Feedback vs Research - Thoughts on doing both better using EFM

Customer Feedback and Customer research are two phrases that used to mean the same thing but now are differentiated because EFM technology allows dialogue to be spawned from electronic surveys.  But, like many change agents, users of EFM have created some new business problems by their use of the technology.  With customer research, virtually anyone today can freely and easily overburden their customers with survey after survey.  All delivered over the internet or via e-mail.  So, there is a new business problem: Negative Customer Experiences-stemming from survey reponses that are not followed up.

I've been thinking about how companies can manage around the divergent goals of customer research and customer feedback so that negative customer experience does not result.  I'm not sure I've got great answers to the problem, but thought I'd jot down some ideas.

Fundamentally, a customer feedback survey is distinct from a research survey in that its feedback solicitation is an invitation to dialogue.  Whereas, a research survey is an information gathering exercise.

Most companies' customer survey processes share three characteristics:

• Both types of surveys target many of the same people
• The same internal entity (market research) often develops and administers the surveys 
• And the same survey tools are often used

It's not surprising to me, therefore that feedback and research efforts would "look and feel" a lot alike to the customers being surveyed.  As a result, I think there is a significant amount of confusion amongst customers as to when their feedback will produce a dialogue and when it won't.  My guess is this confusion is at the heart of the negative experiences issue.

Furthermore, research shows that even today most customer feedback doesn't result in a dialogue.  And, survey participation rates are generally declining, except for companies who go to great pains to "close-the-loop" on customer feedback. 

"Fixing" the problem is, of course, easy.  Just always follow up on any survey response given by any customer.  Needless to say, that "solution" is probably impractical for most companies.  With most companies not even able to consider reponding directly to all the feedback they solicit.  I think though, that with the right tools and processes they could easily respond to a lot more of it than they do now.

So, what I think companies need to do is create a set of "Customer Survey "rules of engagement".   Rules that would govern how they should approach doing both customer feedback and customer research surveys.  My ideas about what those rules ought to be are outlined below:

Customer Survey “Rules of Engagement”

For Customer feedback:

• Try to integrate surveys with CRM, ERP, HRM and other systems where practicable. This can work especially well for short transaction based surveys, which are relatively easy to integrate.  Just be sure to impose rules on the users of those systems to pursue follow up on all feedback received.

• For customer relationship surveys (usually done once or twice per year) create a follow up plan for all customers and response scenarios that you can reasonably think of.
  - Make sure your survey system generates an “alert” or “notification” to a specific person for each foresee-able response scenario.
  - Any feedback that doesn’t “fit” a response scenario should be directed to the most senior available company officer.
  - This ensures an action plan will get created for almost everything that can fit into a response bucket.
  - Keep in mind that response scenarios will need to involve people other than the sales or customer support staff. Ensure those other groups understand the obligation to customers to respond to feedback alerts that will be generated.

• Relationship surveys tend to be difficult to integrate with other systems, as they tend to change over time and often blend-in research questions. So these surveys should only be done in systems that provide follow up mechanisms that are independent of CRM, ERP or HRM systems.

• Keep in mind that if you are soliciting information from all of your customers, or all customers within a segment, you’re probably seeking feedback, not doing research. So plan for a dialogue.

For Customer Research:

• Try to use anonymous surveys for research. Preferably deliver them to a sample subset of your customers or customer segments. People don’t expect follow up on anonymous surveys and don’t feel guilty about abandoning them in mid-stream.

• Try to employ “research panels” containing customer volunteers. People who you have a profile for, who know that surveys may not be followed up and don’t mind acting as research fodder.

• Label research surveys as RESEARCH. Avoid using the word “FEEDBACK” which co notates dialogue. Be sure to tell research survey participants that no follow up is planned. And, that the research won’t result in a dialogue.
  - This may hurt response rates
  - And, may force you to incentivize your research surveys

• Apply strict contact rules for all research oriented surveying. My guess is that no customer should receive more than one research survey in a given year

These are ideas and thoughts.  I'd welcome feedback from readers on other "rules of engagement" with customers being surveyed.

Does a "C.I.A." equal an "E.F.M." ?

 Some comments on Temkin's Six "D's" of Closed Loop VOC systems

"20 best practices across these 6 Ds that will increasingly push companies to invest in Customer Insight and Action (CIA) platforms" - Bruce Temkin.

I'm a big fan of Bruce Temkin and his Customer Experience Matters blog.  So, when he released his recent report titled: "Voice Of The Customer Programs Grow Up" and blogged that businesses will be forced to invest in CIA platforms - what I call Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) systems,  I took notice. 

As someone who personally uses, sells and supports a robust EFM system (called QuestBack) it is nice to hear an eminent customer experience persona like Bruce talk about the need for businesses to acquire EFM systems to help them manage their feedback. 

As it happens, QuestBack (http://www.questback.com/) offers out-of-the-box support for (but maybe not a complete solution to) five of Temkin's six "D's" (Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Design and Deploy).  And, I'm not sure any system supports the sixth "D" (Discuss).  More important though, I think, is Bruce's assertion that market research organizations need to change or risk becoming obsolete. 

My own view is that market research organizations need to change their perspectives about feedback, from a "research" perspective, to a "feedback" perspective.  This isn't to say that market research tools should be abandoned, just that market and customer data needs to be viewed as feedback contributing to a greater (wholistic?) knowledge of "the customer".  Where today research is often developed in isolation from the wholistic customer viewpoint, often being "siloed" to products or departments.

It also seems to me that with so much new data available to organizations via social media, organizations would be well served to monitor those data streams, extract key findings regularly and seek to validate (or invalidate) those findings via structured ad-hoc feedback (surveys) to their existing stakeholders.  By doing so, they would create a process that takes maximum advantage of the available technologies for listening and diagnosing market and customer trends, as well as the rapid action management tools available to them through EFM systems.

At any rate here's a "shout out" to Bruce for another very interesting report.  The report costs money ($195.00).  But you can read his executive summary and a couple of his posts about it on his site.  Link is::  http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/6-ds-for-voice-of-the-customer-programs/

The Survey is Dead - "Long Live the Survey"

This has become a hot topic in the LinkedIn forums I follow as well as in some of the voice-of-the-customer focused media. The headline would lead you to believe that social media based feedback will over time replace customer surveys both for Market Research and Customer Management purposes.

In my opinion, social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys.  Here's my logic.  When an issue is surfaced via a social media channel, organizations need to answer at least four questions when determining response:

• What is the issues' potential effect on the business
• What is it's relative importance
• Who owns it
• Who's going to respond 

For some issues this will be easy and determinable through the social media dialogue mechanism.  For more substantial issues though, it will require answers to those four questions. Much of the answer determining data I believe will have to come from surveys. So as issues surface, surveys will have to be sent out to put some structure and context behind the social media generated data.

Secondly, surveys and especially web-based customer surveys, simply provide organizations with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being the core feedback management tool for most companies. As EFM technology improves and cost-of-ownership declines this technology will be deployed by more organizations, more often than it is now.

Having said all that, social media is a wonderful new tool for listening to customer (and other constituency) feedback. It allows for the almost immediate gathering of qualitative feedback.  Which alone, and when used with survey based feedback, can provide very rich insights.  In the absence of structured feedback though, this unstructured form of feedback might just as easily be not valuable, or worse resource consuming while not adding value.

Lastly, it seems to me that social media, because of its interactive nature, could be expensive to rely on as a feedback mechanism.  People, after all, have to monitor and act on it (as well as decide how to act), determine if it should be acted on to begin with and potentially do it all quickly at all hours of the day or night. 

In the end I think Social media will be additive to the toolset used for listening to customers and creating dialogues with them.  What its best uses will eventually be, I think is still an open question.

Convergence of CFM and VOC - Some additional thoughts...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on this topic with the idea in mind that technology convergence - mainly feedback management and text analytics - would eventually change the way organizations manage their feedback by providing a single application where feedback of different types could reside.  After doing some more reading (and thinking) on the subject, it seems to me that this convergence will take a long time to have any real organizational impacts.  Mainly, because entrenched business functions within organizations don't easily change the way they do things.

A couple of my thoughts on how converged Enterprise Feedback Management and Text Analytics solutions will actually operate in the real world.

I suspect that for organizations that employ EFM today, text analytics will be an add-on capability with two main uses:  To provide some automation for analyzing verbatims from surveys, and possibly, to provide a mechanism to merge at least some of their unstructured feedback with the structured feedback they get now. More importantly though, for EFM vendors facing increased competition from lower cost feedback management tools, text analytics will provide some "glue" to bind customer's more closely to them.

For organizations that mainly rely on unstructured feedback mechanisms today, convergence may mean easier access to, or possibly, more intelligent approaches to structured data gathering. Text analytics can help to create a structure for unstructured data.  But, because its hard to control for respondent profile (ensuring the response isn't all from the "wrong" sets of people) in unstructured data streams, whatever structure and results come out of the unstructured data analysis will have to be validated by surveys, which provide more controlled sets of results.

In the end little real change is likely to occur in organizations from this technology convergence. But lots of expensive software should get sold along the way.

Customer Effort Score - Is it another way to measure employee engagement

I've recently been doing some reading about Customer Effort Score (CES) and the relationship it appears to have with customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer loyalty (CL), as measured by Net Promoter Scores (NPS).  If I understand the literature, as customer effort goes up in service engagements, so does the company's "detractor" rating within the NPS metric.  And NPS therefore goes down.  This got me thinking about the theory espoused by Heskett, et. al. in the Service Profit Chain (http://hbr.org/2008/07/putting-the-service-profit-chain-to-work/ar/1) where employee engagement is postulated to be a driver of CSAT.  Though I've always believed that employee engagement directly affects CSAT / CL, I had difficulty finding companies that were mapping employee engagement metrics against CSAT / CL metrics.  So, how could anyone really tell?  It obviously made sense, but how much increase in employee engagement was needed to improve CSAT / CL meaningfully.  And, at what cost?

Anyone who's done customer support work knows that he or she can often place more of the effort of problem resolution on to the customer, if they want to.  Or, they can take more of the effort on to themselves.  Highly engaged employees try to shift effort on to themselves in the full knowledge that the effort avoided by the customer increases that customer's loyalty and satisfaction.  Less engaged employees do the opposite, shifting effort to customers where possible, with the concurrent side effect of lower satisfaction and loyalty over time.

So, in my mind, Customer Effort Scores are a proxy for an employee engagement metric.  One which can be implemented by the support organization itself.  And, if done correctly can track back against the support and account people who are ultimately responsible for the revenue associated with the effected customers. 

CES is the missing link, literally, between employee engagement and customer loyalty.