For any VOC initiative, it is just as critical to conduct employee surveys as it is to survey customers.  Employee engagement drives customer engagement, and without understanding the hearts and minds of your employees, your VOC initiative will be incomplete. 

Conducting employee surveys within your organization presents opportunities for you to show employees that you care about them and their needs. At the same time, it provides employees an avenue for providing feedback about the company, culture, management, tools, resources, training, and more.  For survey results to be most effective, employees need to trust that they can provide candid feedback in an anonymous fashion without retribution.

Even more important than conducting these surveys is to act on the results – and then to hold managers accountable for creating action plans and executing on them. However, is it a good or standard practice to compensate managers based on their employee satisfaction scores?  This is a practice that is difficult to support, given the following complications caused by providing incentives to managers based on the satisfaction of their employees.

1. Any time you tie survey results to a bonus plan, managers will waste time and energy trying to find fault with the overall program design, survey questions, or data quality – instead of taking the candid feedback at face value, taking ownership, and putting the feedback to work. 
2. Tying compensation to employee feedback also leads to situations that I refer to as the “car dealer syndrome,” which includes gaming the system, bribes, and other seedy behavior.
3. The potential to earn more money because of these results can also lead to retribution for low scores and poor feedback; employees need to know they can provide feedback without fear of recourse for negative feedback.

If you want to reward your managers, use objective measures, such as employee turnover, that can’t be tinkered with.  If you feel the need to reward managers, do so based not on the scores and the feedback, but on the execution of action plans created as a result of the feedback.

Having said all that, I do believe that company executives should certainly have a portion of their bonus plans tied to both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction scores.  Creating a customer-centric culture begins when you first focus on your employees and make their satisfaction a priority.  This culture can only be created and driven by those at the top.

Transactional surveys are a great way to capture customer feedback immediately following a transaction or event. Companies can use them to gain a better understanding of a customer’s experience and perceptions of service quality while the service interaction is still fresh on his or her mind.

Dr. Fred Van Bennekom from Great Brook Consulting has created a list of eight practical items to consider when developing your transactional survey strategy.

Keep It Short. If you want to get a good response rate, then keep it short and to the point. For most transactional processes, 7 to 12 questions should be sufficient.  

Use Random Sampling. If you have ongoing customer transactions, you probably don’t want to send a survey invitation each time a customer has a closed transaction. This will promote “survey burnout” and lead people to complete the survey only when they have an axe to grind.  

Implement a Service Recovery (Complaint Handling) System Concurrent with the Event Survey Program. Complaint handling and event surveying are tightly linked in a customer retention program. If a customer voices a complaint in a survey and you don’t respond, it will just flame the fires of dissatisfaction.  

Consider Different Survey Administrative Methods. Transactional surveying can be done by telephone, web form, paper form, or using IVR. Regardless of the method, you want to get the data as quickly as possible to act on any business process issues. Web form surveys are the fastest and most inexpensive once the system is set up, but your target audience must have web access and be web savvy.

How Often & How Soon to Survey. Most retailers or dining establishments are surveying essentially at the close of a transaction. In situations where you have a database of customer contact information, you could do the surveying in batch mode every day or every week. However, if the period between transaction and survey is too long, you increase the probability of a process problem affecting more customers until you learn about the problem.  

Outsource Surveys Versus In-House Execution. There are many services that will conduct the survey program for you. They may give you real-time access to the results through a web portal, but you will pay for these features. With advanced technology tools, you can accelerate the design, set-up, execution and analysis of your transactional surveys by performing them yourself.

Pilot Test Your Surveys. A survey is a product that you as the designer should test before launching, just as a company should test any product before selling it to customers. The pilot or field test is critical to discovering flaws in the detail of the survey design before going live.  

Don’t Abuse The Survey and Your Respondents. Please know the difference between an event survey and a relationship survey, and be humble in your request for your respondents’ time. By attempting to make the survey serve two masters — the event and the relationship – you will compromise on both.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a real trend, and the chief evidence of this is the rapid adoption rate of Chief Customer Officer and Chief Customer Experience Officer.

Companies today recognize the importance of creating a positive customer experience, from the moment the customer comes into contact with the company and is undecided to when the customer reaches a fork in the road and is considering leaving. Companies can no longer buy customer loyalty and assume customers will stay. It is easy for customers to “click away” and buy from another vendor.

CEM is now a formal program that involves multiple processes and departments. It requires the mapping of customer touchpoints, and combines operational and CRM data with customer service and marketing information.

Organizations that have a great CEM program have been able to increase sales and revenue from repeat sales, customer rescue, cross sells and up sells.. They discover better operational efficiencies and revenue from happy customers. However, if companies go about CEM on a superficial level, they can create a branding train wreck. Customers are savvy and quickly see through hollow statements about customer satisfaction.

Any organization can benefit from CEM, but the prime candidates include companies that have a large customer base and one that can easily switch to another supplier. Also, companies that sell direct to customers rather than through channels are better candidates.

CEM in today’s business world is just as important as measuring customer satisfaction was 20 years ago. CEM has become more formalized, and customer satisfaction is only a small component of CEM. In addition, CEM can now be measured the same as accounting and financial metrics.

In fact, there is a movement to watch companies that are doing it right.  Stock analysts and traders are tracking companies with good CEM and finding that their stock performs better than others. This posting from Bruce Temkin’s Customer Experience blog provides some insights on this.

CEM is a trend that is here to stay. Smart companies are using technology to monitor and improve the customer experience, which translates to increased revenues and profits.

In a recent blog posting, Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group stated: the ultimate goal for any Voice of The Customer (VoC) program should be to infuse customer insight into every decision within an organization. However, he went on to say that not many companies had achieved this goal.

In fact, finding customer data is not a problem for most companies. The world is swimming in data. If you don’t have it, you can buy it, rent it, or collect it.

There is no shortage of survey and data gathering methods either. By last count, there were more than 300 survey vendors. Yet most companies with Voice of the Customer programs are struggling to gain insights from survey and feedback data.

That is because most of their time is spent sampling, surveying, and managing feedback. That includes setting up feedback channels, establishing survey frequency, etc. Attempting to find the ‘ah-ha’ insights often begins with an export to Excel and hours of cross tab work.

But not everyone is a statistician or computer scientist, and not everyone wants to sift through large data sets. Remember: The goal is not to gather gigabytes of data, it is to create actionable insights that drive change. If you work with a vendor that thinks gathering more data is the end-goal, turn and run!

And by all means, use technology for what it’s best for; making complex things simpler. In this case, turning mounds of data into insights. The right technology is ideally suited to bring all your VOC and operational data together, to easily pinpoint relevant trends, and to reveal actionable insights.

“What’s ubiquitous and cheap?… Data.  What’s Scarce and Expensive?…The talent to analyze the data and tell the story.  Data: understand it, process it, transform it, visualize it, communicate it.”  Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

After a stint in college in the early 1980’s, I set my sails and went to live in southern Chile. Letters (actual hand-written characters on paper) from home took up to two weeks to reach me. Information came through at a trickle, and communication to my family was slow. I found that “letter writing day” (as it became known) was calculated and well thought out. Every word I penned to paper had meaning.

At that time, news from home was practically non-existent. The first space shuttle launch happened, but I didn’t find out about it until nearly ten days later. I was living on the far end of the earth and on the far edge of information availability.

Dateline 2010: Chile experienced a horrific earthquake. The resulting Tsunamis inundated the areas around Concepcion (where I had lived). As I watched the news, I immediately began calling on my cell phone, texting my friends, and leaving messages on Facebook in order to check on them. Within a few hours, I found out that my dear friend Pedro had lost his home and his father. Pedro was living in a shelter, and he used a mobile phone to respond to my text and my Facebook post. Soon my Facebook friends, who had seen the exchange between us, were offering support and dollars to help them and others.

Within a day or two, Pedro was rebuilding his house. Yet, thirty years ago, it took me 14 days to find out about the first space shuttle launch.

In those thirty years, the speed of information has increased exponentially. We are at the point now where if you don’t tweet, text, blog or Facebook (yes you can conjugate Facebook as an action verb), it is difficult to keep current. The immediacy of communication allows information to become almost instantaneously available. We want people to know what we think — and we want it now!

Fast Forward to Social Media

As companies begin to embrace social media, many are using a “ready, fire, aim” approach. Companies check social media off their list by creating a Facebook presence, or a Twitter hashtag, but are they doing their due diligence in educating their employees, or better yet, establishing a policy for usage of these social media outlets? 

As you get ready to open your company to the world of social media, here are some basic things to consider:

1. Seek out best practices and ideas from current social media practitioners. Consider Seth Brogan’s The Ethics imperative in Social Media
2. Establish a usage policy for acceptable use and behavior on social media and communicate this policy to all employees.
3. Monitor what people are saying about your company on social media and decide how or if you will respond. This is feedback at the speed of light, so be sure to determine what you intend to do with the data you collect.
4. If you don’t do #3, it won’t take long before employees and customers realize that you are not serious about your social media presence, and they will treat it with ambivalence.
5. Incorporate the data received from your social media outlets into an overall VOC initiative. Allegiance offers SocialVoice to help you get started in this area.

So what have we learned in thirty years?  Information is now instantaneous, but the quality of information can be questionable. If we can incorporate the sentiment and thoughtfulness of letter writing into the instant communication of today, we can leverage social media to build real relationships. After all, elements of social media has helped alleviate the suffering of earthquake victims. We should use the same care and commitment in our tweets, yammers, posts and blogs. People are listening.

What do Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and your company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives have in common? At the basic level, you both have employees, operational metrics, and outcomes. But there are more similarities. Do these sound familiar?

 1. Traditional key metrics used to measure performance
 2. Undervalued or undiscovered insights that can make a big difference
 3. Analytics to aid decision making and resource allocation
 4. Competitors that have much larger budgets

On the heels of the Allegiance Engage Summit this past week, I re-read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. This time, my copy was autographed by Billy Beane himself. Beane’s inspirational Summit talk reminded us that sports and business have much in common: metrics, analytics, and insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.

Quotes included below are from Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

Correlation analysis to understand drivers

“.. if you ran the analysis, you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. [Runs scored] correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage.”

“If this sounded compelling when baseball players were paid $150k per year, it sounded one hundred times more so when they were paid $15M a year.”

VOC programs capture a significant amount of structured data, such as satisfaction and loyalty ratings, demographics, segments, and operational data. Tools, such as Allegiance Engage7, allow you to efficiently focus or filter these and understand the correlation between driver metrics and key metrics. These insights can help focus resources and investment on those drivers that are most significant or important to your customers.

Avoided costs

Correlation analysis also tells us how to avoid unnecessary costs. When Beane and his analytics team realized that bunts and stolen bases had little correlation with winning games, they stopped training on these. The time and money that would normally have been spent on perfecting stealing bases and bunting were diverted toward perfecting skills that correlated with winning more games.

Clearly, the metrics we capture in VOC have varying importance. It’s critical that we have tools that help us discover the metrics that make a difference. The impact of some metrics may be significant among a particular demographic and not among others. Our correlation tools should allow for a bird’s eye view of the entire organization, as well as help you to narrow or refine the results to a local business unit or a specific demographic.

It’s not enough to observe. You must measure.

“Think about it, one absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.”

Experience and gut feel may have their place. But it’s important to validate or measure purposely with metrics. In Beane’s case, he created winning teams by focusing on a prospect’s past performance, not appearance. He “systematically eliminated guys `you could dream on.’”

Numbers and stories

Bill James, a widely influential baseball statistician and writer, said “When the numbers acquire the significance of language, they acquire the power to do all the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry. The numbers also describe character, psychology, history, power, grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, success, failure, frustration, bad luck, ambition, and discipline.”

Sounds familiar. Does your VOC program have a dashboard and reporting that tell a story? Does your customer feedback management tool require you to export its data and have you spend time constructing charts and graphs, or is the “story builder” built-in?

How will you win?

In Beane’s case, he found on-base percentage to be the key driver that drove the team to win more games. But why did this metric win? Turns out, getting on base has a direct relation with wearing out the pitcher. The best batters force the pitcher to throw more pitches because pitchers work harder to avoid the skilled batters’ strengths. As a result, the good batters are often walked because the pitcher is working extra hard to keep the ball outside of the batters’ sweet spots. And when a pitch does hit the sweet spot, a careful batter will almost always make contact and get on base.

What’s your company’s advantage? Perhaps it’s customer service, employee attitude, or simply an amazing product. The key is to understand which advantage drives revenue and ROI. Once you know the aspect of your business that is highly correlated to revenue, make an effort to understand the root cause for that correlation. Dig deeper to understand the key customer values that are causing your consumers to ring your cash register.

Math and a chance

Rama Ramakrishnan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who spoke at the Allegiance Engage Summit, described how he built a company that optimized pricing and price adjustment timing for the retail industry. The analytics approach yielded many times ROI in a short period. He summarized the win, “…our retail customers didn’t build any new factories, and didn’t hire new employees. They just used our math to discover hidden patterns they could exploit.”

In Moneyball, there is example after example of players who got a chance to be in the big leagues because of math. The math exposed undervalued skills that made a real difference, which lead to more games won.

VOC is awash with structured and unstructured data. This abundance of data suggests there are hidden patterns to be exploited. Leading VOC management platforms, such as Engage7, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques to help discover new patterns that drive success in your business.

Measuring the advantage

Between 1999 and 2009, the average Cost Per Win for the New York Yankees was $1,736,754. For Oakland, it was only $579,246. The Yankees won 1,063 games in that 10-year span, while Oakland won 977. Beane knew the Yankees had an unfair advantage with their budget, so Beane set out to develop new unfair advantages with tools that didn’t require a lot of capital investment. He turned to analytics.

Leading companies with corporate-wide listening and measurement initiatives already know the value and importance in tracking their “unfair advantage.” They use a wide variety of metrics, such as average scores, box scores, NPS, and Engagement index. Winning companies optimize the drivers and their operations that correlate with revenue generation. Analytics enable any company to compete with rivals with larger budgets.

Hollywood

Moneyball, the movie, starts filming this summer. Brad Pitt will play Billy Beane’s character. Analytics makes a great story. Analytics will be sexy again. What will be your story?