The Corporate Woman

So tell me, is your customer experience deliberate?  That was one of the questions posed last week at the NPS conference and it made me think – what do you mean by deliberate?  Does that mean written down?  Does that mean everyone in the company knows it?  I think that you have to be both – every employee should know it, feel it really, and it should be written down.  Because if no one writes it down, everyone believes we all have the same idea… and I would bet that isn’t the case.  It may be shades of grey close but still, is that deliberate enough?  This is beyond mission statements and core values – this is what you want your customers to see, think and feel when they interact with you and your products/services.  Right?  What do you think?

Tags: customer exprience

In discussing a customer touchpoint mapping project recently, I was asked this question, “Have you formulated your ROI for this project yet?”  Well, no… at the beginning stages of this type of project (touchpoint mapping, customer expectations capture, gap analysis) you simply don’t know what your ROI is going to be, mostly because you have no idea what problems you’ll identify.  All of the ROI glory goes to the projects that come out of a customer touchpoint mapping project. 

I think this is the reason why so many companies don’t make the effort to do it.  Because it’s hard to quantify up front.  Because some people have that little voice sing-songing “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, never realizing that we might not think it is broken, but our customers might.

Having done these types of projects before, I know they can have tremendous positive impact (increase revenue, improve cusotmer loyalty, even attract more customers).  But the patience and willingness to invest (time, resources and money) for the currently unquantifiable gain, that’s hard to find.  What do you think holds companies back from doing these types of projects?

Tags: barriers to success, Customer Experience, projects, ROI, touchpoints

Customer experience is a growing specialty field.  It goes by many names and titles but the disciplines are quite similar.  As a member of this growing group of practitioners, I’m fascinated with the backgrounds where my colleagues come from.  Many are from market research backgrounds (since getting the customer feedback  is where you start a program) but mine is a different path.  I come from an improvement background (project management, Lean Six sigma, program development, etc).  I believe the heart of a customer experience program is identifying and driving customer fed improvements.

Measure – analyze – act – measure.

I’ve had the pleasure to work in this specialty for ten years now.  I continue to be fascinated and challenged.  I wonder where this career path will go.  I’ve heard some say that it doesn’t have “legs to grow with” as a career path or that it is limited in executive potential but I don’t agree.  I believe that the growth of social media highlights the potential need for even more people to participate in this discipline and more companies to adopt it.  Customers are demanding to be heard.  Customer experience professionals are here to listen and learn, using that customer voice to help companies grow and make customers happier at the same time.  What do you think?  Where is this field going?

Tags: Act, Analyze, best practices, Customer Experience, Customer Insights, customer satisfaction, Improvement, Measure

Few things will kill the development of a successful program designed for change than unengaged stakeholders.  For many, the desire to get things done quicklycauses the elements of communication and engagement to fall by the wayside.  If you have been in that situation, you know how easily you end up wondering at the end why your new or improved process isn’t going as well as planned. 

I have found that it saves a great deal of time and work if you spend the up front time engaging key stakeholders across the business.  This process is critical, yes, I said it, CRITICAL, to ensuring change is successfully enacted.  It helps on several levels, for example:

• You identify your internal supporters and detractors.  Listening to them helps you develop their WIFM and ensure you are able to overcome obstacles.
• The stakeholders feel a part of the change.  Their voice is heard and thoughtfully understood.
• The initial stakeholders identify other people you need to add to the list.

This is a process I teach my team and advocate for every new program or process.  When you have stakeholder interviews up front, you get great ideas to help you be even more successful and identify the obstacles to overcome.   Having this group on your communication list for ongoing updates also helps keep your improvement top of mind.  Do you engage your stakeholders at the beginning of every new project or program?

Tags: Program, Stakeholders, Success

In the next part of our series, we’re going to talk about how what to with the results you get back from NPS.  You’ve completed your survey design and fielded it to your customer and/or partner base.  At last, you have your data.  Now what do you do with the results?  If you are anything like me, you could spend a lot of time reading the open ended responses and analyzing them.  And don’t get me wrong, this is important but in my experience, it’s not the next step.

The next step is connecting NPS results to customer data to determine lifetime values.  Our data showed conclusively that the more likely a customer is to recommend, the longer they tend to stay with us.  Showing this proves the value of NPS.  It ties the results to dollars, which is key in determining which improvement issue to go after first. 

A simple ranking of the number of customer mentions without an attachment to dollars makes it very difficult for your key stakeholders in the business to develop ROI scenarios.  But ranking them with the addition of lifetime value makes a significant difference.  If you can also add in the reasons why customers cancel and the reasons why customers choose not to buy, you have a powerful business case for change that is built in lifetime value (dollars of potential revenue) and is anchored in NPS results.   How many of you are connecting your NPS results to customer lifetime value?

Tags: customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score, NPS

I had a call with a colleague in the customer experience field today.  He had some very good questions about how to decide the focus of your NPS survey.  It was an interesting discussion and I thought it worthwhile to share with you in my blog, perhaps as a series.  I’m going to tackle the survey design questions in this blog.

First subject – how detailed do you focus the survey?  A key decision early on in the program.  There are three levels you can measure NPS and each has varying degrees of impact. 

• At the top level, you have the brand NPS.  If your brand has strong recognition and powerful ties to decision making this can tie NPS.  This can be valuable to get a sense for your share of word of mouth but may not get you sufficient detail by itself to help you drive improvements. 
• The mid-level view or as I like to call it, the actionable level is the product NPS.  This is specific to the product they own and would they recommend it.  This helps a great deal because it can get you several why’s down in five why analysis within the survey itself and helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of each product.  It also ensures that the data is not skewed by a strong influencer (negative or positive), which can happen in the top level measure.
• The tactical level or operational view is really about areas such as service or training.  If you sell this in addition to the product, it can be quite valuable to measure at this level, in conjunction with what product the service or training was delivered on.  Because these are heavily customer facing, they are strong driver elements.

It’s important to look across the business you serve in from the view of customer.  This helps immensely when designing what levels to survey and how frequently to survey.  At the heart of any NPS program, in my opinion, is driving improvements in your customer’s experience, which results in a stronger company from a longevity and revenue perspective.  Ensuring that each survey point is purpose designed and driven towards gaining you actionable data is core to your survey design.  When you have that purposeful leveling structure, you know how detailed your survey needs to be, which means you get to keep it short and focused.  How do you structure your NPS survey?

Tags: customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score, NPS, Survey Design

I know that I am going to be in the midst of competing views here but I use NPS where I work and have built a previous NPS program as well – I like it and it works.  Say what you will of the method (and believe me, there is much that has been said/written/blogged on it, good and bad), the core of it comes down to really listening to your customers, taking action on what you learn and letting them know they are heard.  For me, that’s the key.

I’ve often said that the NPS question itself (and the resulting score) are the least important parts of an NPS program and survey.  Before I anger anyone, please note that I said least important, not that they aren’t valuable at all.  What is more important, in my view, is the “why” for the score given and “what would it take to improve”.  This is where the listening gets good.

Once you have all that great data from your customers, it’s time to turn it into actionable information.  That’s done by taking the NPS data and tying it to other key data.  That’s going to vary for your business but it could be market channel, customer value, number of customers, retention, country, product, brand… well, I think you see where this could go, right?

Customer feedback that’s just a number that everyone watches and argues about is not really all that helpful, is it?  The real power comes from the program you build around the NPS data you collect and the tools you develop as a result.  Taking action on customer feedback and letting your customers know they are heard.  And who doesn’t want to buy from a company like that?

Tags: action, customer loyalty, listening, Net Promoter Score, NPS

I’m going to try and avoid my soapbox here but I will warn you in advance that I may not be successful.  You be the judge…

In my experience, most surveys I’ve taken and seen (includes both those I’ve been asked to provide input on as well as those I couldn’t bear to actually complete), don’t really get actionable information as a result.  I get the sense that most people think surveys are easy to do and really, how hard can it be to come up with a bunch of questions?  In a way, they are right.  It’s not usually the questions that trip you up (although there are those and we’ll get to that in a bit).  The hard part, the tripping point, is really purposeful information.

1. If you had the answer to this survey question, what action would you take with it? 
2. Pretend you’re the opposite of a lawyer and don’t ask any questions when you already know the answer. 
3. Would you take this survey if you got it? Really?
4. Avoid conjunctions.  I don’t know why this comes up so often.  Conjunctions don’t conveniently shorten your survey by grouping concepts, they cloud your results.  (And, but, or, yet, for, nor, so).  “Please rate your satisfaction with the cleanliness and quality of our bathroom.”  Really, is cleanliness the same as quality?  Perhaps it was clean but the toilet paper was of poor quality… but I digress to another potential blog here.
5. Don’t be so wordy.  Overdone corporate speak, really long questions and acronyms are the usual culprits here.  Keep it short and simple to get the best results.
6. Have at least one open text/feedback question.  Instead of trying to cover every possible base, leave the customer the chance to share what they want to share, the way they want to share it.

And my last thoughts on the manner – keep the whole survey short and focused on your point.  Tell me how long the survey is or will take in the invite.  There’s always more but these are the things that always seem to come up in one form or another.  Now you tell me – how many times have you seen these simple rules violated?

Tags: best practices, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, design, suggestions, survey

The holidays are over and I am back to work after my longest vacation off in my working history.  It was lovely but it will come as no surprise to those close to me when I mention that I managed to snag an awful virus and was sick for the whole two weeks.  I am still dragging through the dregs of it…  All of that aside, it was a lovely and quiet holiday, filled with family time and I treasure the opportunity I had.

And now, it is time to work with my team to put definition to the strategy elements for 2009.  This is always such a great time of year for work, in my opinion.  I love looking at the long term plan, figuring out what needs to be done this year to get to fulfill that vision and breaking it down to quarterly chunks.  This is the year for retention and customer focus, no doubt about that.  Any company not thinking in those terms are going to have an even tougher year.  

Step one – find our retention version of the angled measuring cup.  If you haven’t heard the President of Oxo International talk about this invention and how it fulfills their principles, you missed out (http://gelconference.com/videos/).  In short, it’s time to find a clearer way of looking at the information to better understand what our challenges are.

Step two – use that information to make the customer experience even better, so we are able to deliver more value to our customers and they want to stay with us longer.

Which brings me back to the beginning – it’s time to plan!  Is that what you are doing this month?

Tags: Balance, Customer Experience, Loyalty, Vacation, Work

I have a lovely, long holiday planned with my husband and daughter.  Sixteen days off.  A rare thing in my life.  Normally, I only have a week off at a time (total of nine days), so this rarity will be something to treasure.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past few weeks encouraging my team to do the same.  For a Customer Insights organization, the end of the year is not a crazy one like some parts of the org, more a time to wrap up projects. 

I believe in setting a goal to try to get to zero by the end of the year when it comes to vacation time.  There is a reason we get that time off – it’s for balance, for health – both physcial and mental.  And it’s important to take time off.  This year, I won’t quite make zero – I’ll be short by a day and a half but that’s pretty darn close.  And it’s important to remember that there’s no award or recognition for not taking time off.  So if you are one of those types – you know the ones, the hoarders of time (I am a reformed hoarder, so I know what it’s like) – then try it for just one year.  Make it your goal in 2009 to get to zero vacation days by the end of the year.  You never know, if you try it once, you might find you’ll never go back to hoarding again.

Tags: Balance, Customer Experience, Family, Health, Vacation, Wholeness, Work