What do busted computers laptops and broken guitars have in common? The answer…broken customer feedback and busted support channels.
When Jeff Jarvis complained about his Dell computer in the infamous “Dell Hell” blog posts and when Dave Carroll chose songwriting over suing United Airlines with his wildly viral “United Breaks Guitars”, they gave the companies ample warning that they planned to talk. They were subsequently ignored and then proceeded to unleash a storm of negative sentiment that significantly impacted both companies’ reputations and bottom lines.
In Dave Carroll’s case, he spent nine months contacting United Airlines, including talking to flight attendants and gate agents the very day the issue occurred. His last exchange with the company, before he created the now-famous video that potentially dropped United’s stock price by 10%, was with a Mrs. Irlweg who said “United would not be taking any responsibility for what had happened and that that would be the last email on the matter.”
In Jeff Jarvis’ case, he was so dissatisfied with the performance of his laptop and with the service, or lack thereof, that came with it, that he unleashed a storm of negative sentiment through his Dell Hell series of posts on his blog.
When I’ve chatted with folks about these examples, the conversation often revolves around dealing with the storm. Responding is an important topic, but, in my view, the big opportunity is to prevent the storm in the first place. Why wait? You probably already know what the busted computers or broken guitars are in your organization. Your biggest detractors are already talking to you. They are using every available channel, which sadly, are often silo’d from one another.
Your job as a S.P.I.C.Y. leader within your organization is to get ahead of the busted computers and broken guitars and break down the silos. In Part 1, let’s spend time on how to connect the customer feedback silos in a way that’s meaningful to your organization and your customers. Parts 2 and 3, coming soon, will be about what to do with the feedback once you’ve got it.
Part 1: Connecting Customer Feedback
- Audit your existing “voice of customer” channels: How many are there? What are they capturing? Who’s monitoring them and what’s being done about the feedback? Are they survey-based only or are there data analytics and social web monitoring included as well?
- Map your customers’ end-to-end experience: When I was a S.P.I.C.Y. leader myself at Intuit, I was part of a cross-functional team that mapped the experience from the moment a small business owner lost the ability to get business done to the moment she got back to business. We also identified the key “moments of truth” in that experience – which things really mattered to the customer not just which ones mattered to us – by using our own data first and then interviewing customer to validate the moments or adjust them based on the interviews.
- Overlay the moments of truth with the feedback channel audit: Where are the gaps? Where do the channels overlap? What feedback has come through to show how you’re doing against the key moments of truth for the customer?
- Establish a baseline of customer experience and priorities to improve: Based on the audit, mapping and overlay work, you’ll likely have a clear picture for where you’re doing well on customer experience and where you need to improve. From the baseline, in alignment with your company’s objectives, you’ll want to create measurable priorities to improve the experience.
- Establish a regular process for reporting: You’ll have a couple of levels of reporting. You’ll have ground level, emerging issues reporting that is much more real-time. You’ll also want a report-out that should go as high as you can in your organization where hard, longer-term decisions can be made. In some cases, decisions can be made quickly that have a big impact on customer experience, like Southwest Airlines going back to black & white text on their online boarding passes based on customer feedback about the cost of printing in full color. In other cases, the decisions are harder and more complex.
You’re probably asking…now that I’ve done the heavy lifting of connecting the feedback, what next? Part 2 in the series will cover how to measure the value of customer feedback and Part 3 will cover closing the loop on the feedback, even in heavily regulated industries.
I’d love hear more from all of you. How are you connecting customer feedback channels today? What’s working? What’s not?