MarketTools Blog

As our new clients begin their Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, the question they inevitably raise is “What Key Metric should we track?”   Many Customer Experience Managers have lost countless hours of sleep over this one.  Will it be some kind of “overall satisfaction” score?   A score for likelihood to continue to do business or expand their business?  Or a fancy weighted index score combining the results from multiple questions?  There are many different VOC metrics that a company could track, but what works and makes sense for one organization does not necessarily make sense for another.  So don’t feel compelled to copy the metric that someone else is using.

A number of options exist when deciding which metric(s) to use and what makes sense for your company.  A few of the most commonly used include:

Creating a multi-country Voice of the Customer (VOC) program isn’t as simple as duplicating the same program activities in different countries.  The program complexity can increase proportionally to the number of countries involved.

Planning a multi-country VOC program implementation is like planning construction of a house: if a key task is not properly set up, it can put the entire program at risk, either at structural level or financial/ timing level. The key to success is to make sure that all the steps are thought through, and you try to foresee as many potential issues as possible. Planning is very important to make sure the program is a success!

We on the MarketTools CustomerSat team have a lot of experience managing complex multi-cultural, multi-language VOC programs – here are some tips and best practices that help us get these programs off the ground successfully.

Even the best-designed customer satisfaction survey won’t yield results if people don’t receive it, open it, and answer questions.  To maximize your survey response rates (or diagnose a response rate issue), here are five areas to consider.

1)  Sample:  Who are you trying to reach and how frequently?

• Make sure you’re sending your customer feedback survey to the right people.  Don’t send a product or support survey to a billing contact, just because that’s the contact name you happen to have on file!
• Prevent over-surveying by implementing touch rules that ensure no respondent receives survey invitations too frequently.
• Be sure your email addresses incorporate the latest contact information from your CRM systems.
   

When your company has a support call center, how do you ensure that the service delivered by representatives consistently meets corporate standards and drives high customer satisfaction?  An ideal solution for monitoring the support experience is to introduce a satisfaction survey to collect customer feedback.  

One popular option for collecting this type of feedback is the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) survey.  An IVR survey is a pre-recorded automated survey in which the customer responds to questions either by voice or by typing numerical responses using the telephone keypad. 

IVR surveys are leveraged differently across industries, because no one method is suited to all situations.  Following is a list of common IVR survey approaches:

Think of all the surveys you’ve taken in your life.  As you hit the submit button or hung up the phone, did you ever expect to get something in return (aside from that minor incentive you come across from time to time)?  The model below illustrates that your feedback rarely comes full circle:

^{Source: eVergance (October 2008)}

Here’s the good news: this opens the door for your Voice of the Customer (VOC) program to establish a competitive advantage.

“Closing the Loop” refers to the process of sharing customer feedback with the employees responsible for the customer experience and empowering those employees to talk directly to the customer to take appropriate action on the feedback provided.  As a result, organizations can effectively turn difficult situations into an opportunity to enhance the customer experience and strengthen the relationship.  That responsiveness will help you stand out from your competitors in the marketplace.

Where do you begin?  Here’s how to get started with Closing the Loop in your customer feedback program:

This blog post revisits some tips for getting the most value from your Voice of the Customer program.

These days, it’s hard to find companies that are NOT performing some sort of customer satisfaction survey. Whether you’re purchasing a big ticket item such as an airline flight, picking up something at a drug store, or calling into a help desk for technical support – it seems every company you deal with wants to know “how was your experience?”  And that’s a great thing…if anything is actually done with the results.

It’s demotivating to customers who take the time to complete a survey – whether it’s because of a good experience or a bad one – and then see no evidence of follow-up.  It can make them feel even less valued than if they hadn’t completed the survey at all.  What this means is that collecting feedback without an effective process for analyzing and acting on the results may actually do more harm than good.

This blog post revisits a examination of best practices for using Net Promoter Score* in your customer satisfaction program by Joe Camirand, Vice President of Research & Consulting Services for MarketTools CustomerSat.

One of the questions clients focused on customer satisfaction and loyalty often ask me is “how do my NPS scores compare to others?”  NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is a metric for measuring customer loyalty, based on the question: “Please rate your willingness to recommend us to a friend or colleague." The Three Segments of Net Promoter Score (NPS) are Promoters, Passively Satisfied, and Detractors, and they are typically determined using a 0-10 or 1-10 scale.  The NPS score is determined by subtracting the percentage of responses that rated a 0 through 6 (Detractors) from the percentage of responses that rated a 9 or 10 (Promoters). The end calculation of this is your NPS score. Note that the Passively Satisfied individuals, those that rated a 7 or 8, are not included in the calculation.

This blog post revisits some practical tips from from Jolinda Decad, one of our MarketTools CustomerSat Research Consultants, who offered up great advice on survey design best practices for Voice of the Customer programs in a 10-minute interview that you can listen to here.

Here are some of Jolinda's key considerations to keep in mind when you develop your customer feedback surveys:

• Focus on a specific purpose: As you begin development, resist the urge to pull together a cross-functional team to start brainstorming survey questions. The best surveys focus on a specific purpose and ask only questions that are relevant and actionable. The more people involved, the more likely the purpose will be clouded and the more difficult it will be to get the information you need from the survey.

Guest blogger Candy Michael is Vice President of Customer Feedback at American General Life Companies, one of the top insurance providers in North America – and a longtime MarketTools CustomerSat customer.

This past year, American General Life Companies launched a Voice of Producer (VOP) program series, to ensure that we deliver an exceptional customer experience for our distribution partners.  We leveraged our EFM system with MarketTools CustomerSat to maximize the success of our partner feedback program.

While designing just about any voice of the customer survey, many debate the right placement of their key customer satisfaction questions such as “Overall Satisfaction with the Company” (or OSAT) and “Willingness to Recommend”.  Some place these key questions at the beginning of their customer feedback surveys, while others lean towards placing these types of questions at the end. 

There’s no right or wrong answer to this issue of OSAT question placement.  However, the placement can and likely will alter your survey results, so it’s important to carefully consider which placement makes the most sense for your business needs.