Seeing the Elephant: Top-Down Customer Feedback Management
Posted by Nancy Porte on Tue, Mar 16, 2010
As I wrote last month in my post The Nancy-Bruce Project, one of my New Year's resolutions (besides committing to grueling half hour sessions with the Stairmaster) was to work through Bruce Temkin's advice for building a best-in-class Voice of the Customer program. And I as work through his advice, I will blog what I learn, a la the film Julie & Julia.
The first item on Bruce's list of 7 keys to Customer Experience in 2010 was "Drop the executive commitment façade". When our CEO promoted me to vice president of customer experience, he was signaling his own executive commitment to our customers.
The second item on Bruce's list follows naturally. "Acknowledge that you don't know your customers." Of course, we all feel we know our customers, but the departments we are in and the roles we serve shape our knowledge. It's much like the story of the blind men and the elephant: one man touches the trunk and concludes it is a snake, another touches the tail and concludes it is a rope, a third touches an ear and concludes the elephant is a hand fan. Too often, we haven't stepped back to see all of our customer's experience. We don't know our customer holistically. Having an executive in charge of the customer experience provides your organization with someone who is in charge of assembling the big picture. At Vovici, we had extensive surveys (of course), all deployed on a common feedback platform (of course), but no one had looked at the process from the top down.
Confession is good for the soul. Once you admit you could know your customers better, you're ready to change. As I've applied Bruce's advice as head of customer experience at Vovici, we've launched some new initiatives to improve the way we obtain and use feedback from our customers. We've chosen to take a three-step process:
- Customer Lifecycle Feedback - First, we wanted to understand how a customer experiences our company. We started by documenting the points of customer interaction - from the sales process through the first year to the renewal process. Once we had our customer lifecycle map, we used that to clearly identify where we wanted to capture additional customer feedback. We also standardized question wording and scales that had grown out of sync over time. In all, we are currently fielding seven new or revamped transactional surveys and a customer relationship survey.
- Customer Insight Team - Once the surveys were launched, we formed a cross-functional team to review the data and make continuous improvements to our VOC program. Again, making sure everyone sees the elephant for an elephant. This team is using the data to prioritize cross-departmental customer experience initiatives and assure that departments are actively addressing reported customer issues.
- Acting on Results - We are actively improving customer experiences in two primary ways. Cross-departmental initiatives are identified and implemented by the Customer Insight Team. Changes within departments are led by the department directors. Many cross-departmental initiatives are underway, including improving system integrations so customer-facing teams have all the information they need when they are working with a customer. Another initiative is to implement a tool which will automatically broadcast survey data reports and dashboards to stakeholders, presenting them with timely data to get to know their customers while improving processes within their departments.
It's easy to get impatient, but Temkin knows what he is talking about. We are already starting to see the impact of getting to know our customers better through a more programmatic approach. For example, early survey data indicated that our customers were not completely satisfied about how we communicated maintenance periods and new releases. We made changes to how we communicate with customers, creating standard processes for each customer segment. Overall satisfaction and loyalty rates are trending up.
If anyone has examples of collaborating with department managers to incorporate customer feedback into new procedures, please let me know. Vovici customers should always feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.
And, if the elephant in the room for your business is that you don't truly know your customers, step back and design a feedback program that will provide you the big picture.
As for me, it's back to that Stairmaster...