Surveys: Should you report based on “sent date” or “received date”

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Recently a customer asked: “In terms of “best practice” do you have a view on whether NPS should be calculated based on the date a survey was sent or the date of the response?”

My response was perhaps not as specific as they had hoped: it depends.

In many ways it doesn’t matter which you choose so long as you stay with the same date. The client was concerned about being “most accurate” when calculating the score but this is a fuzzy concept here. “Most consistent” is probably more useful idea in this case. A consistent NPS data collection process is key in obtaining data that you can trust and action. See this blog post for more on this topic:Three Prerequisites to setting Net Promoter targets.

When running a transactional survey approach, another date that could be used is the order date or transaction date. If you use this date you can potentially tie changes in the customer scores to events in the order or touch-point process. This can be very useful in the root cause analysis process.

Some organisations like to use response date because that means that as of a particular date the reported scores will not change. If you use order date or date sent, the reported NPS for, say, February can change during March if someone fills in a survey in March that was sent in February.

However, because we’re most often talking about email surveys this effect is quite small. Email surveys are normally done within a day or two of being sent so by March 5, nothing will be changing in the February report. That may however be enough of an issue to make you want to change.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement a best practice Net Promoter Score program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Customer Feedback Process, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: , ,

People are not thermometers so customer feedback is messy

December 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

ThermometerWhen examining any type of customer feedback, one issue that you will come up against is that the feedback people give is not like the feedback you get from a thermometer.

If you want to know what the temperature is you need only consult a thermometer of the correct type and it will tell you that information to any level of accuracy required. However, the feedback you receive from customers is not quite so neat and tidy.

Ask a customer to provide feedback on a particular touch-point and you are likely to also get information on other areas of the business. You will also get halo affects and other human based biases. They will miss key areas, include unrelated items, score you based on one bad experience three years ago and ignore perfect performance since, etc. In short the data that you receive will be messy.

But that doesn’t make it useless

Clients will often cite the lack of accurate data as the reason that implementation can’t progress or that a decision cannot be made. Messy customer feedback is a prime target for this excuse.

Unfortunately people often overestimate how accurate data needs to be in order to make a decision. This is because there is a prevailing attitude that data must be very accurate in order to be useful. This is simple not true.

Let me provide a quick thought experiment to prove my point. Imagine for a few seconds that you are standing on the side of a road. Just as you step out to cross, from the corner of your eye you perceive something moving towards you. You look quickly, see that it is a car, and jump back to the kerb. Safe.

If I saw this happen and asked, “Before you jumped back did you calculate how heavy the car was, check how many passengers were in the car, determine the make, model and speed?”, you would look at me as if I was mad. It was a car and moving towards you so you jumped out of the way: end of story. But without a highly accurate set of data how could you decide whether or not to jump back?

Patiently absurd, yet this is how many organizations go about the decision making process. Very often, before people are comfortable making a decision, far too much accuracy is demanded in the information inputs. In my example you only needed two pieces of low fidelity information to make a decision: the object was likely to be heavy and coming towards you, the rest was superfluous to the decision.

Data can be messy but also useful

This whole area of how accurate information needs to be is covered in greater detail in an excellent book: “How to measure anything” by Douglas Hubbard. Much of this book is dedicated to helping companies, and people, to determine how accurate information has to be before a decision can be made. Critically it looks at the idea of the value of increased accuracy and how to trade that off against the cost of obtaining that accuracy.

If the value of increasing the accuracy is less than the cost of obtaining that information then you should not expend energy in collecting the data. In our thought experiment above: the value (“how badly am I likely to be hurt if I don’t jump now”) was much lower that the cost (“I am going to be hurt if I don’t jump now”) so you don’t bother to collect any more accuracy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has to make or recommend decisions based on data, i.e. everyone in business. After reading it you will never look at data accuracy and the need to be “really sure” the same way again.

Back to our customers

So the data that you will receive from your customer feedback process may be messy and somewhat inconsistent and generally not perfect. That’s because people are messy, somewhat inconsistent and generally not perfect. However, that data can and will be better that no feedback at all and used correctly will be the basis for solid decision making.

More Information

Download our free report: How to implement an effective customer feedback system for more information on how to run a great customer feedback process.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process Tagged With:

How To Drive Customer Experience Innovation Using Transactional NPS

December 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

innovationI wrote recently about how engineers in process plants are never happy with the status quo. They are always looking for improvements and tweaks to the manufacturing process that can drive incremental improvement in profit and efficiency.

This post is about how you can use Transactional Net Promoter Score to do the same thing for customer loyalty, through its key driver; customer experience.

Two types of innovation

Lets start by identifying two key types of innovation: discontinuous and incremental.

Discontinuous innovation creates whole new genres or products: think T-Model Ford replacing the horse, the Sony Walkman creating a whole new product category, the IBM PC. Discontinuous innovation generates major leaps forward but is relatively rare and risky.

Incremental innovation slowly but surely improves a product or category. Incremental innovation is how the car went from the T-Model Ford to the F1 racing car we see today. All the key features of the T-Model are present in the F1 racing car, they are just much, much improved. A million small incremental innovations over 80 years has generated a product that is essentially the same but completely different.

The simple truth is that while discontinuous innovation is sexy, it is also risky and rare. Incremental innovation is less exciting but very low risk, and generates enormous value day in and day out.

Driving incremental customer experience innovation

So how do engineers drive incremental innovation? Not by focusing on the whole process but by breaking it down into sub-areas areas and focusing on the worst performing areas first. To identify the worst performing areas, and how to fix them, engineers then use systems that collect thousands of measurements from all over their manufacturing process.

This very same process can be used to drive incremental innovation in your customer experience. Simply swap the industrial manufacturing process for the customer experience (where we manufacture customer loyalty) and the Transactional Net Promoter Score process for the engineer’s temperature and pressure sensors.

From a practical perspective you can achieve this by breaking your customer experience down into distinct touch-points and sub-processes and then apply Transactional Net Promoter Score to collect data at each of the touchpoints.

Start with the worst

Now you have a series of customer experience manufacturing steps, each with it’s own customer experience sensor to collect data about what works and does not work. Using NPS you can now rank the customer experience manufacturing steps from best to worst; highlight the pain points and focus on those areas that most need attention first.

Put simply; the touch-point with the lowest NPS will be the one that is performing the worst, and the one that you need to start work on first.

If you have implemented Transactional Net Promoter Score correctly you will also have a range of other diagnostic information to let you know what is wrong with the touch-point and how to fix it. It is then up to you to apply the current quality system toolkit that your organization uses (Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, etc) to take this information and drive change.

Customer Experience a Process not a Project

Once you have improved the worst touch-point you can move on to the second worst touch-point and repeat the process. Now you can see that customer experience is not a project but a process. It is a never ending cycle of incremental innovation that can and will move you a long way from your Model-T customer experience to a Formula 1 customer experience.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Customer Experience Management, Customer Feedback Process, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: ,

How to use customer feedback to directly drive revenue

November 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

using customer feedback to drive revenueIt’s been a busy six months.  You’ve rolled out a best practice transactional customer feedback process using Net Promoter Score as your KPI of choice.

The whole thing is going great with customer feedback comments flooding in.  You’re driving tactical service recovery processes and starting to look at strategic customer experience changes.

Then it hits you, even though you’re identifying customer advocates like never before, you’re doing nothing to directly drive new sales with that information!

Day in day out customers are putting their hand up and saying, in no uncertain terms, “I really, really, like your company”.  So why aren’t you helping them to spread the word?

Customer advocates can be a powerful sales driver

Working with your customer advocates can drive enormous value for your business.[1]

  • You don’t need to pay customer evangelists – most of the time you just need to get out of their way.
  • It’s effective – I shouldn’t need to convince you that customer recommendations are an incredibly powerful sales tool.
  • It’s fun - How much better can it get than working with people who love your product or service.

How do you find them?

That part is easy.  If you already have a transactional Net Promoter Score process up and running using, say, CustomerGauge, then everyone who scores you a 9 or 10 is likely to be a customer advocate.

If you haven’t implemented transactional Net Promoter Score perhaps you may have another customer feedback process or even a loyalty scheme that you can analyse for high rate purchasers who may also be advocates.  Or you may even have a social media monitoring process that will let you know who is saying great things about you.

Whichever approach you use, try to link it back to the person’s contact and purchasing history.  With that information you will be able to drive the most action.

How do you help them to help you?

Step 1: Segment

Just like the rest of your customers, not all advocates are the same.  You have to be craft an offer that will appeal to them in order to be successful.

Look to the segmentation approaches that have been successful for your business  the past and see if they are applicable in this program.  Perhaps you can create value sensitive programs for low value customers or custom programs for high value customers.  In short, start with what has been proven to work for your business.

Step 2: Craft your offers

Your first impulse may be to send your customer advocate a standard “refer a friend” or discount coupon offer.  Don’t. While these work in other situations, for your customer advocate they are a slap in the face.

Stop and think about it for a moment.  This person has indicated that they are an advocate for you.  If you send them a “refer a friend” coupon you become just another company wanting to use their good graces to grab some more sales.

Try a different approach 

How about an offer that goes:

“We really appreciate your recent feedback.  In it you indicated you were a strong supporter of our company.  Thank you. If you do recommend us to a friend or colleague please have them use this special telephone number/access code/restricted portal.  This is our priority customer line and will ensure that they get the very best service when they contact us.”

Why this works

  1. Acknowledging the person’s feedback in a sensible way.  Do this and their already high perception of you will go up.
  2. They feel special: almost like a Platinum Frequent Flyer but without the overhead of all those gate lounges.
  3. They are reassured that their friend will get a great customer experience so their innate fear that their friend might have a bad experience and think poorly of them is abated.
  4. They will want to pass on this special privilege as quickly as possible.

Of course you have to be able to deliver on that priority service experience, but that’s a given.

Step 3: Do it now

The program you see here is a classic triggered marketing program.  As in all such programs; speed of the essence.  In fact: speed beats perfection every time.

If you already have a transactional Net Promoter Score process then you probably already have the data source and initial processes you need to get this up and running.

 

More Information

If you’re looking for a transactional Net Promoter Score system check out CustomerGauge NPS data collection and reporting system (full disclosure: we sell the CustomerGauge system in Asia).

If you’re new to trigger based marketing why not download our free “Implementing Trigger-based Marketing to Drive Customer Loyalty” presentation.  It includes lots of success statistics, case studies and is a good introduction to this valuable approach.

For a full presentation of these ideas check out the full webinar: Harvesting you Company’s Advocates

 

[1] Adapted from Forward to the book, Creating customer evangelists, by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

 

 

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process, Customer Strategy, Marketing Automation, Net Promoter Score

B2B Customer Feedback: Relationship Vs Transactional approaches

September 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

transactional feedbackSelecting between the two styles of customer feedback survey, relationship and transactional, is relatively straight forward for most business to consumer organisations.

Use Transactional feedback surveys for understanding what drives day to day customer loyalty.  Use Relationship feedback surveys to benchmark yourself against your competitors.  However, it is not nearly so simple in a business to business (B2B) or business to government (B2G) environment.

Relationship Vs Transactional: What is the difference?

There are two key differences:

Timing

Transactional (or Bottom-up) surveys occur shortly after a customer has interacted with your organisation.  This could be completing a sale, receiving an invoice, contact a service centre, etc.

On the other hand, Relationship (or top down) surveys occur on a regular timeframe: say monthly, quarterly or annually.

Content

Transactional surveys are very short; often just 2 or 3 questions.  They rely on a high number of responses and lots of qualitative data in order to be successful.

Relationship surveys are longer (20 or more questions) and rely on getting more information from each customer to be successful.

Neither approach is right or wrong and both have their advantages.

B2B: When would you use Relationship?

Relationship surveys can almost always be used in a B2B business.  In fact this is the type that is most often used.

On an annual or other regular basis, the company will contact their clients to gather their feedback. Data is collected analysed, reported and actioned.

This style of survey also work well for B2B companies because it can handles a range of influencers and decision makers within the client organisation: economic decision maker, technical influencer, etc.  Using the Relationship approach allows you to collect input from each of the perspectives and integrate them together.

B2B: When would you use Transactional?

Transactional surveys are not always applicable in a B2B situation. They key attribute required for this approach is, not surprisingly, a regular, high volume, stream of transactions. You might think that all organisations have a good stream of transaction but this is not the case.

Many B2B companies have only a relatively few, very high value transactions. For instance, consider a company that performs mainly project based work (IT companies, engineering companies, construction companies) or companies with relatively large per customer sales (heavy equipment suppliers).

If you are one of these companies it may be difficult to identify meaningful transactions against which you can implement a Transaction style survey.

So which should you use?

My overall preference is to use Transactional surveys whenever possible.  This is for several reasons:

  1. I have seen this approach very quickly drive customer focus into an organisation; it’s hard to ignore the feedback when customers are telling you every day what you are doing right and wrong.
  2. The constant stream of feedback informs ongoing tactical change in the company, which in turn demonstrates the value of feedback to the whole organisation.
  3. Rather than a once a year “hit” of feedback that can get forgotten, the constant stream of feedback keeps it top of mind for all staff and management.

Having said that, in a B2B company there are sometimes just not enough transactions or they are not of the right sort to make transactional approaches work.

In these cases relationship approaches are invaluable.  They give deep insight into what is motivating the customer and can provide an excellent understanding how to help you make changes to improve customer loyalty.

What is the impact on your NPS program?

Not much actually.  Net Promoter Score can be used in both Transactional and Relationship approaches.

You should note that the scores from each approach are not comparable but you can, and should, use the Net Promoter Score questions and approach in both Relationship and Transactional feedback approaches.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Transactional Approach: CustomerGauge is an excellent software tool for implementing and managing transactional NPS surveys.

Relationship Approach: The Genroe High Value B2B Customer Feedback Process is a Relationship feedback approach specifically designed for B2B organisations.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw 

 

 

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process, Net Promoter Score
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »