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Part 4: Employee Engagement - In-life Engagement

What role do employees play in creating a great customer experience? An engaged employee is happy, motivated, and will strive to deliver the best possible customer experience and outcome for the organization.

A key aspect in keeping employees engaged is rewarding success, and this requires an understanding of how to best recognize achievement. Organizations must understand what motivates their team and how to set targets, and know how to use financial and non-financial rewards as well as instant/ad-hoc prizes.

VoC reporting and analysis tools play a key role in recognizing employee success. Cyclical benchmarking and  quarterly performance analysis reporting ensures all employees – from executives to front-line staff – know exactly how their performance relates to others within the organization and how these results enable more informed choices regarding individual training, coaching and performance management initiatives.

It is important to complement these reports with other analytical work such as an actionability matrix or satisfaction driver analysis, and to share customer experience trends and discussion topics, as well as uncover drivers of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

If you missed the previous VoC video series post on “Employee Engagement – The Key to Successfully Launching a VoC Program,” you can catch up here. 

Hayley Kitson

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Part 3: Employee Engagement – The Key to Successfully Launching a VoC Program

Launching a Voice of Customer program can be an uncertain and daunting time for a business; frontline staff may be suspicious of adopting a new performance management tool, while stakeholders might expect or demand an immediate return on their investment in the project.

By developing an effective launch plan, your VoC program can benefit from a smooth take off, generating excitement within the business and delivering not only immediate improvements but the foundation for long term success.

Part 2: VoC Engagement: The Multi-Channel Experience

Capturing feedback from your customers is a critical component of any Voice of the Customer program. Engaging customers via the optimal channel, and at just the right time, can drive both higher response rates and better quality feedback.

The road to delivering an engagement plan which will deliver maximum benefit for your customers begins with understanding how customers interact with each other and with the organization. 

Part 1: VoC Philosophy; Building a Customer Centric Culture

Starting on the journey to customer experience excellence is a tough and challenging process, which is by no means guaranteed to end in success. It is important to know how to get on the right track, including how to deliver a solution which fits within your business while also driving a better customer experience. This six-part video blog series will address these challenges and more.

All successful VoC programs are based on four pillars: volume of feedback, quality, insight, and operational focus.

Third Time Lucky

Like everyone, I was recently very excited about choosing a new smart phone. I chose a network operator of the many in the UK and went to the store to make my purchase, I was advised to order the new mobile over the phone in store as that was how to get the best deals. However, when the phone arrived it was broken. I took it to the store hoping to exchange it but I was told because it was ordered via the phone it would have to be resolved in the same way. Not ideal.

The Cardinal Sin of CXP: Listening but not Acting

I recently had my own customer experience that I would be interested to get your viewpoint on. Without sharing too many details, I had a request for my credit card provider (who it is worth pointing out, is different to who I have my current account with). Somewhat frustratingly due to the lack of current account they were unable to provide me with a solution to my problem.

Having not had the situation resolved to my satisfaction, I felt it necessary to write my feedback to the company involved.

VoC Forum 2013 in review

This month saw the fifth NICE Voice of the Customer Forum take place at the London Stock Exchange. Attended by leading professionals focused on improving the customer experience, the event offered a unique opportunity to hear real life success stories of leveraging Voice of Customer across the enterprise. Customer experience is the overall resulting thoughts, feelings and emotions that a customer experiences during his interaction journey with his service provider. The day also served up engaging discussions across industries on how to serve the customer better and deliver a better experience to them. Customer speakers included Sprint, Capital One, TSYS & TalkTalk; the event was opened by a keynote presentation from Sir Clive Woodward.

Customer Experience Maturity

I think we’d all agree that in today’s market, the majority of companies have now tuned in to the fact that measuring and managing their customer experience is crucial to their future success and sustainability. Moving alongside this trend has been the emergence of more sophisticated and insightful tools to capture those measurements, from SMS surveys and alerts, to text analytics, customer journey trackers and Big Data predictive insights.

This does not mean to say, that as technology has advanced so has the maturity amongst companies using CEM solutions. Research by The Temkin Group™ shows that there are still an overwhelming majority of companies at the very early stages of their CEM journey, which they define as ‘Novices’ & ‘Collectors’. Essentially, if a company wants to gather feedback about your recent interaction with them, it is most likely they will collect this information via one of the more traditional, low volume and low insightful methods.

Customer Experience Metrics of the Future

NPS or Net Promoter Score is a term I am sure everyone reading this blog will be aware of. Over the last couple of years there have been a number of attempts to replace this favoured metric to measure the customer experience. These have ranged from trying to measure Customer Effort to a recent example I saw of WoMI or Word of Mouth Index.

These new metrics have not only sought to bring a greater and more accurate understanding of what customers think of the brand, but also how they act on those thoughts with friends and family. It is true that NPS was created in a very different world to that which we live in today, smart devices were still a number of years off hitting the mainstream and Facebook was still a year away from being created in Mark Zuckerberg’s college bedroom. Today customers interact with business across more channels than ever before and in more complex ways. In NICE’s Consumer Survey last year, respondents said on average they interact across six channels with an organization, not so long ago it would have been a stretch to name six channels across a business.

Interactions 2013: The Key Themes

Last week the annual NICE User Group (NUG) event, Interactions, took place in Orlando, Florida. Attended by over 1500 customers the event brought together professionals from all industries, all who were focused on providing a better experience and level of service for their customers.

The event featured a number of Fizzback customers from Sprint, Alliance Data and Capital One on the main stage presenting keynote sessions to Virgin Money, Bell Canada and Talk Talk in breakout tracks. It was a true showcase of the value that leveraging and operationalizing direct Voice of Customer within the enterprise can bring.

A New Retail Experience

The ever present news that yet more well-known brands are struggling on the UK high street (Jessops, Blockbusters and HMV to name just three in recent examples) is sad to see, and it is a worrying time for many others. Their fate is causing many businesses to rethink how to approach their retail strategy and one of the new ideas is the development of a new style of retail stores which aim to provide a better customer experience for the shoppers and customers.

Quota Management – the unsung hero of Voice of the Customer Performance Management

In my role helping leading global organizations to craft and operationalize Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions, one of the most commonly established and desired use cases is the ability to performance manage the organizational hierarchy on the perceptions and ratings of the customers they serve.

In Forrester’s 2012 book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business, two of their six key practices to customer centricity – Governance & Culture - have their roots in this sphere; utilizing technology and services to be able to confidently performance manage employees by the Voice of the Customer. A robust end-to-end technology solution and surrounding program provides the VoC governance which, in turn, establishes a platform for the taking the longer-term view to customer-centric cultural change within an organization. The theory is sound.

Give your Airline Loyalty Programme the Competitive Advantage

This is not an industry we cover regularly in the NICE Fizzback blog, but this week we mean to make amends. Many airlines operate extensive and hugely expensive loyalty programmes to secure bookings from the occasional to the frequent flyer. But how do you know if the scheme is working?

Requesting customer feedback is common practice however, traditional paper-surveys, emails, focus groups and anecdotal feedback all have serious drawbacks that impact the accuracy of the results. One of the biggest problems is the time lag between the experience and the feedback request, as this delay lessens not only the ability to respond, but also the quality and level of response. Asking questions as close to the experience as possible produces a more accurate response, as the memory is still fresh in the mind. As a result many airline loyalty program managers are moving away from the traditional methods in favour of Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions.

Making VoC Text Analytics Count: From Directional to Diagnostic

For a number of years in the Customer Experience Management (CEM) space, we’ve relied on text analytics to make the first steps in turning unstructured, but highly rich customer verbatim comments into measurable packets of insight that organizations can use to gain never-before-seen insights into the expectations and perceptions of their customer base.

Back when I first set out in this industry and the VoC market was a little less mature, it was sufficient to be able to leverage text analytics to categorize customer comments into pre-defined buckets to understand what a customer is referring to. Example – customer says “The agent was great but your price plans suck” – analytics engine says Staff Conduct & Pricing. Taking this use case and extrapolating across hundreds of thousands, even millions of pieces of feedback every year and you’re left with a very credible barometer as to what’s on your customers’ minds. Tactically you can reward and recognize staff, recover customers based on the analytics output and strategically  aggregate to assess underlying trends and spikes. That is how it was.

Have three strikes become one?

Mistakes happen, people understand. The evolution is that human error, faulty technology and acts of god have progressed beyond common parlance and are no longer trusted explanations. The focus is on how you identify and resolve customer dissatisfaction and adapt your processes to address these occurrences so that they match customer expectation levels and result in recommendations and repeat business.

The commercial reality is that whilst companies of all sizes invest in brand awareness in the pursuit of organic referrals and to win the badge of 'deliver right, first time service' it is just as important to know what happens when the process flow is interrupted and understanding how tolerant your customer base really is. To offer some proactive advice I will highlight the two key customer splits that I experience on a daily basis:

Employee Engagement: An Undervalued Source of Voice of the Customer Business Impact

If you spend half an hour Googling ‘Voice of the Customer business impact’, you’ll no doubt stumble across the much discussed link between customer advocacy (often referenced in terms of Net Promoter Score™) & bottom-line revenue. Regardless of whose study you read, you’ll get an impressive, and perhaps surprising looking figure. If you consider Forrester’s differentiation between the stock market returns of customer experience ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ – it becomes very difficult to dispute the headline relationship between customer centricity and downstream business success.

Building a Brand on the Coattails of a Dynasty: Part 2

In case you missed last week's Building a Brand on the Coattails of a Dynasty: Part 1 you can find it by clicking here. For those who did you can find Part 2 below, kicking off with the second example of an individual involved in recent social media stories!

Katherine Webb, a former Miss Alabama, an aspiring model and girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron, gained instant fame on television during the BCS National Championship game. As a result her Twitter following grew, within a week, from 2,200 to over 250,000...that’s 100,000 more than her superstar boyfriend. Miss Webb’s Kred Influence rose to 914 (a good score is 700). Comparing social mentions for Miss Webb one day after the game to Johnny Manziel one day after winning the Heisman Trophy finds her with nearly 60% of Manziel’s volume and on day three the two were nearly even. As a result of the publicity, Miss Webb landed a job with “Inside Edition” and numerous modeling offers, serving as a great example to last week's statement on our ability to influence people we don’t even know through the use of social media.

Building a Brand on the Coattails of a Dynasty: Part 1

The college American Football season provided dozens of exciting games, the first freshman Heisman Trophy winner, continued dominance for the South Eastern Conference, a dynasty in Alabama and plenty of story lines off the field. When we think back on the highs and lows of college football, as the leaves fell and seasons changed, it is interesting to reflect on the real-time impact Social Media had on our ability to communicate with friends, express our emotions in written form, capture information about topics of interest and, believe it or not, influence people we don’t even know.

Don’t Call Us, We Will Call You: When Customer Care Does Not Call Back

It has happened to everyone: Someone promises to return your call or email. While waiting in vain for them to get back to you, you get the sinking feeling that maybe this is not as important to them as it is to you. NICE Fizzback commonly sees comments about failed call backs and broken promises in VOC feedback from Customer Care touchpoints.

While call back-related complaints may appear on the surface to be less important than the initial problem, they often prove to be more of a threat to the business-customer relationship. Whatever the reason to contact customer care in the first place, most of us realise that things happen and if they can be resolved without expending too much time and energy, everything will be fine.