I have been working on something like this – what if the metrics are functionally grouped but instead are aligned along the customer journey from awareness to advocacy?  (For example, Awareness, Knowledge, Consideration, Buy, Satisfaction, Loyalty, Advocacy)

So awareness might contain your metrics on brand and social media and PR.  The buying phase would be where your sales metrics go (sales, win/loss, etc…)  Satisfaction might metrics related to customer service.  Loyalty could be retention, Net Promoter Score or repurchase intention measures.

I’m really interested in learning how you think dashboards can be more customer centric.  What examples can you share?  Where have you seen best in class ideas?

Brand – Product – Service

At the brand level, loyalty is more about attachment to a name and what that name means to me (good or bad).  It’s also about a promise – the brand makes promises (implied or intended or unintentional altogether).  Delivery of that promise is judged in the mind of the customer.  Asking loyalty questions at the brand are more about the company brand value and the company brand promise.  And that is where the improvements will need to play out.

Product is very specific.  Asking customer loyalty about a product will tell me a story.  That story is the one they tell other people in their circle (however large or small).  This can be a great tool for better developing a customer focused view of our products and what is most critical from a feature or functionality improvement perspective.  I think it is also important to remember that this won’t be able to give you unknown, unmet needs – that is a whole other discussion.

Service – if the customer is paying for service in addition to the product, then asking for loyalty on this front can be a great tool.  Particularly because it is possible that the buying cycle for the product is longer than the buying cycle for service and its accompanying touchpoints are more frequent.  The down side is that if the service is included somehow or not visible as a cost the customer pays for directly, then asking loyalty at this level is often hard.  Might be better to stick to customer satisfaction for this critical touchpoint.

Those are my thoughts on the level of the question.  What do you think?  How have you seen this applied?

Let’s start with Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Loyalty (including NPS) – what are you going to use it for? 

• Customer satisfaction is all about us – the company/product/service/employees – how did we do? 
• Customer loyalty is all about your customers and their behavior – what stories will they tell about you?  What will they say when someone asks them what they think about a company/product/service?

Picking one or the other (or using both) starts with knowing how you will use the data once you get it. 

• Customer satisfaction – great for repeatable events (like customer support or field service) that need a customer based metric on the scorecard and to drive repeatable excellence in the customer experience. 
• Customer loyalty – great for determining what stories customer’s are telling about you.  Good at showing (or even predicting) customer lifetime value.  Excellent source of customer feedback for product or brand improvement suggestions.

Once you’ve decided how you want customer feedback to apply to your business, it becomes easier to answer questions like “how often do I ask?” and “what method do I use to get the customer’s feedback?” or even “at what level do I ask the question (brand/product/service)?”  **We’ll get to these questions in my next post in this series.**

I’m big on actionable information.  I like to know what business questions customer feedback will answer or what business problems customer feedback will resolve.  It helps me find the right focus for applying customer metrics.  My program team is service oriented – we are here to help our business partners across the company and improve the customer experience at the same time.  This is important because it is feedback from the customers and my business partners that help fuel how I design a program.

These are my thoughts.  What do you think?  Share your experience with me.

Here are the areas we will cover together in the next couple of weeks:

• Strategy:
  • Appetite for risk
  • Customer focus
  • Embracing innovation
• People:
  • Executive buy-in
  • Employee engagement
  • Company culture
• Metrics:
  • Satisfaction and loyalty
  • Customer retention
  • Customer lifetime value

I look forward to hearing what you think as we go through these topics.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?