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Transcript of VoviciWP EFM Best Practices Customer Loyalty Leaders
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i Enterprise Feedback Management: The Best Practices of Customer Loyalty Leaders
Feedback that drives vision.
vovici.com45365 Vintage Park Plaza, Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166 t: 703.481.9326 f: 703.783.0069 e: [email protected] vovici.com45365 Vintage Park Plaza, Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166 t: 703.481.9326 f: 703.783.0069 e: [email protected]
Enterprise Feedback Management:The Best Practices of CustomerLoyalty Leaders
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Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Feedback Management Pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Strategic vs. Tactical EFM Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Feedback Management Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Co-Creation Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
The Role of Systems, Processes and Software in EFM . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Change to CRM Best Practices and Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Feedback & Operational Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Enterprise Feedback Management Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Incorporating Competitive Benchmarking in EFM Frameworks . . . . . 12
Communicating Results Throughout The Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Making Customer Research & Insight Actionable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Discovering Trends in Customer Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Trends and Future Directions in the Area of EFM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
About Vovici . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
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Introduction
With todays economic pressures it is more critical than ever to deepen existing customer relationships
its much more cost effective to keep your current customers than it is to gain new ones.
The recent global downturn has put a dramatic new focus on measuring the customer experience. In
2009, 63% of survey respondents in the Vovici/CGA Customer Experience IQ (CEIQ) study of over 200
companies around the globe said that customer experience management (CEM) was important to their
business, up from 47% in 2008.
Many organizations recognize the importance of engaging customers, employees and partners but nd
it difcult to establish sustained interactions across multiple channels. Market research departments
manage projects to gather input for specic initiatives. Marketing departments analyze the metrics of the
web site and other marketing campaigns. IT departments coordinate customer relationship management
(CRM) systems, tracking attributes and customer purchases but not customer attitudes. Surprisingly, few
organizations today are treating the actual customer feedback itself as the asset.
Customer feedback management is a foreign concept to many organizations. The majority of businesses
dont treat customer feedback itself as an asset. A formal customer feedback program is much more
than just surveys. In this whitepaper we will discuss how enterprise feedback management (EFM) helps
organizations leverage feedback to increase loyalty, facilitate innovation, and inuence critical business
decisions. EFM provides a mechanism to centrally manage the deployment of customer, employee and
partner feedback programs. An integrated approach includes survey systems, panel management and
online community solutions that enable you to listen, interpret, act and monitor feedback. These are the
building blocks, the tools you will need to successfully build a truly comprehensive feedback program.
The Feedback Management PyramidEFM
Enterprise Feedback Management provides a
solution to establish sustained interaction across
multiple channels with customers, employees and
partners. Moving from survey tools to enterprise
feedback management helps organizations build
customer loyalty, with the adoption of EFM solutions
having a 49% correlation to the customer loyalty
index of the Vovici CEIQ study.
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Research Community Management
When no one owns feedback, disparate practices, tools and standards begin to arise across different
teams, departments and divisions. This is largely because survey tools provide for gathering customerfeedback but not for organizing it. Today, most large rms have dozens or even hundreds of separate
accounts with survey tools. Employees conduct online surveys to solicit the information they need to answer
specic questions. In the process, they degrade the research process. Response rates decline, as too
many individuals send out too many survey invitations. Respondents are confused, as questionnaires are
published with leading questions and ambiguous lists of choices. Its easy for do-it-yourself researchers
to collect data poorly, leading the business to the wrong conclusions and the wrong decisions.
Panel Management
Panel management is the recognition that customer feedback is an asset and should be treated as such.
In order to preserve customers willingness to respond to surveys, organizations need to control andconserve access to customers for survey research. Too often, organizations survey all or most of their
customers rather than a random sample which, at the cost of modestly lower statistical validity, enables
many more surveys to run in parallel. Good panel management practices treat survey respondents as an
ecosystem and make sure not to hunt respondents to extinction.
Survey Tools
Surveys are a great way of gathering data that is representative of customers as a whole: quantitative
information. Market research online communities (MROCs), are a complementary research technology
that allows researchers to monitor and initiate rich conversations between customers: qualitative
information. In 2008, 95% of qualitative research was gathered ofine, compared to only 50% ofquantitative researchMROCs represent a signicant opportunity for realizing the time savings and cost
advantages of online research. By moving to research community management, rms are able to gather
more extensive qualitative information than can be collected with focus groups, on a continuous rather
than an ad-hoc basis. This enables rms to turn to customers for both strategic and tactical decisions.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) unites surveys and research communities to provide a fuller
picture of customers, in numbers and in their own words. The marketing research department now
mentors and assists employees as they conduct research; research data is pushed out to employees in
hierarchical reports that tailor it exactly to their responsibilities. The marketing department learns the Voice
of the Customer and hears ideas and issues raised directly by customers. The IT department integratesCRM with the panel management capabilities of EFM: professionals can then easily target groups of
customers for particular surveys, and customers themselves see shorter and smarter questionnaires,
with information they have already provided the organization embedded behind the scenes.
Moving from survey tools to enterprise feedback management helps build customer loyalty. According
to the Vovici CEIQ review of 24 best practices, the worst practice is simply collecting market research.
Firms with highly loyal customers are more likely to distribute research data to employees, co-create
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new products and services with customers and prospects, and link CRM and EFM systems to build
360-degree views of customers. Moving from survey tools to enterprise feedback management helps
organizations better listen and act on customer feedback.
Strategic vs. Tactical EFM Activities
According to the CEIQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers have a formal customer
experience strategy and the tactical plans to execute against it. In fact, out of 24 best practices studied,
having a formal customer-experience strategy in place had the highest positive correlation (0.59) to the
customer loyalty index.
But its not enough to just have a strategy: you must also have planned programs and tactics in place to
achieve the strategy through practical, measurable changes (0.44 correlation). Further, to be effective,
a strategy and plan must have the support of senior leadership and be communicated throughout the
organization (0.42 correlation).
While three quarters of respondents to the study say that they have a CEM strategy, fewer than half have
formal CEM programs in place along with compensation programs that align with CEM objectives. Many
organizations appear to be paying lip service to the importance of CEM, with only 42% of respondents
reporting that senior executives compensation is tied to the achievement of CEM goals.
A formal customer-experience strategy is in place.
Our customer-experience strategy and tactics deliver
practical, measureable changes to the way our organization operates.
Customer-experience measurement has the active support
of my organizations senior management team.
Loyalty
Correlation
Our organization behaves towards customers
in a way that matches our brand promise.
% Strongly Agree Average Agreement
0.59
0.44
0.42
0.37
22.9%
13.4%
26.9%
9.2%
7.1
6.0
7.1
5.4
Does your senior management
team have a customer experience
objective as part of their
personal objectives?
Are any of your seniormanagement team eligible for
bonuses based on achieving customer
experience objectives?
YesNo
YesNo
Over two-thirds of
senior managers
have formal CEM
objectives...
...But fewer than half have
their compensation tied to
achieving CEM objectives
42%
58%
67%
33%
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Having an executive sponsor and the buy-in of the senior leadership team are indispensable components
of success, but they may take time to achieve. Ultimately, this commitment to a CEM strategy and plan
must translate into the organization in a way that allows the brand promise to be fullled (0.37 correlation).
Feedback Management Best Practices
Another conclusive nding of the CEIQ determined that organizations that have the most loyal customers
have approached primary research with a coordinated strategy of feedback management.
Standardizing on a common feedback management solution throughout the enterprise provides manybenets for organizations. First, they can use the platform to coordinate activities across different
departments and functional areas, helping to eliminate duplicate activity. Second, a common platform
enables the use of guidelines and guardrails that empower users with the ability to capture data within
pre-approved parameters and branding standards. Finally, it enables easy information sharing among
internal stakeholders while eliminating redundant costs for multiple platforms.
Once the platform is in place, organizations must agree on a set of metrics that will be used to evaluate
the customer experience. These metrics can be drawn from one of the many existing CEM metrics that
already exist, such as Net Promoter, ACSI, the Apostle Model, Customer Heartbeat and many others, or
they can utilize a proprietary model. While researchers can critique each measure, and some are better
than others for different industries and different organizations, consider this: The most important element
of success is to agree on a set of metrics and then apply them consistently throughout the organization.
We have a standard feedback management solution used
throughout the organization.
We have a standard customer satisfaction, loyalty or
experience measure used across the organization.
We coordinate feedback eorts across all parts of the
organization.
Loyalty
Correlation
We track over time how customers perceive the experience
we are providing them.
% Strongly Agree Average Agreement
0.49
0.47
0.47
0.40
9.4%
16.2%
8.6%
15.5%
5.2
6.1
4.9
5.7
Organizations with the highest customer
loyalty use a common feedback platform and
use standard metrics across the organization.
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Co-Creation Best Practices
Organizations with the most loyal customers actively engage their customers in co-creation.
A new breed of customer now exists that demands to be heard and who wants to engage in a two-way
dialogue about issues that are important to them. As a result, organizations that have the most loyal
customers include customers in the ideation process around product and process improvement. Very
closely related to this practice is having a formal process for placing customer input into the planning cycle,
instead of relying on ad-hoc methods. Fundamentally, these organizations are engaging customers at
every step in the process and, importantly, are providing customers with status updates on the ideas that
they have submitted, as well as informing them if their ideas have not been put into an implementation
plan.
In fact, each of the four co-creation best practices we examined in the CEIQ study are in the top nine best
practices with the highest correlation to customer loyalty out of all 24 practices reviewed.
How can your organization apply these best practices to build customer loyalty? First, create a formal
process to engage in co-creation activities with customers, through quantitative surveys and through
qualitative means such as social media and online communities. Share with your customers what steps
your taking based on their input, closing the feedback loop so that your customers are motivated to
provide information on an ongoing basis.
We include customer ideas for both strategic initiatives and
tactical process improvements.
Our planning cycle includes formal processes for obtaining
customer input.
We approach the design, development and improvement of
products and services with customers as co-creators.
Loyalty
Correlation
We systematically prioritize customer ideas into short- and
long-term roadmaps.
% Strongly Agree Average Agreement
0.56
0.55
0.54
0.51
11.2%
14.7%
13.2%
12.9%
5.3
5.7
5.6
6.0
Successful organizations include customers
in the ideation process.
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The Role of Systems, Processes and Software in EFM
SystemsEFM within CRM
Enterprise feedback management is typically considered within the context of customer relationship
management systems. In the independent report published by Forrester Research, Inc., TechRadar for
BP&A Professionals: The Extended CRM Application Ecosystem, Q3 2009, EFM is placed at the center
of all the applications that integrate with CRM systems. The report sorts 19 application categories into ve
broad areas: Customer Understanding (the hub, containing EFM, Customer Business Intelligence (CBI)
Customer Data Management (CDM)), Customer Targeting, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention
and Customer Collaboration.
Forrester Research, Inc. recognizes the central role that EFM can play in extending the capabilities of
traditional CRM. Clearly, customer understanding is critical to each of the other segments:
Customer targeting works best
when organizations understand
the types of customers that are
most satised and most loyal, as
discovered through EFM surveys.
One could argue that customer
targeting without customer
surveying is like shooting in the
dark.
Customer acquisition works
best when deploying sales force
automation. And sales force
automation works best when
integrated with the customer
understanding that comes from
transactional surveys into new
and lost accounts. Acquisition
is also supported when EFM is
used to audit, measure and alert
issues in Contract Life-cycle
Management (CLM) systems.
Successful organizations include customersin the ideation process
Customer targeting
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Customer retention
Customeracquisition
Customercollaboration
Customer understanding
Enterprise feedback management (EFM)
Customer business intelligence (CBI)
Customer data management (CDM)
Product life-cycle management (PLM)
Enterprise marketing management
(EMM)
eCommerce
Customer communityplatforms (CCP)
Customer forums (CF) Sales force automation
(SFA)
Partner relationship
management (PRM)
Congure, price
and quote (CPQ)
Revenue and pricingmanagement (RPM)
Order management
Contract life-cycle
management (CLM)
Electronic billpresentment and
payment (EBPP)
IVR/speech portals
Contact center infrastructure
Field service management
(FSM)
Customer service and support (CSS)
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Customer retention is a key focus of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty studies. By using
surveys with email alerts and triggers, EFM systems help organizations intervene to improve customer
loyaltynot just measure it.
Customer collaboration has been a particular area of focus for EFM vendors. Vovici integrates with
third-party customer forums and customer community platforms, as well as offers our own MROC
platform specic to research.
Back at the center of the hub, few EFM systems have yet been integrated with third-party BI (Business
Intelligence) systems. A BI/EFM system that uniquely combines survey and operational data is a powerful
tool for creating highly analytical and segmented reports on the y and sharing relevant, personalized
reports across internal boundaries.
Change to CRM Best Practices and IntegrationAccording to the Vovici CEIQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers make sophisticated
use of their CRM systems.
Nothing undermines the loyalty of your customers more than when your organization demonstrates that
it doesnt know who they are, what they have bought or how they have interacted with you. Too often
survey authors ask customers to provide basic details about themselves rather than cross reference thatinformation from a CRM system.
By associating known information about the customer such as name, company name, product/service
history, support interactions and other relevant data with requests for unknown transactional, attitudinal
or experiential data, organizations can engender much higher degrees of customer loyalty. This approach
achieves two ends: rst, it shows customers that youre treating them as individuals and not as numbers;
second, it allows organizations to ask fewer questions but get better data. By no longer needing to ask
customers to provide answers to questions which you already have answers to in a CRM system, its
possible to ask fewer questions but get better data by further reducing feedback fatigue. How valuable
was this practice? With a 0.57 loyalty correlation, it was second only to having a strategic commitment tocustomer experience management.
Unfortunately, many organizations have not yet standardized on a single CRM system. And, those that
have often fail to integrate other applications with the CRM system where appropriate, and miss the
opportunity to establish the CRM system as the central data repository for customer information.
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Only by appending CRM data to attitudinal information can organizations build a complete 360-degree
view of their customer and their customers experience with the organization. These four practices truly
leverage CRM to build customer loyalty.
The majority of organizations with an EFM platform do not integrate it with their CRM system, which was
the CEIQ best practice with the lowest adoption of the 24 practices studied. CRM integration with EFM is
a classic case of 1+1=3. Integration is easier to do than ever before (thanks to web APIs), and the small
added investment in integration can pay both tangible and intangible dividends, while leveraging both
systems that you already have in place. The return on investment (ROI) comes from higher customer
retention, more accurate data and cost savings.
Higher customer retention: Out of 24 best practices studied in the Vovici CEIQ study, integrating
CRM data with customer feedback responses was one of the top two practices with the highestpositive correlation to customer loyalty. By integrating what you already know with what you want to
know, your organization treats customers as individuals. Failure to integrate means that you have to
ask questions that the customer believes you should already know the answer to (e.g., what products
and services they buy), creating a sense of distance between you and the customer, degrading their
trust in your brand.
More accurate data: Integration gives your surveys access to more accurate information and
improves response rates, also increasing accuracy. Most organizations with CRM systems invest
regular resources in cleaning and validating the data in those systems. By using this data with your
survey feedback, you develop more accurate analyses. The data is often more reliable than whatcustomers could recall (they dont remember the date of rst purchase, when their contract is up or
exactly which product conguration they use). Youll get greater response rates from personalized
emails and from shorter surveys (shorter because many of the questions are hidden and populated
by the CRM data).
Cost savings: Typically customer contact records are exported manually from the CRM system
and then imported as temporary mailing lists into the EFM platform. By setting up automated
synchronization, you remove this ongoing labor cost.
We integrate data from our CRM system with
customer feedback responses.
We integrate other application with our
CRM system as appropriate.
We have a standard customer relationship management
system used across the organization.
Loyalty
Correlation
We have a 360-degree view of the customers experience
with us and attitudes towards our organization.
% Strongly Agree Average Agreement
0.57
0.49
0.47
0.41
7.7%
6.1%
4.3%
6.0%
4.1
3.8
4.0
4.4
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Feedback & Operational Processes
Closed-Loop Feedback Process
The closed-loop feedback
process starts with choosing
the metric that your
organization seeks to monitor,
understand and improve. When
you measure a variable, you
will pay more attention to it.
Which metric to use as the Key
Performance Indicator is an
important decision, depending
on which aspects of customer
loyalty are most important
to you (repeat purchases,
upselling or retention see
the Vovici white paper, The
Customer Satisfaction Survey
for more details).
The closed loop is about resolution. For example, after visiting an Apple store for a transaction, you
could be sent a survey. Typically, complaints within a survey are forwarded to the relevant store within an
hour. Closed-loop feedback is not treated as traditional research (consulted rarely), but is an embedded
operational metric, and is consulted daily.
The four steps of the process:
Collect customer feedback data
Make changes
Communicate feedback to customers and employees
Rene the changes
A closed-loop feedback process transforms market research into operations. Multiple Vovici customers
have reported improving customer loyalty within days of implementing this process, as at-risk customers
identify themselves and receive follow-up to rectify their issues.
Collect customerfeedback data
Make changes
Communicatefeedback to
customers &
employees
Refine thechanges
Closed-Loop Feedback Process
The core of
the VoC process and
change management
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Even a simple closed-loop process drives improvement of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), promotes
active listening to customers and prioritizes customer-centric decisions. Some of the benets:
Improve your integrity with your customers
Engage employees and customers
Identify opportunities rapidly
Prioritize based on customer needs
Generate an ROI from the research
Feedback drives change: organizational and cultural change that produces growth and prot, driving
superior business performance.
Panel Management Quality Processes
Panel management provides an excellent framework for improving the quality of an organizations
feedback collection and customer insights.
1. Dont abuse your customer. Many in-house panels are created in a response to rampant Do-
It-Yourself surveying, which is often done with little oversight or quality control. Develop detailed
guidelines that all panel surveys should observe in order to improve the consistency and reliability
of the surveys your organization is elding. Use random samples rather than inviting every
customer. The Market Research (MR) department should create policies that govern how often
customers can be surveyed and by what means, in order to safeguard the long-term health of
customer participation in market research.
2. Have research departments vet questionnaires. What decisions are being made on the
basis of results from amateur surveys? These amateur surveys can lead the organization astray,
often incorporating biased questions or unrepresentative samples. Many research departments
have on-staff experts at questionnaire writing, specialists who can tease out key insights from
respondents, and professional researchers with decades of mastering the survey process. But
these are experts who arent available to their coworkers. Its time for market research departments
to rethink their mission. They should not simply be project managers, overseeing large outside
research efforts; they should be mentors to their coworkers, assisting fellow employees with the
deployment of surveys. To do this, MR departments need to expand, hiring additional staff with
the appropriate research skills and knack for teaching.
3. Embrace continuous process improvement. The initial guidelines should be looked at as a
foundation to build upon and improve over time, as the organization comes to new realizations
about what types of research work well for its specic customer base.
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4. Common resources. The market research department should create, maintain and eld
research resources to be used in common. The research department should create questionnaire
templates with standard question wording and scales for other departments to use, to support
internal benchmarking.
Enterprise Feedback Management SolutionsDeclining response rates, rampant oversurveying and poorly designed questionnaires are symptoms
of organizations where departments have led the bottom-up adoption of survey tools. This frequently
happens in an organization where no MR function exists or where MR concentrates primarily on strategic
or outsourced projects.
With market research uninvolved, surveying starts as an individual activity, where each individual may
have selected a different survey software application to use. Over time, these individuals begin working
together, and survey research within the department turns into a collaborative effort. The requirements
become increasingly complex as users knowledge of surveying increases and the complexity of
requirements grow.
Each department or division often evolves through four stages in its use of survey systems:
1. Survey activity using simple survey tools is widely distributed.
2. De facto survey-domain experts emerge through experience with these tools and through peer
recognition. Only rarely do these experts have any formal training in market research.
3. Survey development, deployment and analysis changes from a solitary effort to a collaborative
approach within the department and occasionally across departments.
4. The need quickly arises for more sophisticated survey systems, greater collaborative capability
and wider information sharing.
While enterprise feedback management systems are intended to provide cross-departmental
standardization, they are adapted frequently for standardization within a department. Departments often
have all the same problems as the enterprise does when it comes to survey research, only smaller in
scale.
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Incorporating Competitive Benchmarking in EFM Frameworks
External benchmarking
Extensive academic research into customer-satisfaction and customer-loyalty metrics in the past 20
years has provided valuable insights into the best questions to ask to measure satisfaction and loyalty.
Yet it is as if this research was never done. Most organizations are not aware of these ndings and cobble
together their own metrics. In fact, according to the CEIQ survey, 83% of respondents reported that their
organization was not using any standard customer experience metric.
Vovici provides extensive consultation to the use of popular external benchmarks, especially:
The ACSI Score
The Forrester CxPi Customer
Experience Index
The Customer Effort Score
In addition, Vovici promotes the public domain CSAT question, the Apostle Model, the TNS Loyalty Model,
the Business Over Broadway RAP (Retention/Advocacy/Purchasing) model.
Internal benchmarking
One of the reasons organizations need enterprise feedback management is to standardize on the same
question wording and scale across your products, departments and divisions. Whichever measures you
decide are best for your organization, use them consistently. This will enable you to compare and contrast
different parts of the business. Internal benchmarking can help different groups learn from one another.
Unfortunately, such standardization is the exception rather than the rule. In a review of 29 customersatisfaction questions used by one Vovici partner, for instance, we identied eight different scales in use
with nine different ways of wording the question.
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Communicating Results Throughout The Company
When it comes to reporting, the two keymistakes of traditional market research have
been to provide a static summary of research
results and to design it for one audience.
Top-down reporting
Bottom-up reporting
Managerial reporting
For instance, for one retailer with 900 branches, 100 districts and 10 regions, the same survey is reported
over a thousand different ways:
The branch manager and assistant branch manager can drill down on the survey data for their
retail location in detail.
The district manager can compare each branch in their district and can dive into the details for
each branch, looking for what one branch management team is doing better than another.
The regional vice president and assistant regional vice president can compare districts and
branches, looking for best practices that can be applied across the region.
Corporate executives get dashboard reports showing high-level trends and comparison of regions
and can drill down in detail to the results for any branch, district or region.
Employee-Customer Engagement Best Practices
According to the CEIQ study, organizations with the most loyal customers not only measure and monitor
employee interactions with customers but also share that feedback with employees (a strong correlation
of 0.54 to the studys loyalty index). This creates a closed-feedback loop that allows customer-facing
staff members to understand the impact of their interactions on customers and enables the creation of
programs that allow employees to improve those interactions over time.
In addition, companies with the most loyal customers also periodically share Voice of the Customer
(VoC) information with employees across the organization, ensuring widespread understanding of the
customers point of view. Taken a step further, these organizations also engage customers in two-way
dialogues through online communities. This allows a wide variety of individuals within the business to
interact and engage with customers. CEOs always talk about making their organizations customer
centric. By talking to customers and evangelizing their viewpoints across the company, the organization
truly becomes centered on the customer.
Execuves
Management
Front-Line Staff
Tailoring Research Results to Different Audiences
Top-Down
Botom-Up
Source: ConsumerContact
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Finally, organizations with the most loyal customers also recognize the link between satised employees
and loyal customers by measuring employee satisfaction on a regular basis. Satised and loyal employees
reect their positive attitudes and good behaviors to customers, who in turn increase their loyalty to the
business.
Averaging these four best practices together, the resulting index has a 0.65 correlation to customer loyalty,
the highest of any of the six practice areas examined. Clearly, employee-customer engagement is key to
unlocking greater customer loyalty.
Making Customer Research & Insight Actionable
Taking action on survey data is driven by tailored views of the data (as described above), the closed-
feedback loop and and the service recovery process.
Service Recovery Process
As Chief Customer Ofcers drive actionable survey results, one of their challenges is that the market
researchers who work for them have not traditionally concerned themselves with using surveys to
intervene on behalf of individual customers, because of the tradition of respondent anonymity and the
interest in measuring rather than affecting customer satisfaction. But applied feedback techniques require
designing processes that include service recovery after a dissatised respondent completes a survey.
This prevents negative comments and sentiment from getting buried in the data and facilitates direct
action while there is still an opportunity to recover.
Employee interactions with customers are regularly
measured, monitored and reported back to the employee.
Our organization regularly looks at the relationship between
employee satisfaction and customer experience scores.
VoC insights are periodically shared with
employees across the organization.
Loyalty
Correlation
Employee representatives from most departments interact
with customers in an online community.
% Strongly Agree Average Agreement
0.54
0.50
0.50
0.48
15.4%
10.2%
6.0%
8.6%
6.1
5.1
4.0
4.8
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Similar to customer satisfaction surveys, social media research is not anonymous when your monitoring
tools report back feedback, you can identify people (or at least their online personas) and either thank
them for that feedback or try to get them assistance if they need it. Some organizations are expanding
their customer service teams to monitor social media directly, so that they can respond as issues are
tweeted and blogged. The market research department is then free to collect the feedback simply for
aggregate analysis.
Email triggers highlight two key aspects of enterprise feedback management: 1) transforming surveys from
projects and integrating them into processes; and 2) distributing survey data to employees. Typically, a
web survey of customers is set up with triggers or alerts that are red off to staff each time a respondent
gives a low rating to customer satisfaction or loyalty questions.
For instance, through an automated process, each call to a contact center generates a follow-up emailsurvey within 24 hours of the issue being marked as resolved. This survey is short andbehind the
scenes, thanks to CRM integrationincludes data about the transaction being rated. If the customer
rates the service poorly on one of several key measures, an email is triggered. This notication of a poor
rating is sent to a contact center manager, and includes within it the customers answers to the survey as
well as data about the customer, product line and call-center transaction.
By receiving this notication moments after the customer has completed the survey, the manager is able
to begin customer recovery with a call or email. The actual manager notied might vary depending on
other elds contained within the survey, such as location of the contact center or location of the customer.
An EFM solution allows quick and real-time triggers to alert managers of potential issues based on customer feedback responses.
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Of course, the survey response is compiled and aggregated for reporting purposes, as with a traditional
survey. However, thanks to the user of email triggers, measuring satisfaction has been transformed into
intervening to improve that satisfaction.
Discovering Trends in Customer Data
Trend reports and dashboards
In research conducted into the best practices that distinguished loyalty leaders from loyalty laggards,
survey research company Business Over Broadway, surveyed 227 customer feedback program
professionals: 86% were with B2B rms, 80% were in North America and 36% were with rms with
1000+ employees. Each professional completed an organizational self-assessment of 28 best practices
and rated their organizations customer loyalty across two outcome measures.
From this, Business Over Broadway calculated an industry percentile ranking of customer loyalty for each
organization and contrasted the average percentile for organizations that had adopted a best practice
against those that hadnt. Importantly, the average loyalty percentile for organizations that hadnt included
customer feedback in executive dashboards was 43%, compared to an average loyalty percentile of 70%
for those rms that had. In other words, organizations that integrated feedback into dashboards scored
27 points higher (27) than organizations that didnt. For more information on this research, please refer
to Beyond the Ultimate Question by Bob E. Hayes (Quality Press, 2009).
Pracces that Disnguish Loyalty Leaders from Laggards
METHOD RESEARCHREPORTING
GOVERNANCE
INTEGRATED BUSINESS PROCESSES
STRATEGY
Source: Business over Broadway
CF included in vision/missions/goals 19
CF important as finance in decision-making 21
CF included in exectuive dashboards 27
Web surveys used for CF
15
Results widely shared
9
Operaonal linkages
22
CFP integrated into process & technology 14
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Trends and Future Directions in the Area of EFM
Multichannel
What channels should you be tuning into to receive the Voice of the Customer? A Walker Information
survey revealed the following primary channels for customer feedback:
Surveys (97%) Almost every attendee uses surveys. VoC started with survey research, which
remains the structured-feedback cornerstone of any Voice of the Customer program. Let the
availability of text mining change your approach to questionnaire design and use text analytics
for survey analysis as well, but surveys ask the questions that your customers arent talking about
on their own.
Contact Centers (78%) Chris Jones of Intuit said that the contact center is one of the key
listening posts for Intuit. Chat logs, email correspondence and web-form submissions to service
portals each provide an excellent source of information about customer frustrations, in their own
words.
Employees (53%) Front-line employees can be a transmitter for the Voice of the Customer.
Use surveys and employee communities to enable staff to share what they are hearing from
customers.
Online Communities/Panels (47%) - User forums and online communities for Intuit software
applications are another of its listening posts for VoC. Chris said, The business as a culture lovescustomer feedback, and this gives them all the data we can. Its fun to now know what you didnt
know.
Social Media (31%) - The blogosphere and microblogosphere (e.g., Twitter and its competitors)
provide timely information into what a select group of your customers and prospects is thinking
and saying to one another.
Customer Councils (28%) Advisory groups consisting of large accounts (for business-to-
business (B2B) rms) or randomly selected consumers (for business-to-consumer (B2C) rms)
whether meeting ofine or online can provide a rich set of ongoing information about customer
perceptions.
Reviews - Unlike social media streams, reviews provide rich sets of additional information. Rory
discussed harvesting customer reviews from e-commerce sites, extracting ratings, structure,
value, qualities and metadata along with the reviews and comments. You hear what customers
are telling one another in public about your products and services.
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Research management
Sometimes the best survey is not doing a new survey at all. And sometimes the best questions are the
ones you dont ask. Enterprise feedback management should encourage wider use of past surveys: the
business user with a research question can review past studies to see if any have answered the issue at
hand.
Sometimes a study will have most of the information needed to answer a new question and with a bit of
added data integration will be able to answer everything. For instance, a new customer segmentation
or view of customer data can be applied to old survey results if those responses tie back to individual
customers; if the sales organization is testing a new industry model, an analyst can integrate that industry
coding into the survey results and do a cross-tabulation on the added eld.
Social listening
When an organization hasnt asked customers about a specic issue, they may have talked about that
issue on the Web. Enterprise feedback management needs to grow to integrate social listening.
For instance, according to HotGrinds, a listening platform:
81% of Internet users have done online research on a product at least once
20% of Internet users do online product research on a typical day
73 -87% of readers of online reviews of restaurants, hotels and others services report that such
reviews signicantly inuence their purchase 32% have provided an online rating of a product, service or person
30% have posted an online comment or review regarding a product or service
Consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rate item than a 4-star-
rated item (varying by product and service category)
Text analytics
Prior to text analytics, analysts could not read all the verbatim responses for surveys with tens of
thousands of responses. For such surveys, companies would draw a random sample of the responses,
read them to develop a coding sheet of common categories of responses, then code or categorize each
sampled response to develop some quantitative estimates of the frequency of occurrence of these codes.
For large coding sheets, sometimes budget or time constraints would limit the coder to only manually
classifying the verbatim responses according to the most frequent codes; in effect, ignoring the long tail
of categories on the coding sheet.
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Text analytics decreases the cost of coding high volumes of comments and increases the quality of that
analysis. Text mining now lets you categorize every single response, which was impossible before when
tracking hundreds of thousands of satisfaction surveys a month. Further, you can now categorize theentire coding sheet, since the work is automated. You can now identify low frequency negative customer
experiences, picking up on rare events that would have been lost if coding was done manually.
In summary, text mining is decreasing the cost of analyzing large quantities of verbatim responses,
increasing the depth of verbatim analysis, and providing greater exibility for adapting to changes in the
data.
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About Vovici
Vovici is the leading provider of online survey management and customer feedback solutions. Powerful,scalable and easy to use, Vovicis solutions help companies engage customers, employees and
partners to increase loyalty, facilitate innovation, and inuence critical business decisions. Thousands of
organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500, rely on Vovici to turn information
into action. Visit www.vovici.com for more information.
We have nearly two decades of industry experience
We have over 1,500 customers, including 50% of the Fortune 500
We invented the term Enterprise Feedback Management and persuaded leading analysts rms
and our competitors to adopt it
We have helped our customers execute over 200 million surveys to drive their Voice of the
Customer programs
About the Author
Jeffrey Henning, PRC is the founder and VP of Strategy of Vovici. Henning has
been a market research consultant, analyst and writer as well as a software
developer. He writes regularly for the Market Research Association blog, The
Researchers Perspective. Henning co-founded Perseus Development Corp.,
developed SurveySolutions for the Web and led the marketing and software
development teams that pioneered the concept of Enterprise Feedback
Management. Earlier, he worked with BIS Strategic Decisions (now part of Forrester Research, Inc.) in
the U.S. and Europe managing survey-research projects for the Fortune 1000. He writes regularly on the
Vovici blog and has written the e-book Survey Software Success.