Using the Voice of the Customer to Drive Real Business Results

By Bruce Johnson on July 30th, 2010

The reason that Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs exist is to monitor the customer experience and identify problems that it makes sense for the business to resolve.

Let me be more specific. An effective VoC program will likely uncover—and must address in one way or another—several categories of feedback from customers:

1. Complaints – These reflect the negative experiences customers have had with the business. Perhaps they are unhappy that they are now being charged for services or content that was formerly free. Airline baggage fees, bank service fees, and “premium” online news content are all examples of things people complain about.

2. Comments, Suggestions, and Requests – these are neutral-to-constructive statements that may provide strategic insight into how to run the business better. Sometimes they capture the experience of a relatively small subset of customers rather than the entire customer base. Take the music that’s played while waiting on hold, for instance. Some customers like classical music. Some like smooth jazz or lite rock. Yet another group prefers not to wait at all and is indifferent to what they are hearing.

It’s useful, I think, to filter these two categories through a third:

3. Problems that, if fixed, would benefit the customer and the business – This is the classic win-win scenario.

Elaborating…

Customers may comment on many different issues, so the key is to be strategic. Use your resources to create solutions that benefit both customers and the business.

Consider fees for services or content. Removing them will not benefit the business, unless customers are deserting it for the competition. Reasonable options include reducing fees, making them competitive with businesses in the same sector, or perhaps restructuring them to appear as an incentive.

Or music on hold. An effort to reduce wait times can improve customer satisfaction and decrease abandonment rates. It’s better for the business because shorter wait times presumably mean that customer issues are being addressed and dealt with.

Improving Business Outcomes

It’s important to remember that customer feedback does not necessarily, nor should it, inform action to the exclusion of other considerations. One-off responses to customer issues that do not view feedback in the context of business operations as a whole and the market environment, are typically less than optimal.

Listening to the voice of the customer is all about improving business outcomes. Customer feedback provides strong clues about what to look at in order to improve performance. Used correctly, this feedback can drive a listening effort that creates real business results: a campaign integrating a well-thought-out response to customer concerns with strategic communication to better serve and retain customers.

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July 30th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Customer Experience, Data Analytics | One comment

Bringing Data Sources into your Voice of the Customer Efforts

By Shaw Taylor on July 15th, 2010

It’s no surprise that consumer-facing businesses with strong customer experience programs generate staggering amounts of data across a variety of touch-points. Consider a retail bank, for example. Customers visit a branch, bank online, call customer service, and communicate with bankers by email on a daily basis. We believe that this avalanche of data can—and should—be mined to empower businesses to better understand their customers.

Collecting the Right Data, the Right Way

In this post, we review best practices that we’ve implemented in putting customer data to work. Though we use retail banking as an example, these steps apply to any enterprise with a large customer base.

A Structured Approach

A thoughtful, structured approach to acquiring and analyzing data is critical to the success of any Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

  • Prioritize – We begin by identifying processes that have both strategic importance to the business and affect the customer experience.  For example, data collected during customer interactions with online properties, customer interactions during ATM transactions, or understanding experiences through channels that exist only for high-value customers. Once understood, we define their relative importance and prioritize.
  • Discover – During this step, we interview business and data owners to document and confirm their understanding of the data and its value to the business.

  • Stage – To prepare for downstream analysis, we obtain data from operational databases and stage it in an analysis workspace that we help our client to create.
  • Build and acquire metadata – We then help to develop contextual information about the customer’s interaction with the business. Having context about the customer experience—is this a high value customer, where is the customer engaging with the business, how many accounts does she have, how long has she been a customer—is essential for analysts as they draw insights about customers.
  • Determine usability – During this stage, we characterize the data, define its source, identify the number of records available, and document the existing text fields that contain customer verbatims.
  • Go / no go – Based on the initial assessment, we decide if the data source will likely provide insightful analysis about the customer experience. We make this decision for each data source, re-engaging with business and data owners where appropriate.
  • Data loading and analysis – After each of these steps has been completed, the data is ready for analysis.

What We’ve Learned

In our work with high-touch, consumer enterprises, we’ve learned that a thoughtful data acquisition process is a key component of an effective VoC program. It is important to focus on sources that provide actionable insights that can improve the customer experience.

In upcoming posts, our technical team will discuss the inner workings of the analysis process of VoC initiatives.

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July 15th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Customer Experience, Data Analytics | Leave a comment

Customer listening: 6 key insights on using text mining in social media

By Thomas Morphopoulos on May 3rd, 2010

What do corporate heavy hitters have to say about The Future of Social Media in 2010? A recent Silicon Valley American Marketing Association forum explored innovative ideas and best practices for leveraging social media, with insights from the likes of Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo, Jeanette Gibson of Cisco, and Maria Pomeromo of Adobe.

Adobe, Cisco, and Wells Fargo have all made significant commitments from the top of their organizations to better engage with customers through social media. However, many companies are not gaining the maximum impact from their customer listening –and that got our data analytics team thinking…

6 key insights on using text mining in social media

1. Text mining can make social media efforts more effective

If your company is still taking a manual approach to analyze customer feedback in social networks –you may be missing something vital. As the volume of comments from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sources continues to grow, manual analysis can’t keep up. Marketing and product management teams risk missing valuable insights, and this is where text mining comes in.

2. Let the data talk to you

By systematically categorizing comments, applying a metric of importance or severity, and tracking trends over time, you can uncover what customers think about your products and brand. Browsing blog posts and comments are no longer enough, and in fact, present a big risk: you may focus too much on what you’re looking for and too little on what the majority of current and potential customers are really saying.

3. Take an enterprise approach to evaluating customer feedback

Instead of monitoring online conversations only at the product level, think about expanding to a broader, integrated view of what customers are saying. They see your company as one entity, even if lines of business or products are managed semi-autonomously. If you only monitor dialog around a few key products, you may miss out on potential insights by not putting all of the pieces together.

4. Text analysis: the best thing since sliced bread?

An automated text tool can help you zero in on key themes, and the associations among them. For example, if you look at blogs about Toyota, there has always been a customer conversation about quality; however, lately, there’s been an increase in the total volume of comments, and the issue of Toyota quality is being discussed in more negative terms. Using text analysis, and social network data from Twitter, Facebook and other sites, you can measure and track sentiment and its intensity over time. This can provide a kind of gut-check, or early warning system, well before you tally up your next Net Promoter Score.

5. Bionic ears, on Steroids

Automating the analysis of listening efforts lets companies integrate analytics into their social media monitoring. Companies like Adobe are already using brand monitoring tools to enhance their customer listening capabilities. Leaders in this space include Radian6, Cymfony, and SM2 by Alterian, and while these solutions currently have limited analytic capabilities, you can leverage the content these tools provide.

Radian6, for instance, allows you to monitor and export data from blogs, top video sharing and social networking sites, forums, and mainstream media sites. Suck it into text mining software like SPSS Modeler, and you’ll hear things from your customers that never used to hit your radar. Ready to take it up a notch? Add this layer of information to other feedback sources you track, including customer service email, call center notes, and customer surveys.

6. Your customers are talking behind your back

Turn around, already. You can use these techniques to create a comprehensive Voice of the Customer program that gives you a rich, nuanced view of what’s on customers’ minds. Companies like Adobe, Wells Fargo, and Cisco have done a great job of diving into massive amounts of customer data. Their next step—and the future of customer listening—is to mine it for the real gold.

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May 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Customer Experience, Data Analytics | One comment

How to say you’re sorry (to customers)

By Dana Roytenberg on April 1st, 2010

Courtesy of the discerning Clive Mettrick at Business Research Lab and a defective pint of JavaChip ice cream, Starbucks had the opportunity to rise to the occasion.  And it did – sending a dissatisfied customer an excellent problem resolution (‘apology’ in layman’s terms) letter that not only salvaged the relationship, but contributed to increased satisfaction and loyalty.

"We hope that you will give us another chance to provide you with the quality ice cream you deserve and that all your future encounters with Starbucks Ice Cream bring you nothing but pleasure"

"We hope that you will give us another chance to provide you with the quality ice cream you deserve and that all your future encounters with Starbucks Ice Cream bring you nothing but pleasure"

Based on Clive’s Starbucks correspondence, here are some key elements of an effective resolution communication:

1.  Thank the customer for contacting you, and apologize (Starbucks did so twice).

2.  Address the issue directly. (“We are sorry to hear that the ice cream lacked the quality you have come to expect from Starbucks.”)

3.  Offer an explanation. Clive points out that an excuse was not necessary, but it was important to him to know that this problem was an exception to their normal practice. (“In the case of your carton, it appears that we were the victim of human or mechanical error, in that the feeder failed to add the appropriate quantity of chocolate pieces to the mix.”)

4.  Assure the customer that the problem will be resolved, and that they can count on you in the future (“Please be assured that we have reported this incident to our quality assurance department and that they are implementing measures to ensure this situation does not recur.”)

5.  If possible, offer some form of restitution, whether a voucher, refund, or other appropriate item or service. (“Please accept the enclosed gift certificate for one quart of Starbucks Ice Cream to replace your purchase.”)

6.  Close with an expression of appreciation for the customer, and (OPTIONAL) a hint of panache! (“We hope that you will give us another chance to provide you with the quality ice cream you deserve and that all your future encounters with Starbucks Ice Cream bring you nothing but pleasure.”)

April 1st, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Communications, Customer Experience | Leave a comment