Customer experience management (CEM) programs involve the collection, analysis and dissemination of customer feedback. These customer feedback data are extremely valuable to businesses. Customer feedback data are used to help senior executives identify and improve key drivers of customer loyalty. They help call center staff immediately address specific customer issues.  They help managers understand how their business unit compares with other business units. Finally, customer feedback data can help your marketing and research departments uncover deep customer insights through more sophisticated analyses of the data and linking customer feedback data to other sources of enterprise data (e.g., employee data, operational data, financial data).

When sharing results from your customer survey research, have you been asked, "So, are we doing good or bad?"

When designing a voice of the customer (VoC) program, one of the best practices is to share some type of perspective when presenting results.  

To do this, consider one of these four options:

Add benchmark questions to your survey: Many companies have a couple of questions asking the customer to evaluate a benchmark company. This is an ideal approach for many because it focuses on the perceptions of your customers and allows you to compare what they think about you versus another company.  

Benchmark against yourself: Companies can answer the “good or bad” question by looking at key segments within their business. For this approach, identify the customer segments with high performance scores and use those as the benchmark. The benefit of this approach is the "best-in-class" score is most likely achievable with your existing products/services.

Look at scores over time: As a customer survey research program matures, it is natural to look at changes over time. This becomes a good source for perspective since it will highlight improvements and/or declines. In year one, you create the benchmark and then measure progress against it over time.  

Acting on the voice of the customer doesn’t (or shouldn’t) happen in just one department or one area of the company. I like to think of it in levels. For simplicity sake, here are three common levels where VoC action should be taking place:

CORPORATE – At the corporate level, action should be very strategic. Based on customer insights, action plans should address issues such as overall retention, forecasting future revenues, projecting attrition, and considering customer perceptions on topics such as brand reputation, ethics, market position, and how you stack up against the competition.

FUNCTIONAL – Action at the functional level action becomes more tactical and involves specific areas such as business units and key departments. This middle level is the most diverse of the three. It refers to all groups throughout your enterprise that can benefit from the voice of the customer. These include departments such as service, account management, sales, and product development, R & D, marketing, and many others. In each case customer strategists should provide each group the customer information they need to improve their specific operation. What’s more, they should implement a prioritization process to ensure the most important issues are escalated to require action.

Reviews are creeping up everywhere

I was checking in online the other day for my trip to Digital Marketing Strategies conference and Continental had placed the following set of tabs at the bottom of my boarding pass.

Here were their suggestions for restaurants, nightlife and things to do. I am not sure how these got loaded in but the fact that these businesses have a review gathering process helps.

I would think your business could benefit from this type of exposure. But if you don’t have reviews you will not make the list. (I wrote about this in a previous article)

One other place I have recently seen how video reviews will impact business. I was shopping on Amazon and at the bottom of my searches was a request for people to submit their “product review” videos.

The more that customers see companies wanting feedback people will give it. Why not be in front of the surge of reviews and ask your customers to send in a video with them using your product or commenting. What a great viral way to show that you engage your customer base.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the process of understanding and managing your customers’ interactions with and perceptions of your company or brand. The ultimate goal of CEM is to build valuable relationship with customers so they stay with you longer, advocate on your behalf and expand their relationship with you over time.

A CEM program consists of a set of organized actions that support the goal of CEM. While a CEM program has many moving parts, an easy way to organize those pieces is depicted in the figure on the right. A CEM program has six major components:

Present voice of the customer to all employees, and you will be more likely to reap financial benefits and manage customer experience holistically, according to the 2011 Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study.

Although only a third of companies are presenting customer feedback to all employees, those who do reported at least 20 percentage points advantage in the performance of holistic customer experience management, as shown by the gaps in blue and red bar graphs below. Examples of business results attributed to customer experience management efforts include:

This statement published on Forbes blog inspired me to take another look at customer satisfaction with tablets in question.

If there was ever a chance for a tablet contender to take a run atApple’s dominance in the tablet market, it was Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Not the myriad Android-based products. And certainly not RIM’s Playbook. No, the job was up to the Kindle Fire and the moment it needed to go in for the kill was the holidays. Amazon tried and failed. Now it’s over.

The complete post can be found here.

The premise of this article is based on assumption that people who were planning to buy iPad, would purchase Kindle Fire instead. I think this is a false assumption. In fact analysis of reviews from 7,897 customers shows that both tablets exceeded expectations of their customers, albeit by a different margin. I included the analysis of Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1″) to make it more interesting, because it is probably the distant 3rd in this race for customer’s affinity. Apple clearly beats Amazon and Samsung Tab in Customer Support (1.03), Design (1.33), Screen size (1.75) and Usability (1.82). However Kindle Fire leads in General Satisfaction (1.35), Price (1.31), and Reliability (1.07).

The film Moneyball recounts the true story of Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a winning baseball club on a relatively low budget by using a combination of technology and data analytics to decide on the players drafted (purchased).

In Moneyball, the Society for Baseball Research was the key source of data, in business, the source of data is customer insight, or Feedback. Jermey Koudi once wrote in the Economist’s guide to effective decision making that the most certain route to profitability for a business is through understanding and reacting to:

• Customer needs and preferences
• What’s going on in the market place and competitive landscape

Both strands of these valuable data are critical, but they become much more powerful with a deeper understanding achieved through analysis. When capturing feedback, managers have a treasure trove of structured and unstructured data that is there to be exploited, the type of benefits are as follows:

It’s funny – just asking customers what they want more of is one of the best ways to see where the market is heading, and where the pressure is strongest.

We’ve been surveying our customers via Net Promoter® for about five years, and each year, we ask three key questions:

• How likely are you to recommend Corporate Ink to a friend or colleague?
• What’s your primary reason for scoring this way?
• What’s the one thing we could do to improve this score?

Then we ask a few spontaneous questions – to get a better understanding of where our clients are feeling the most pressure (which typically connects pretty tightly to how we can improve), and where they want to grow. As I look back, our clients’ comments, as a group, have been an uncannily accurate temperature check – and a read on the business environment.

Here’s what stood out by year, and what it really meant (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight):

I get a kick out of the AT&T ads (examples here and here) showing how the pace of things is so fast that the savvy user of the HTC Vivid with 4G is always informed and ahead of the game.

While the commercials are informative and entertaining, the application makes sense for how customer strategists build better customer relationships.

The most common example that has gotten attention is the way some companies have monitored social media sites to identify customer complaints and quickly address them. In doing so, they salvage a customer relationship and impress consumers with their attention to customer issues.

I prefer to consider uncommon examples, like complex customer relationships in a B-to-B environment. We've seen terrific examples of companies that have closely monitored feedback from surveys that trigger alerts notifying account managers of customers issues that need to be addressed and opportunities to pursue. In one example a company identified more than 5,000 issues that were logged and prioritized for action. What's more, they prompted sales opportunities that delivered more than $200 million in new sales.

This was all done by setting up a system that included the following: