Relationship marketing can bridge the gap between action and rhetoric

Wednesday, June 19, 2013 by Stacy Sanders

If you’ve read any of my recent blog posts, you know that I have been pushing for the consideration of “trust” within evaluations of the customer experience.  Today I read an article in the Journal of Service Science and Management (March 2013) called “The Mediating Role of Customer Trust on Customer Loyalty”. 

This article confirms five hypotheses, one of which is “The greater the customers trust is in a firm, the greater is his loyalty toward the firm.”

As with many hypotheses, once it has been proved, it seems the takeaway is “of course”.  While it makes sense that the stronger the customer's trust in the firm, the stronger the loyalty, we can still ask ourselves, how can we take action?  What can we be doing to enhance trust?  Obviously, following through on commitments is paramount, but there are other more subtle contributors.  For example, this article highlights that marketing plays a key role in positively influencing customers’ perceptions and as a result developing trust.   “So, the choice of elements for positioning and communication strategies must reflect the reality and ability of the organization to keep the promises of quality and benefit made to its customers in order to bridge the gap between action and rhetoric.”

I think this is great advice – and while intuitive, it may not always be top of mind.  Relationship marketing is extremely important.  If there is a gap between action and rhetoric, the result will be a contradictory image of the company which can develop a loss of trust.  It is important for everyone in your organization to close the gap between corporate image/marketing and reality.  Monitoring “trust” within the customer experience can be beneficial, as well as monitoring reasons for any declines in trust.  

Social Media’s Influence on Brand, Trust, and Loyalty

Customization is NOT the Answer to All Problems

Is your company a preferred provider?

Monday, June 10, 2013 by Walker Weekly

Many companies sell their products and services through a third party – this may be a distributor, a systems integrator, or a value-added reseller to name a few.  Knowing what drives a Channel Partner to sell more of their products and services and which Channel Partners are going be most successful in the future gives you the ability to boost revenue growth as efficiently as possible.

Loyalty is not necessarily the best measure for gauging Channel Partners’ commitment to the OEM. Instead OEMs should be focused on Partner Preference.  Any company that has a third party in the mix needs to know which Channel Partners prefer their offering and why.  It’s just as critical as knowing and using their customers’ perspectives.

Customization is NOT the Answer to All Problems

Friday, June 7, 2013 by Stacy Sanders

A recent article in the European Journal of Marketing, “Creating Customer Loyalty through Service Customization” authored by Pedro S. Coelho and Jörg Henseler, grabbed my attention.  My initial reaction was, well of course --- no new insights there!  Customers feel customized options are better because their problems are unique.

However, reading through the article and its own review of existing literature, I realized that I had fallen into the trap of many others: 

“Given the organizational efforts involved in customization strategies, it is striking that the expected positive outcomes to be achieved by using customization are rather assumed or taken for granted than empirically validated.”

The article provides a great deal of empirical validation regarding customization and its impact on customer loyalty. 

If you have a client interested in customization, I think a key takeaway table from the article is below:

Customization can be expensive, and as with any business decision, the potential for gain must be weighed against the costs.  This article highlights that customers with current high levels of trust, but current low levels of satisfaction are the best targets for a customization plan.  While a customer with current high levels of trust and satisfaction might enjoy a customization you offer, it may not yield the “bump in loyalty” you would expect.

While it may seem prudent to offer customization to your ‘best’ customer, it may in fact be better to target customization efforts on customers who currently have low levels of trust in your organization.

Customization is definitely on our clients’ minds and this article may give them something additional to consider.  Also, often “trust” isn’t measured within customer experience surveys, it may be a question to consider adding in your next evaluation, especially if customization is on you radar.

 

Putting the center at the center of the business

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 by Leslie Pagel

customer strategyAt the Strategic Account Management Association's (SAMA) 49th annual conference, the conversation focused on putting the customer at the center of the business. While this conference was for SAMs, the content was relevant for customer experience professionals.

Two good reminders emerged:

  • Many companies fail to define success in customer terms. It's common to talk about success as increased sales, customer satisfaction, or employee engagement. While these are important for the company, they aren't necessarily important to customers. Instead, customers care about the outcomes they receive when using your product or service. As companies focus on creating a customer-centric culture, they must start defining success in customer terms.
  • Customer experience is more than providing customer intelligence: For B-to-B companies, customer experience professionals support the account planning process by providing customer insights and intelligence. While this activity is extremely important, we must broaden our role by providing tools, materials, and frameworks that help account managers facilitate joint planning activities. Engaging the customer in the planning process will deliver mutual value and more engaged customers. 

In B-to-B, companies make significant headway toward customer-centricity by driving actions at the customer level. Essential to driving results is defining success in customer terms and joint development of the account plan.

Your racing success

Thursday, May 30, 2013 by Troy Powell

In Indianapolis, the month of May is dominated by one thing - The Greatest Spectacle in Racing - and I just realized that we have not posted a single race-themed posting this month. I am going to rectify that situation.

Drivers are the face of the racing world. This year's winning driver was fan-favorite Tony Kanaan, but everyone knows he didn't win it alone - it took an amazing effort by a top-notch team to get him in the winner's circle. If you stuck Tony in one of the last place cars, he would likely finish higher than last place, but there is no way he wins Indy. 

Running a race is kind of like managing an account. The account manager is the face of effort. If we win with an account, the AM gets most of the focus. If we lose with an account, the AM gets most of the focus. However, we all know the account manager is not the only reason we win or lose. Just like success in racing, it takes a great team. To win, you need...

  1. Great ownership. A good team owner, just like a good CEO, will set the right vision, bring in the right people, and manage the company well to ensure quality and sustainability. What happens to the best drivers when they feel the team owner is failing to provide a successful environment for them? They leave and go to a new team. AMs are the same way. They know their success is partially dependent on the entire company and want to be sure they are in the right place to be successful.
  2. Great products. The best drivers are worthless without a car to drive. The best drivers are also smart enough to leave the car construction and adjustments to the professionals. In the same way, AMs know that their skills are useless unless the products are meeting customer needs. The old adage of a good salesman being able to "sell ice to Eskimos" is untrue. First, I'm from Alaska and know that Eskimos are all big consumers of modern refrigeration technology. Second, no sales person can sell something that the customer has no need for. They may be able to sell them more than they need or something that doesn't perfectly fit their need, but all sales starts with connecting a product to a need.
  3. Great strategy. The driver has a role in developing a race strategy and adapting that strategy during the race, but the crew chief and his team are the real owners of this process. They are keeping an eye on weather, fuel consumption, track temperature, tire wear, and dozens of other factors and then developing and modifying the strategy for the driver to execute. The best teams are the ones who can accumulate, synthesize, and take action on all this information to make the best decisions about when to pit, how hard to drive, when to draft, etc. And this is usually the difference between winning and losing. In business, these are the sales managers and, increasingly, the sales operations team who help put strategy in place for the AMs to execute on. This is also where predictive analytics and decision management come into play. Companies with the best sales conversion rates will increasingly be those who best utilize information to inform their customer-facing decisions.
  4. Great support. I've been in the pits and garage area before, and it is simply amazing to see all of the support personnel involved with one race car. Now think about all the people who aren't even there on race day but are integral to the car getting on the track - the people making and shipping parts, the tire manufacturers, the marketing team, the truck drivers, etc. Without a great operations and support staff, the driver wouldn't even make it to the track, much less win the race. Successful sales are the same way. In order for AMs to focus on selling and managing accounts, we need a lot of people taking care of everything else.

But guess what? Even with all these things in place, you still need a great driver to win. There's all sorts of debate about what makes a great driver, but a few non-negotiables are great reaction time and the ability to make the right decision in a nano-second. Similarly, AMs are asked to assimilate a lot of information about accounts, determine what things are important, what needs to be changed and managed, and make the right decisions at the right time. So, if you want to win the sales, make sure you have a great team in place. 

Do You Have the Right Team to Drive Results?

Friday, May 10, 2013 by Melissa Meier

As customer strategists, we love to hear stories about how customer insights have been used to drive meaningful results in our organizations.  Unfortunately the road to achieving these results can be long and filled with hazards.  A common obstacle to achieving results is not having the right team in place.   Driving results happens when there is a strong network of customer advocates across the company who are responsible for stewarding customer initiatives. 

Here are a few tips on building strong customer advocacy teams:

  • Right People:  Make certain that teams have an executive sponsor and are cross-functional in nature. Take the time to recruit the right people who will serve as customer evangelists in the organization. Consider rotating team members on a regular basis to prevent team fatigue.
  • Right Purpose:  Create a mission statement or charter for your customer strategy team.  Too often teams are pulled together with no specific purpose and teams are left wondering what it is they are supposed to accomplish. Mission statements and goals should be measurable & specific, as this will allow the team to determine the success of customer initiatives.
  • Right Process: Develop a communication plan that identifies what information your team will need and when.  If team members are not kept informed they are less likely to stay engaged in the team. Also make certain that there is a process in place to recognize & reward team members for a job well done to encourage long-term engagement in the team.

     

 

Which customer strategy will you focus on?

Thursday, May 9, 2013 by Leslie Pagel

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)

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

  1. Becoming Easier to do Business With
  2. Providing Superior Service
  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?

Interviewing Tips

Thursday, May 9, 2013 by Chris Woolard

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. 

World-Class Validation

Monday, April 15, 2013 by Walker Weekly

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.

How to implement a follow-up process

Monday, April 8, 2013 by Walker Weekly

In complex customer relationships, a company can see a huge impact by implementing a follow-up system that triggers alerts that notify account managers of customer issues and opportunities. This is all done by setting up a system that includes the following:

  1. Good lists - insights are gathered from the right customers
  2. Good design - to incorporate triggers to identify issues, opportunities
  3. Good training - account managers understand their role
  4. Good buy-in - everybody sees the benefit for them and for the company
  5. Good tools - an online documentation system ensures follow up
  6. Good measurement - the ROI is measured to validate the payoff

Providing an extraordinary customer experience doesn’t just happen

Monday, April 1, 2013 by Kitty Radcliff

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
 

Does your team fulfill these roles?

Monday, March 11, 2013 by Walker Weekly

A key to creating a customer-focused organization is about the people. Without them, customer retention strategies will not be successful.  It takes people to:

  • Take the initiative to create a better organization
  • Ask customers for their constructive feedback
  • Listen objectively
  • Be an advocate for change
  • Measure and monitor progress
  • Share best practices
  • Reward success
  • Learn from failure
  • Be relentless

Channel Partner Preference – More than just compensation

Friday, March 8, 2013 by Brad Harmon

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?

The Payoff from Mentoring

Wednesday, February 6, 2013 by Managing Strategic Accounts

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

Five steps for creating a customer journey map

Monday, February 4, 2013 by Walker Weekly

Journey Mapping engages customers and cross-functional teams in exercises to illustrate the customer interaction points, moments of truth, unique strengths and common challenges present in relationships between companies and their customers. The five steps for creating a journey map are:

  1. Customer Strategy Goals – First, understand the goals, and be sure that the intent, situation, and measures of success are clear.
  2. Internal Hypothesis – Conduct in-depth internal discussions to identify initial hypotheses, including the broad stages of interaction and moments of truth.
  3. Workshops – Facilitate cross-functional teams as they walk through each stage of interaction, exploring what the customer is trying to accomplish and how the company is organized to support the customer.
  4. Customer Interviews – Conduct customer interviews to confirm/refute hypotheses and enhance the understanding within each interaction from an external perspective.
  5. Maps and Recommendations – Use an iterative process to create and analyze the map. The outcome should include a visual illustration of customer interactions, recommendations, and a plan to communicate across the organization.

Capturing the Voice of the Customer from your Own Sales People

Thursday, December 6, 2012 by Katie Kiernan

Interest in capturing and quantifying the voice of employees is growing – and in this case, I’m not talking about "employee satisfaction" but rather "voice of the customer" THROUGH the employee’s view point.

This is something companies do all the time, but often in a more anecdotal way.  Some voices are inevitably much louder than others, and often times the anecdotes are not strong enough to persuade quick actions.  Capturing the employee perspective in a more thoughtful, organized, and balanced way can become far more compelling.

An example – recently we’ve developed a targeted study aimed at understanding the factors behind a handful of very large lost deals from the perspective of the sales team.  In this study, we’ll be able to organize a lot of different inputs and learnings about the competition, and make that info available to the sales force at large to help strengthen their positioning on future deals.  We’ll also be able to quantify the loss drivers – price, value, solution, etc.  What’s more, I think we will also gain some important goodwill and buy-in to their overall VOC architecture from this critical internal stakeholder group as a result.

Now, you’ll see the obvious push-back that some VOC managers will face --- Why do we need to debrief?  We’ve got to stay 100% focused on the next deal...   A colleague of mine put it very astutely when he countered … "Tell me about any NFL coach that doesn’t watch reels of film after a game loss."  There’s always something we can learn from our experiences if we take the time to analyze the data in an objective way.

Krista Roseberry

VP, Consulting Services

Walker

World-Class Communication

Monday, November 26, 2012 by Walker Weekly

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.

Diversification in Customer Listening

Monday, October 29, 2012 by Mark Ratekin

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

Getting predictive: Voice of Customer, without the Voice

Friday, October 26, 2012 by Jennifer Batley

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.

What about customers that didn't complain?

Monday, October 8, 2012 by Patrick Gibbons

Predictive analytics and big data are some of the hottest buzzwords. So how can this be used to improve customer intelligence in service organizations?

Here is one simple example:

Large contact centers regularly respond customer complaints. To improve the way they serve customers they are often relentless in the way they analyze data to measure time-to-respond, assess customer expectations, and improve the way they meet customer demands. Done correctly, their analysis results in precise profiles of the customers that have contacted the customer service department with issues.

But what about those that never complained?

Think about it. If you have a profile of the customers that complained, you should be able to identify many other customers that fit that profile. The only difference is they never contacted you. And yet, they probably have the same issues. This provides an excellent opportunity to proactively reach out to customers to address their issues before they ever contact you. What's the worst that can happen? Maybe they will tell you that they're just fine. Regardless, they will likely be impressed that you contacted them

No longer can we rely on asking our customers how they're doing. Instead customer strategists need to use all the customer intelligence they have to drive results in their company.

 

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker