Next Generation VOC - Some comments on Temkin's recent report

I've just recently finished reading Temkin Group's new research report titled: "Prepare For Next Generation Voice of the Customer Programs".  It's an interesting read and worth spending a few bucks on ($195.00).  Anyone interested can purchase it at www.temkin.com.   After reading the report, I found myself agreeing with a lot of it.  I also wasn't surprised by many of the points Temkin makes.  Being in the business of selling and supporting feedback management tools, I help customers develop action oriented feedback programs all the time.  So, I see many of Temkin's VOC challenges and opportunities on a daily basis.

The report's main thrust is that businesses are getting less benefits from their current Voice of the Customer programs than they should be.  Temkin cites one main reason for this: A lack of action taking based on VOC.  He points out that current VOC practices divert resources and attention from VOC's real value (its usefulness in improving customer experience)  He specifically talks to three things that VOC efforts are too heavily weighted towards:

• Market research, relying on large annual customer surveys
• Management presentation of aggregated data (things like metrics and dashboards)
• Data analysis (In another life we called it analysis paralysis)

Most importantly, Temkin contends that Next Generation VOC programs will be much more focused on feedback based action.  He also notes that:

• VOC programs will have to incorporate more unstructured feedback sources (things like Facebook, Zendesk, Twitter, etc.)
• They will need to integrate customer feedback (however sourced) with CRM databases
• Organizations will have to shift over to Customer Insight and Action platforms (Systems Like QuestBack, EasyResearch and Listen & Act among others).

The following chart comes from an Aberdeen Research report I came across earlier this year.  I include it here because it demonstrates how acting on feedback builds value into customer feedback processes.  Clearly, Temkin isn't the only researcher seeing the shift in VOC best practice to more action orientation.

 

As I mentioned earlier, for folks like myself, Temkin's observations are not at all surprising.   I see companies with all the VOC issues he cites.  His insights are accurate, in my view, and correspond to what I see day-to-day. 

In fairness to large companies, when viewed at an enterprise level, VOC is tremendously difficult to boil down operationally, except within very defined silos (customer support, for instance). The ability to route customer specific feedback, either structured or unstructured, to a "person" like a product manager, account executive, third party representative (a reseller for instance) or someone else in a business composed of thousands of employees, hundreds of resellers, dozens of product managers, etc. is not simple nor necessarily easy. 

In my experience, when looked at more granularly, VOC is a lot easier to deal with and take actions on.  For instance, at a departmental level, the number of different paths customer feedback can take before finding a person is limited, it might be limited to only a few people.  So, implementing action oriented VOC doesn't need to be necessarily difficult.

I think it's wonderful that an insightful analyst like Bruce Temkin is promoting the concept of feedback based action taking while de-emphasizing the "Research" orientation that many feedback management initiatives adopt.  At QuestBack, we've been flogging the Ask&Act, and now Listen&Act, processes for many years.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

 

Maximizing Super Promoter Impact

I've recently been active on the topic of Super Promoters and the value they offer for businesses.  My earlier posts were mostly about finding out who super promoters are and the value they bring.  In my opinion super promoters bring value in two distinct ways.  They recommend a lot, bringing in new prospects.  And, they do things for you, either absorbing costs or contributing more revenue, that help you be more profitable as a business.  I believe most businesses have super promoters.  But, that they struggle with finding them and what to do to create new ones (or both).  Neither do most businesses know how to activate their super promoters.  Since my earlier posts were mostly about finding super promoters, I thought I would delve a little deeper into how to create more super promoters as well as how to "activate" the ones you may already have.

I've defined Super Promoters as "promoters who recommend a lot more than the average promoter". Other people who study customer advocacy have concluded that super promoters should also be "influential" with your customers and be demonstrably more profitable for your business.  I tend to believe that super promoters are likely to be influencial generally and are already provably more profitable.  So, I don't really believe in expending lots of energy, money and time studying your customers for "influentialness" or "profits" in order to identify super promoters.  Though, admittedly, there other good reasons to why you might want to study customers for those data points.  And, if you have customer influence or customer profit data, marrying it with results of a net promoter survey can't but help with the identification of super promoters.  Also, if you have a lot of promoters, the additional data could help you determine where to start with your super promoter activation program.

Finding Super Promoters.

My earlier blog post talked primarily about how to find super promoters and why you should know who they are.  So, I will only summarize the process here.  I've used a two question sequence:  The "likely to recommend" question followed by an additional question, "How often have you recommended in the last year", which is delivered only to promoters (9s and 10s on the "likely to recommend" question).  In my earlier post I arbitrarily assigned super promoter status to promoters who reported recommending ten or more times over the preceding year.  For your business the number may be different and its something to think about before asking the question.  My earlier blog post can be found here if you would like read it.

Creating Super Promoters

For many smaller and mid-sized businesses it seems to me that creating super promoters is the simplest and easiest way to create organic business growth as well as to build the basis for a marketing campaign that helps you go from a smaller to a larger business.

In my experience promoters require two things in order to become super promoters.  First, an opportunity to make recommendations.  And second, a triggering event that causes them to actually recommend.  Therefore, if you want to create super promoters you need to find ways to give your promoters opportunities to recommend and then to trigger events that spur the recommendation.  Big companies often do this kind of thing haphazardly by, for instance, inviting all their customers and prospects to company-wide user conferences.  These firms often feature super promoters in presentations, but have detractors (and promoters too, to be fair) mingling with prospects the rest of the time.  If you have lots of detractors amongst your customers this could have unintended consequences, as promotion triggering events (i.e. people meeting and talking) are mainly accidental.  Meaning that a prospect might talk with a detractor as easily as a promoter.

Making promoters into super promoters doesn't have to be an accidental process, nor does it have to be difficult to do.  Here are some thoughts:

• Invite your promoters to attend events that your prospects attend.  Make it free for them (its already likely to be free for prospects).  Give them special badges that identify them as somehow "knowledgeable" in ways that will appeal to prospects.  Then just let them mingle with prospects.
• Organize a special access on-line community just for your promoters.  Incentivize them to participate in the community.  Then, let targeted prospects ask questions of them as a group.  Promoters will become super promoters by making recommendations on-line.
• Reward your promoters.  Give them things they value at irregular intervals (provide them with an unanticipated moment of delight).  If you do, many of them will promote more (becoming super promoters).  An anecdote:  I'm a member of American Airlines Advantage program and have lots of AA miles to my credit.  I used to fly a lot, and when I'd check-in an agent would occasionally upgrade me to first class or give me an upgrade certificate to a future first or business class upgrade.  As you can imagine, after they had done that a couple of times, I became very loyal to AA.  Importantly, I'd tell my friends about how great AA was to me. 
• Use a Blog.  Send it to everyone, but only allow promoters to make comments (or at least un-monitored comments).  When promoters comment, if appropriate, tweet their their comments.  This will engage other promoters and will spur re-tweets that many prospects will see.

This isn't an exhaustive list of ways to create super promoters.  But, the point is that by engaging with your promoters in multiple ways you can offer them more opportunities to promote and trigger events by which they might recommend.  Thus, making them more likely to become super promoters.

Activating Super Promoters

The process for activating super promoters is the same as for creating super promoters.  But, super promoters should be engaged with at a deeper level than that for promoters.  For instance, super promoters should be:

• Asked to create blog posts (not just comment) on your company blog. 
• Put on the company's customer reference list.
• Invited to write articles in customer communications vehicles like newletters
• Invited to participate in prospect oriented marketing like webinars or user group meetings. 
• Asked to have their stories developed into abstracts for use by media outlets who want perspective on topics they are knowledgeable about.

None of this is new from a marketing perspective.  What is new is that these opportunities be offered to your super promoters, not just to your biggest customers.  Again, if you have lots of promoters you may want screen them for desirable account characteristics first, but the point is to do everything you can to push promoters and especially super promoters into contact with prospects.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
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