1. Customer Feedback: How to Value It in Your Organization, Part 2 of a 3-Part Series

    Friday, 11 Jun 2010 View Comments Posted by: Kira Wampler

    “Well, that is just customer feedback and this [insert business policy] makes us [insert revenue number].”

    Sound familiar? As a S.P.I.C.Y. leader in your organization, you’ve worked hard to use customer feedback to break down barriers within your organization, as described in part 1 of this series. But, it is inevitable that you either have heard or will face a customer vs. shareholder debate when it comes to reporting out on customer feedback and the root causes driving it. Price, product and policy issues that drive sales and negative sentiment are particularly tricky to navigate within the context of large organizations.

    What makes these conversations so hard and the barriers between silos so thick is that different measures of success are in play. Customer experience measures, derived from customer feedback, usually come in the form of satisfaction, resolution rates and brand favorability while shareholder measures are, well, all about revenue, expenses and profit. And, the concept of missed revenue as a result of negative sentiment can feel very fuzzy for operations, finance and business unit leaders.

    Having an apples-to-apples discussion between the two camps is critical. At Intuit, we heavily used the Net Promoter methodology which asks a simple question – “how likely are you to recommend this [product, service, etc] to someone else”, and it is often used as a side-by-side measure with revenue. Over the last couple of years, Intuit’s research teams did extremely hard work to connect Net Promoter data to revenue.

    But, Net Promoter data is what people “say” they are going to do. What about what people actually say and actually do? Listening on the social web is the best way to understand this other side to the loyalty coin. Using tools like Radian 6 or Scout Labs, you can listen to what’s being said about your brand, apply sentiment scoring and use your real customers’ voice to show how they are, or are not recommending your products or services.

    In some cases, you have listen yourself in specific channels, like my team at Intuit did within Amazon. My team led the effort to have a 100% reply goal on Amazon reviews on Intuit’s flagship small business product, QuickBooks Pro 2010, and we developed a weekly dashboard, shared at senior staff, that showed key topics, number of reviews, sentiment and change over time.

    What that dashboard didn’t show was impact on sales. By adding in simple questions to several surveys that regularly go out to recent purchasers (and not) of QuickBooks, we were able to determine impact on sales.

    We found that online reviews had a double digit impact on sales – meaning that our customers said that reviews were the main & only source or the main but not only source of purchasing. Between the Net Promoter value work and the online review-to-sales research, our team had the opportunity to really connect customer and shareholder measures. Efforts like this enabled the team to drive closed-loop changes within the product that dramatically decreased negative sentiment.

    Valuing customer feedback is the second key step in breaking down the barriers within an organization. Next up, we’ll tackle responding to customer feedback!

  2. Customer Feedback: Breaking Down the Silos in Your Organization. Part 1 of a 3-Part Series

    Friday, 7 May 2010 View Comments Posted by: Kira Wampler

    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.

    busted laptops_broken computers

    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?

  3. Is your Brain ready for Great Customer Service?

    Tuesday, 22 Dec 2009 View Comments Posted by: Sean McDonald

    Great customer service starts with a healthy brain. I believe if your employees are happy, informed, engaged, and energized; then they produce better products and deliver great service. If your employees have negative feelings, this clogs the Prefrontal Cortex in the brain,  where empathy and reasoning reside.

    I attended a great workshop from the Hand in Hand organization (a non profit started by Patty Wipfler). Hand in Hand is a parenting resource, but I saw many parallels to adult business relationships. Hand in Hand’s approach is based on the principles of respect, listening, leadership development and the importance of interpersonal connections. The way to break thru the negative emotions is to Listen on a personal level. Bad behavior can be a request for help.

    Case in point: American Airlines – I have flown over 30 segments with American Airlines in last 6 months and have been paying a lot of attention to the flight attendants, gate agents, ticket counter agents, and pilots (greet you at end of the flight). My service experience has been either great or terrible. Why? It comes down to the employee’s attitude– some are enjoying their job and others hate it. Unfortunately over the last 30 flight segments, about 75% of my observations appear to be hating/regretting showing up for work. This comes across as some rude behavior in boarding and in flight service (“HURRY UP take your seat”  “we can’t take off because YOU are not seated”, “Turn off your device NOW”). December 3,  I was on a flight from AUS to DFW, they started loading the plane 12 minutes before scheduled departure, then complained that the passengers were holding up scheduled departure. The reason was the late arrival of the plane (inbound to AUS) and late loading delayed the departure. Compare this to stories of Virgin America or Southwest – customers talk about the positive experiences. I met one business traveler in San Francisco that has changed his schedule to fly Virgin America over other airlines. So I asked why? What does Virgin America do differently? Answer: “they are nice to me, say hello, they smile”.

    People smile when they are happy. People are happy when they are informed, empowered, and energized. Management has a lot of jobs and get dumped on a lot. A management philosophy I followed (while in the U.S. Navy and at Dell, Inc.) was to listen to my team, remove roadblocks, praise in public, and counsel when necessary. If you take care of your team, they take care of you. What is yours?

    American Airlines: if you happen to read this, I would be interested in discussing some ideas to improve your customer service. As a frequent flyer, it is in my best interest (along with millions of other flyers to improve the status quo).  I believe your employees are not the core problem. Improved communication and engagement can help.