact?
• While the company is looking at these areas for improvement, are there any additional suggestions that we can focus on to improve the value you receive?

If you are like me, you have likely received a number of email notifications from companies stating that your email address may have been compromised. As a result of a security breach at email distributor Epsilon, email information was hacked that impacted 2% of Epsilon’s customers (for a list of known companies that were impacted, click here). Epsilon reportedly sends more than 40 billion emails annually, so there is a good chance that you or your customers were impacted by this security breach.

What does this have to do with the customer experience? In short, it erodes the trust that exists between the customer and the organization, and it is difficult to imagine a situation in which customer loyalty can be cultivated in the absence of trust. The reasons for this decay in trust are fairly intuitive:

1)     Customers expect companies to guard their data – It is likely that every opt-in process disclosed that these organizations used a third party to manage elements of the customer experience (communication, promotion, etc.); however, customers rightfully expected that all steps would be taken to ensure that any information shared would be properly guarded.

2)     Communication has been sparse – To Epsilon’s credit, it appears that they moved swiftly in alerting their customers once the breach was discovered; however, the details have not been as forthcoming to end consumers. Moreover, the tone of these messages has taken on a decidedly legal tone (likely for good reason), including statements that the company has been assured that only name and email data were compromised. As a consumer, I was left with the feeling that the company was relaying what they had been told, but they were not entirely confident in what they were reporting.

3)     There is a feeling of a lack of control – The tone of the messages sent by companies suggest a lack of control of how sensitive customer data is stored, managed and used. This lack of control extends to the end consumer – that is, I feel as though once I share my information, I have lost all control with respect to how my data are managed. This increases skepticism, which reduces trust.

What should we expect the fallout to be as a result of this breach? For starters, we should expect that spamming and phishing attempts will skyrocket – this has been a topic that has been addressed in nearly every notification I have received. As a result, customers will be more apprehensive with sharing their information, and will be less likely to click on links in emails (for example, to take a customer survey). This will adversely impact response rates, which will beg the question as to whether our customer listening efforts are truly representative in nature.

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to proactively address this issue. In addition to advice provided by my colleague Becca Lewis (see Becca’s blogs on response rates here, here, here and here), Walker has written a book on tactics and strategies to increase response rates (if you are a Walker client and do not have this booklet, please ask your account team for a copy). Above and beyond this information, there are three additional steps companies should consider when launching a customer listening initiative in light of the Epsilon breach:

1)     Provide a way to validate that the survey is legitimate – Many of our clients will construct a special website that customers can visit to validate that the survey request is legitimate. This is also a great opportunity to set expectations on how your organization will use the information (and the follow-up that customers should expect to see).

Given the extra concern over clicking links in emails, it may be preferable to have a link available from your home page to route customers to this page (as opposed to providing a link in the email notification). This also reinforces to all customers (even those who were not selected in the sample) that you are focused on listening to – and acting on – customer feedback.

2)     Do not ask questions you should know the answer to – This is particularly important with respect to any sensitive account information such as account numbers, contact information, etc. Data elements such as these should be linked from your CRM data so that they can be leveraged in the analysis on the back end. This will not only streamline the survey process and prevent concern about sensitive information, but it will also focus on the most important aspect of the survey – getting the customer’s feedback on items that you do not already know.

3)     Communicate early and often – This is a common theme, but it bears repeating – you cannot communicate enough with customers. Communication does not take a one-size-fits-all approach, either – you should consider things such as a CEO video embedded on your site, utilizing the front-line account team to alert customers of the coming survey (and take the lead on any follow-up), promoting the survey initiative in billing inserts, and so on. Taking a varied approach will maximize the probability that your customer will participate in the program.

Data breaches such as that experienced by Epsilon are unfortunate; it is my hope, however, that these tips will help you to take a proactive approach of getting ahead of the issue with respect to your customer listening initiatives. If you have other thoughts, please feel free to share them.

Mark A. Ratekin
Senior Vice President, Consulting Services

• 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.
• The words customers use to describe a company, product, problem, or positive experience adds context and can be helpful in developing customer communications.

• A technology firm branded theirs as GROW – Gain, Respond, Own, and Win.
• An information services company calls theirs Customers First!
• A medical device firm branded their initiative as Vital Signs.
• A telecommunications company labeled theirs Connected to Customers.
• We call ours FOCUS – Focusing On Customer Understanding and Success.

This is the fifth part of a multi-part series on the trends we are observing among the 1to1 Customer Champions with respect to their efforts to build a customer-focused culture.

Part four of this series focused on how to leverage our employees in the action-taking process. Taking action is critical because it provides an ROI to your customers for the time investment they made to share their feelings and perceptions with you. It is also important, as taking action is the only way that we can trace the impact of our actions from a financial perspective.

The challenge that most organizations have – particularly in this challenging economic environment – is that resources are more scarce than usual. This means that firms are more likely to be short-staffed, so adding work to an already full list is a recipe to have our efforts to take action fall flat.

The key? We have to make the insights from customers relevant, easy-to-understand, and linked to the day-to-day work of all associates. How can customer loyalty practitioners manage this? This brings us to the next trend we are seeing among the 1to1 Customer Champions.

Trend #5: New (or Enhanced) Tools are Available

The 1to1 Customer Champions remind us of the tools that are available for us to leverage in our customer-focus efforts; some of these are new, while others represent the latest version/evolution of tried-and-true tools:

a)      CRM integration – The investments that firms have made over the last decade or so in the area of CRM are starting to show payoff – from a customer knowledge perspective, being able to link customer demographics/profiling information and actual behavior data to survey metrics creates the opportunity for more robust customer intelligence.

The impact of CRM integration is twofold – first, it provides a data infrastructure into which program findings can be warehoused; second, it can provide a myriad of other data that can be used in segmentation exercises. This provides a more credible framework within which to articulate ROI (for example, by using actual customer purchase behavior in lieu of a survey-based question around intended behavior).

b)      More powerful predictive modeling – The ability to integrate other data streams into customer survey data would be for naught without the ability to build sophisticated models. The computing technology available today means that analytic approaches that were either highly theoretical or too mathematically challenging even ten years ago are now accessible.

c)       Social media and text analytics – The newest tools that are emerging include data from social media sources coupled with the rapidly-advancing discipline of text analytics. The ability to harness these non-structured data sources is beginning to add incremental value to our customer analysis efforts; there is clearly more to come on this front.

These tools represent, in my opinion, a “data enhancer” rather than a wholesale replacement to current data streams – that is, they provide additional insight that can bring further clarity to the more traditional quantitative analysis.

What are the common threads of these tools? First, they leverage the latest technology; many of these tools and techniques were simply pipedreams a few years ago. Second, they recognize that data from disparate sources can and should be leveraged in a variety of ways. Finally, they offer to streamline processes that historically have been challenging (I can recall, for example, a time in my career when it was not uncommon for a customer list to be written on a sheet of paper vs. having a consolidated file of data). Streamlining these processes creates capacity for practitioners - for example, by eliminating time spent data-entering customer records and managing multiple customer data sources, we can work on more strategic initiatives - such as making customer information relevant, easy to understand and integrated into the everyday workflow process of all employees.

In my final blog of this series, I will discuss what outcomes that the 1to1 Champions will enjoy as a result of their efforts and will provide some recommendations on what steps you can take to ensure that your firm is seen as a customer-focused organization.

Remembering back to my last post, the amount of data kept on a customer is increasing within organizations and tying this data to customer survey data could help us gain better insights into the customer experience. 

Potentially fulfilling every researcher's dream, using this data could open the door to massive amounts of data to analyze while answering business questions.   However, with that we can’t lose sight of the quality of the data. In other words, more bad data isn’t necessarily better. So keeping that in mind, before we use this data to help aid us in understanding our customers, we need to evaluate the data itself.

The first thing to do here is look to see what data you have available. This will help you gain a better understanding of where/how this data could enhance your understanding of the customer experience. For example, if only product information is kept for customers, then it would be logical to look at this data alongside a customer’s product ratings. This could help explain trends you are seeing in the data, as well as gain a profile of the type of customers that use particular products. A few examples of things to consider are…

·         Type of data?

o   Is it sales history? Customer demographics? Account Information (ex. size, tenure, etc)?

o   Do we have information for individual contacts within an account or simply account level information?

- How easily can this be linked to customer survey data? Are there common fields, such as customer ID, which can be used to link the data?

o   Is data tied to an individual/account or is it tied to departments within your company (ex. call center, agent)?

o    If there are metrics in the data (ex. Issue Resolution Days), how is it calculated by your company?

·         Location of data?

o   Is all this data stored in a central database? Spread out among different parts of the organization?

o   Is this data available for you to access? Format you can use?

The second thing to assess is the quality of the data to ensure that it is giving us accurate information about our customers. We don’t want to use customer data that has never been updated or doesn’t reflect the current customer’s situation. Instead we want this data to accurately reflect our customer as they are today so this information can be paired with their current perceptions of your company. A few examples of things to consider are…

·         Who owns this data?

o   How is it populated?

o   How often is it updated? 

·         Is there a lot of missing data?

o   Do we have data just for select segments of customers or for all customers?

This assessment will give us a better understanding of what the data is telling you, where it may be best used in the analysis, how best to link the data, how easy it will be to obtain and then any cautions/limitations that could be kept in mind with the use of this data. More to come next week on linking and benefits of using the data…

Becca Lewis

Director, Marketing Sciences

Most companies have operational metrics that they keep about the ways they interact with customers, as well as an abundance of customer information through CRM tools. For example, support centers keep track of metrics such as time to resolve, time on hold, etc. And CRM tools can give us information on account history, such as products purchased, tenure, etc. An ideal situation would be to link these sources of data with customer survey data in order to gain a fuller picture of the customer experience.

In terms of operational data, this information allows you to link perceptual ratings and op metrics to understand where to focus to gain the most improvement in the customer experience.  Knowing the actual metrics (ex. time to resolve issue) as opposed to simply the respondent’s perception (i.e., satisfaction, quality) of the time to resolve, adds another dimension to the data that can provide additional actionable information. For example, it can potentially tell you if your customer’s tolerance in the actual time it takes to resolve your issue as well as if there are different levels of tolerance for your customers. Additionally, it can help companies set their operational goals with the customers in mind so that company’s improvements will also help to increase the customer’s experience. 

In terms of CRM data, this could help add variables that would be useful in understanding the customer’s experience. For example, if see Account A’s score is significantly declining, CRM data can be useful in seeing what changes have occurred in our relationship with Account A that may help explain this decline. Are we really doing that much worse? Have they changed the products that they are buying with us? Another potential benefit is this could reduce the need to ask customers certain questions in the survey. For example, if we know why the customer called support then do we really need to ask that question in the survey?

As you can see, there are many benefits to linking this information during the analysis of customer survey data; however, there are some things that need to be considered during this process. 

·         What is the best level to link this data at? Is it for an individual respondent or at an account level?

·         Is CRM data kept up-to-date so that we can be confident in its accuracy? 

·         What do you do if customer’s survey data and operational data don’t agree?

·         Should Customer Data be a consideration when setting operational goals?

·         What are the other uses of CRM data?

Over the next few weeks, we will be discussing these considerations, as well as providing cautions and benefits surrounding each concept.

1. Senior management factors
   1. Committed to and take action on being customer-focused
   2. Willingness to take risks and tolerance of some failure
   3. Positive attitude toward change
   4. Marketing leaders are trusted by other senior management
2. Interdepartmental dynamics
   1. Interdepartmental cooperation
   2. Formal and informal connections between departments
   3. Openness to ideas from other departments
3. Organizational systems
   1. A balanced approach to organization structure (this is a complicated topic but generally you want some hierarchical departmentalization, but not too much of it).
   2. Market-based incentive structures with a focus on long-term organizational health (another complex topic I've blogged about a few times)
   3. Low incidence of "office politics"

1. Re-centering on customer centricity
2. A broader orientation for being customer-focused
3. Characteristics of a customer-focused company
4. The focus of customer-focused companies
5. The moderation of customer focus

Intelligence Generation

1. Meeting with customers to determine current/future needs.
2. An in-house market research department.
3. Ability to detect changes in customers' product preferences.
4. At least annual surveys of customer perceptions.

Intelligence Dissemination

1. Regular interdepartmental meetings on market trends and developments.
2. Important events in the market or with key customers are shared quickly with all affected departments.
3. Regular dissemination of customer satisfaction data at all levels of the company.

Responsiveness

1. Recognition of changes in customers' product or service needs.
2. Alignment of product development efforts with customer needs.
3. Regular, interdepartmental planning to respond to changes in the business environment.
4. Responsiveness to customer complaints.
5. Making concerted efforts to modify products or services to fit customer needs.

1. Re-centering on customer centricity
2. A broader orientation for being customer-focused
3. Characteristics of a customer-focused company
4. The focus of customer-focused companies
5. The moderation of customer focus