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.

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?

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?

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?