Close the customer feedback loop but don’t be a Blocker

June 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Closing the customer feedback loop by telling your customers what you heard and what is changing as a consequence, is a very important part of the process but you have to do it in a way that adds value.

I saw this on my local bus the other day.  In some ways it was great to see the bus company trying to close the customer feedback process.  However, they haven’t really nailed the idea yet.

The white text says:

These beasts block you from getting off. You flatten like a stamp to get past but then you have to say ‘excuse me’ to them.  You told us this really bugs you.

(As an aside what’s the harm in having to say ‘excuse me?’)

Okay so the bus company is feeding back to its customers about a customer satisfaction issue and that issue is mostly out of their control.  The problem is that it’s a “so what” piece of feedback.  It says they heard what the customers said but the response is just not useful.

I can see that in some sense they are trying to educate the “blockers” that their behaviour is not wanted but this doesn’t seem like an effective approach to do that, to me at least.

To maximise the value that you generate from your customer feedback process you should always close the loop with your customers.  That communications does not always have to be about how you’re correcting the problem but it does need to address the areas that are under your control or at least appear to be under your control.

There will be some feedback that you can action quickly, some that will take some time and some that you just can’t change: but you need to let your customers know that you’ve heard them.

An example of the last one: when performing customer research in the insurance industry you often receive a complaint that “if I don’t use my insurance in the year [i.e. claim] I should get a refund of the fee less an administration charge”.   Of course, this comment indicates a pretty deep misunderstanding of how insurance works. The response to this comment should not be to ignore it but can be to subtly educate your customers about how insurance works through your ongoing customer contact.

Closing the loop in this way confirms the tacit agreement you have with the person providing the feedback: I’ll tell you what I think if you try to fix it.  If you don’t abide by your side of the bargain, try to fix it, then customers are less and less likely to provide you the feedback you need to improve your business.

On the other hand if you do use the information to improve your business your customers will be more likely to help you improve in the future, and your business will go from strength to strength.  A win/win situation.

Want to learn more about how to implement an effective customer feedback system?  Download our report.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Process, Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Customer Retention: You already have enough segmentation, take action!

May 31, 2011 By 1 Comment

Think quick: to drive customer retention should you focus on a deeper understanding of your customer segmentation or take action with the data that you already have?

If you said segment your customer data base with greater accuracy you probably picked the wrong answer. According to research by Aberdeen Group (“How the Best in class use customer data to boost retention revenue in 2010″) best in class organizations focus on “doing” more than they do on analyzing. This certainly has the ring of truth to me.

It is a scene that we have observed many times in our customer experience management consulting practice. As we sit with the customer discussing what they would like to achieve we are met with a barrage of “can’t be done” because “our data is no good” or “we don’t know enough about our customers”. The desire to analyse, segment and target with ever greater depth is almost impossible to resist. More data piles on more data but we often seem to lose sight of the customer forest for the data trees.

As an example of this issue I’ll relate a recent customer experience. A few weeks ago I was running a workshop to design the high level segmentation fields that they wanted to use to describe their customers. After the initial flurry of segmentation style data was written up on the board I started to ask: “What will you do differently knowing that piece of information?” Applying this to each data field in turn, we ended up removing all but one key segmentation field and a couple of transactional indicators.

That one key field held the vast a majority of “how should we communicate with this person” information. The additional transaction indicators were then used to tweak the message to that person. All of the rest of the information was interesting but ultimately would never be used to change how they dealt with the customer.

Getting clarity on what drives customer purchases was good but the real value was to dramatically simplify their customer segmentation to the bare essentials.  At the same time they made their ability to execute, simple, straightforward and easy to implement. It is now clear how they should communicate with each customer based on one key segmentation variable.

I think that this is indicative of many customer data segmentation projects and discussions. The desire for an ever more complex, elegant, mathematically perfect segmentation model is almost overwhelming but at the cost of making almost impossible to implement customer communications. When you have 20 segmentation variables you feel the need to use them all in your communications plan but that is hard to do in practice.

Building a solid interactive and relevant communications strategy with just a few variables is complex enough. As you increase the number of variables the design complexity becomes exponentially more complex until it is just too hard to implement.

So have a quick look at your customer database. How many of those segmentation variables actually impact on the messaging that you send to customers and how many are molasses in your process — they are sweet but just slow you down?

If you’re looking to implement a customer experience management project why not start by downloading our free 4 Steps to Great Customer Experience Management report.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience Management, Customer Retention Tagged With: , , ,

Customer Feedback: How not to ask a question

April 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

Here is another quick example of a problem that we often see in customer feedback surveys.

In this case the question has been worded in a way that may change the way the respondent will answer.

By prefacing the question (“Overall how satisfied…”) with the pejorative statement “… is continually striving to achieve 5-STAR customer satisfaction…” the company has subtly altered the respondents feeling towards their experience.

This could go either way:

1.       Increase expectations: some people will read the question and their expectations will rise, depressing the score they give: “well they were going for 5-star and that was only 3 star.”

2.       Increase the score: other people will subtly increase their score because they don’t want to disappoint the company by marking them down.

The problem is that you will never really know the overall affect.

The real pity is that you can just eliminate the first sentence and the question still makes sense – there is no need for that first sentence.

Have a look at your customer survey now.  Have you put in any extra wording that prejudices the feedback from your customers?

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Feedback Surveys Tagged With: ,

Surveys for Customer Satisfaction: Do you make these mistakes?

April 11, 2011 By 3 Comments

Because I’m in the industry I, maybe like you, take all the customer feedback surveys that I can, to see what organisations are doing, what works and what we should avoid doing.

Rather than keep this information to myself I’ve decided to post the reviews here.  In this series I’ll review a survey that I’ve received and deconstruct it.

For the most part I’ll delete the company name.  I don’t see any need to “name and shame” organisations who are at least trying to collect customer feedback.  Most often it is their advisors (research providers and related companies) that are letting them down.  These are the organisations that are paid to know the best practices but depressingly often don’t.

Background

I contacted our web-hosting company a few days ago on a small issue.

The service was for the most part prompt (although I spent a little too much time on hold), accurate, and good natured.  All in all I was happy.

Survey Good Points

  1. The survey was delivered the next day:  Good transactional survey practice is to get feedback from people soon after an interaction so this was done just right.
  2. It was short: the survey itself was only four questions, plus a sevice recovery question.  That it was short was good, that the questions could have been better (see below) was not.

Could improve points

The survey invite was not personalised

Rather than have my name at the top of the survey there was a generic: “Thank you for contacting…”  They know my email address so a little first name personalisation would not be that hard.

The sign-off came from the very personal “Customer Service – Leadership Team”

Hey, we all know that these emails are automated but if you put a (real) person’s name at the bottom of the email then staff and customers will feel much more strongly that the feedback will be used, i.e. the buck stops with signatory.

Question “1.  As you interacted with us last month, how would you rate our Customer Service Support?”

Fine, but I would go with the Net Promoter Score question.

Question “2. How proficient was the consultant who assisted you?”: Well Above Standards to Well Below Standards

Hmmm… not really sure how to answer that.

Do you mean my standards or your standards?  Even the word “proficient” is difficult in this circumstance.

Questions “3. Purpose of your request?”

This is one of my pet peeves with surveys: don’t ask what the customer has a right to expect that you already know.

The company obviously has the ability to extract my email details from their systems.  Why couldn’t they also extract the reason code for the call, as entered by the agent?

Not only is this a negative for the customer survey experience but if they don’t ask this question they could ask a more important question and still keep the survey short.

Question “4  Please select one of the following to provide feedback on the highest priority area for us to improve our service delivery”

Customers have great difficulty in objectively determining what is important in the customer experience.  Asking them in a simple “select one” question is almost never reliable.  Plus you’ve used up another question spot that you could get more value from.

Question 5 “If you feel that your enquiry is unresolved with Company X, please provide us with your contact information, and one of our senior representatives will contact you to investigate and resolve.”

This is a good effort to start the service recovery process.

But again why are you asking me my name, phone, email (hey you just used that to contact me), etc ,etc.

I may be labouring the point but don’t ask what your customers have a right to expect you to know.  This is asking the customer to invest their time to do what you are too lazy to do.

What’s missing: any sort of qualitative feedback.

All of these quantitative questions are great and make for lots of cool charts.  They can tell you WHAT needs to change but they don’t help you to understand HOW to change.

Only qualitative questions (or lots of quantitative questions) can do that effectively.

My approach would be to replace questions 3 and 4 with “So tell us the most important reason that gave us that score.”  Then at least you would have some powerful statements in the customer’s own words to drive change in the organisation.

Have you seen a good or bad example of a survey recently?  Contact me via the comment box below and we can deconstruct it for everyone else to learn from.

Want to learn more about how to implement an effective customer feedback system?  Download our report.

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 Surveys, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: , ,

New stats: Australian Marketers concerned most about process

April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Aprimo is currently touring Australia presenting to marketers far and wide about “The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution”.

I attended the 29 March 2011 event in Sydney (disclosure Genroe is an Aprimo Field Partner) at which Aprimo CMO Lisa Arthur presented the organisation’s “10 Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution”.  Overall a good presentation and interesting content.

Also interesting were the results from the impromptu polls that Lisa performed on the assembled marketers.  Using hand held response devices, Lisa asked questions and gathered live data for review by the audience.

So what did we learn from an audience of 80 or so Australian marketers, albeit with a few vendors and consultants thrown in?

Australian marketers are most concerned about process.

When asked “What do you think is your weakest area” the results were:

More than 50% considered that their weakest area was “process” dwarfing Technology and People.  Unfortunately Lisa did not gather additional feedback on exactly which aspect of process was of most concern.  I suspect that it was less about the marketing process in general and more about driving repeatability and automation from their technology solutions and business.

The response did leave me wondering what marketers were doing to actively drive process deeper into their day to day operating models.

Channel / Campaign integration competes with Data and Analytics and Process for marketing integration focus.

When asked about the key areas of marketing integration this year, those in the room called it a close race between Channel/Campaign, Data and Analytics and Process.

We see the process area raise its head but there are two other big issues in marketing integration.

With the proliferation of channels and the desire to create integrated campaigns I think marketers are having trouble converting technology capabilities into real world implementation.  The idea of integrated channels and campaigns is a good one.  The technology (like Aprimo) can support it.  The issue is that designing the strategy and implementing the strategy are difficult.

Data and Analytics suffers from similar issues.  The ability for the technology to capture and report on what is happening is outstripping the ability for most companies to interpret and act on the information.

Doing more with less is still a key marketing driver.

Yes, the perennial drive to reduce costs is still there but competing for equal second place are Accountability/Measurement and Driving Usable Insight.  I suggest that Driving Usable Instight is the same topic as Data and Analytics above – we have access to plenty of data but lack the skills and time to drive actionable insight from that data.

Potentially the need for Accountability/measurement is being driven from doing more with less.  Generally if you can prove a good ROI from a project (be it in Marketing, Operations or any other area of the business) then management will give you more budget to invest.

Marketing’s key metric is … Customer Satisfaction

Now this was a real surprise.  A good surprise but a surprise none the less.  Almost as shocking was the drop of Brand and Brand recall to third place behind Lead Related Metrics.

It is generally difficult for marketers to act directly on Customer Satisfaction becuase they are not, in general, a direct part of the supply chain.  This results implies a substantial shift in organisations to focus on customer satisfaction. This can only be a good thing if it is true.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Case Studies and Statisitics, Customer Feedback Surveys, Marketing Automation Tagged With: , ,
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