The Corporate Woman

I love the ability to make successful recommendations.  When I love a product or a service or an idea, I can’t wait to share it with my friends, family and colleagues.  And when that recommendation is equally well liked and received, then I feel great.  Surely I can’t be alone in that, right? 

Where am I going with all this?  Well, I am an avid reader, when I say avid, I mean that in actual definition of the word – I have read pretty much every day of my life since I was seven.  A day that goes without reading a book is a sad, sad day for me.  I read at least two to three books a week, sometimes more.  I am also the queen (self-proclaimed) of reading multi-tasking.  Some examples - while eating (easy), while blow drying my hair (a little harder but easy with practice) and while watching TV (harder but still possible).  My family has many stories of the unsuccessful attempts I have made over the years to combine reading with other activities but that should be a different post, I think.

So I thought that I would never convert from the comfort of the paper in hand to an e-reader.  But I have converted and done it wholeheartedly.  I received a Kindle for Christmas and fell in love with it.  I have shared it with dozens of people (even numerous strangers who have asked after it out in public).  I rave about it because it turned out to be perfect for me.  See… there I go again, recommending.  Can’t help it.

Being a fan of Apple and being married to an Apple fanatic, I was looking forward to the iPad.  I thought to myself, “Wow, will this be even better than the Kindle and my iPod Touch combined?”  I’m sorry to say but from all I have seen, I just can’t feel the love on this one.  This from a woman who has a Kindle, an iPod, an iPod Touch and a Flip in my purse at all times.  I’d have an iPhone too if I didn’t have a company Blackberry instead.  I wanted to like it, really I did.  I think it could be great but I don’t think it’s there yet.  Certainly not as an e-reader.  I am not getting the “magic” or the “revolution”.  Maybe I will when it improves in future generations.   What do you think?

Tags: iPad, Kindle, Loyalty, Recommending

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

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 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

There isn’t one best way to best understand your customers but whatever you choose, it really needs to start with understanding their behaviors.  For example, your customer has decided to leave and you have a way to capture the reason why.  When they say price… do you accept that?  Or do you realize that price really means something else – such as “Budget – something in my life has changed and I need more money in my budget, so this has to go or I need a cheaper price” or “Value – I just don’t see the value in this vs. what I have to pay”.  Neither of those are actually price – they are root causes of the price top level statement. 

So being able to dig into the behaviors of your customers and understand why they do what they do is incredibly valuable.  In this way, you can really flesh out customer segmentation and work on developing personas or mental models that can actually give you actionable customer insights to drive decision making and strategy development.  And this part of a customer experience program can be very fun – I always enjoying digging in and understanding customers.  How about you?

Tags: Customer Experience, Customers, Loyalty

I was recently asked the question about how do you prove that measuring NPS is worthwhile (or any other loyalty metric).  It was an interesting and good question but it is sort of like asking how do I prove that love is better than not having love.  I know, I know… an odd example perhaps but also ephemeral to prove or disprove.  Here is what I think about that (NPS not love – I’ll save that for another post):

Customer loyalty (or even the power of recommendation) itself is not what needs to be proven, we know it exists and operate on it many times when we make purchasing descisions, whether they are business or personal choices.  What needs to be proven is how you can use measuring customer loyalty to actually drive positive change that not only results in growing your business but also in an improved customer experience.  This actually comes down to the ability to monetize the value of score because money really does talk in this case.  You have to be able to link the lifetime value, likelihood to recommend, frequency of recommendations and repurchase together to build a financial and customer focused picture of how your customers behave and what engages their loyal behavior.  It can be done and I have done it, so I know it works.  The interesting thing to me is how many times companies don’t take it this extra step, which enables you to make actionable business cases for change that benefits both customers and the business.  Food for thought…

Tags: Communication, Customer Experience, Loyalty, Net Promoter Score

It’s been an interesting year for those of us in the customer experience realm.  Lots of passion on both sides of the fence regarding the Net Promoter Score has resulted in positive good overall – it has raised awareness of the era of customer choice.  The more aware a company and its leaders are regarding their customers and their customer needs, the better opportunity that company has to grow organically.  Having used a number of the methods espoused by the various experts, I can see the pros and cons of each of the methods.  What I find the most interesting is not what method but why they choose the method.  Surprisingly, many times that choice is made without actually looking at how their market works and how their customers behave.  Looking their first really helps narrow down the field of what methods will work best for measuring and driving customer loyalty.

Tags: Customers, Loyalty