Reving Up Your Referrals Engine with Customer Feedback

One of our customers - AIFS has deployed our EFM solution in an extremely effective and profitable (for AIFS) manner. I thought briefly outlining the story would add some value to the EFM discussion. Following are a couple of quotes to set up the story outline, then the outline follows.

"The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company's ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department"

Fred Reicheld, Harvard Business Review - The One Number You Need to Grow

"The activities that have been directly enabled and facilitated by our use of QuestBack have driven our referral-based growth this year"

Sr. VP Marketing, AIFS

AIFS uses the QuestBack feedback management tool in some very innovative ways to engage with customers and create force multipliers for their marketing efforts. As a result they've significantly increased referral-driven leads and the conversion rates of those leads - a great combination for building sustainable growth.

Building a referrals engine - 5 Proven Steps to More Referral-Driven Sales

1. Identify your "promoters" (aka "apostles" or "raving fans") - the people who love your offering and tell other people how great you are. Identify them through surveys which permit segmentation by product or service used, geography, etc., so that you can feed this data to your CRM (QuestBack makes this easy).

2. Understand your promoter's willingness and degree to which they will engage with you in your marketing activites. How? Ask them in the surveys! Those that self-identify as promoters get a series of questions about their willingness to talk to the media on your behalf, be quoted, speak to prospects as references, join you at marketing events, etc.

3. Engage your promoters creatively as part of the marketing mix! They've agreed to help! They are your best advocates.

4. Create CRM processes to support leveraging your promoters. For example - to locate a promoter based on geography, industry, common social networking contacts or other characteristics.

5. Continuously refresh and grow your promoter pipeline (promoters often beget more promoters). Continue to solicit their participation in your sales / marketing processes, and seek creative new ways to engage them.

Obstacles to using Feedback in business processes

A brief note I've excerpted out of one of our recent e-mail marketing pieces. But none-the-less valid in the context of understanding barriers to effeective use of customer feedback in business today.

4 Reasons firms don't profit from Customer Feedback

"Companies often spend the bulk of their time / effort trying to get feedback, and not nearly enough time figuring out what to do with it" - CRM magazine, April 2009

Most companies collect customer feedback. Very few make good use of it. There are a number of reasons, but most stem from the approaches and tools used today for feedback management. Some common obstacles to effectively using customer feedback include:

1. Difficulty tying customer feedback to customer data (necessary for segmentation based on customer variables)


2. Identifying the appropriate actions for different customer segments (requires analysis of results vs. segments)


3. Getting the correct feedback data to the right people so they can actually act on it (requires an ability to route segmented feedback to internal "actors")


4. Validating that actions taken are impacting customer experience (requires an ability to trend feedback data over time)

QuestBack solves all these problems with an integrated system for feedback gathering, monitoring, analysis, profile utilization and follow up actions. Because it can integrate with CRM systems each feedback loop desired can be easily implemented.