Customer Feedback Management within a net promoter framework

We have released another new White Paper discussing how to deploy customer feedback management within the framework of a net promoter based methodology. The white paper discusses how to do this using QuestBack's feedback management toolset. The executive summary follows and a downlink is included at the end of the summary. Comments are welcome

Executive Summary

Making effective use of customer feedback can fuel an organization’s continuous improvement efforts and drive customer retention and growth - to name just a few key benefits. The programs and effort necessary to systematically gather and utilize feedback are sometimes seen as complex, expensive and difficult to implement. This paper demonstrates that this does not have to be the case and presents some practical, clear examples of powerful uses of customer feedback. By taking advantage of an established conceptual framework like Net Promoter, and combining this with a feedback management platform like QuestBack, any organization can create a powerful and practical framework for turning customer feedback into tangible benefits.

Three high-impact customer feedback applications are described (from QuestBack customer experiences):

• A Survey “Hotline” Process to spot problems in the customer base that are expressed in relationship surveys and to take quick, direct actions to prevent customer defections.
• Identify & Engage Your Promoters. Use survey results to identify and segment your best “promoters” or “advocates” for the purpose of engaging them in the marketing mix and stimulating more referrals.
• Create a Dialog through Follow-up. Follow-up your customer surveys by sharing some information about the results and planned actions with all customers. This creates a two-way dialog dynamic with customers and demonstrably strengthens customer relationships.

With an approach guided by the Net Promoter loyalty management concept and implemented with the QuestBack feedback management platform, any organization can easily and cost effectively duplicate the success of these examples and gain the tangible benefits from the effective use of customer feedback.

To view the entire white paper click the link below:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B0M0bj3iQjmjYzAxYzQ3MmEtMDBkZC00MmNjLWJmMzAtMWFkNmM0NDhlN2Nk&hl=en

White Paper: The Role of Customer Feedback Management in Business Today

QuestBack Boston has recently authored a new white paper on Customer Feedback Management. I've posted the executive summary here and included a link to the white paper if you would like to read it in its entirety.

Executive Summary

Executives intuitively understand the value of customer feedback and collect it for good reasons. They realize that customer perceptions have a strong impact on their business relationships. Customers can choose with whom they do business. If customers have perceptions that are less than positive, they will go elsewhere. So companies collect customer experience data across numerous touch points, including service events, general attitudes, and relationship data. The goal is to improve the overall customer experience by taking action in response to feedback.

Why, then, do so few companies make truly effective use of the feedback they gather? A 2003 Gartner Group study noted that 95% of all businesses collect some form of customer feedback but only 10% actually act on the feedback they collect. This is not surprising to many front-line managers tasked with putting feedback data to use. Fundamentally, most customer feedback data remains un-acted-upon because most companies lack an organized, systemic, and metrics-driven process for making use of the data. This white paper discusses why this occurs, why it matters, and what to do about it.

You can view the entire white paper here:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B0M0bj3iQjmjYTM2N2FhNjgtYTBiZi00MTVjLWIzNWEtM2ZiMWI4MjQxZTMy&hl=en

The Death of Advertising

One of my favorite websites is www.netpromoter.com. Lots of useful information about how to use customer loyalty in different ways to build a better business.

Since its necessary to know who your loyal customers are and why they're loyal, before taking action to leverage that loyalty, customer feedback management dovetails very closely with loyalty initiatives. In fact you need feedback management in order to accurately identify loyal customers.

At any rate, one of the netpromoter.com blogs talks in depth about how advertising is failing to produce desired results these days and how loyal customers seem to be the one group where advertising still seems to have an effect. It seems to me therefore that targeting marketing and especially direct marketing towards customer segments with higher loyalty makes a lot of sense. By doing so it would save on marketing spend at a minimum and potentially could provide a boost in business generally.

The entire article can be found at:

http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter_community/blogs/richard_and_laura/2009/04/22/how-to-win-customers-and-influence-buyers

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.