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.

Achieving high value feedback from short customer surveys

Web survey developers constantly strive to achieve a balance between survey length and data captured.  An optimum survey length ensures a low drop off rate while meeting the survey's data acquisition objectives.  In practice, most feedback projects sacrifice either data capture objectives or response / drop off rates. With customer surveys in particular, it's important to get both high response and to capture the required data.

 

So how can you achieve both high response and a large quantity of gathered data? 

 

I offer these three techniques. 

• The single best technique for keeping surveys both concise and high value is to "Pre-Load" data into your survey database.  In the customer survey context, lots of data is typically available about customers.  Their names, purchases, account managers, regions, etc. are all known.  Often this information has already been synthesized into reporting elements in the company's customer data warehouse.  Pre-loading some of this information to your survey database ahead of time means that it can be used to filter your survey responses into more useful information.  It can also be used to pre-answer some questions or to automatically "route" or "branch" the questionnaire.  Helping to shorten it.  But most of all, any data you can pre-load from your customer databases is data you don't have to ask questions to acquire. 
• Question Routing or Branching is another great way to shorten surveys.  Branching let's you only ask questions to those people who can or should answer them, thus shortening the questionnaire for all participants. 
• Data Piping is also a great technique for shortening questionnaires.  By inserting pre-loaded data into survey questions or answer alternatives, piping saves you from the need to ask for data in order to answer a question.  If your survey system can both pipe in data and automatically branch / route based on piped in data it makes the survey doubly efficient from a time utilization perspective.

By using data you already have, along with "branching / routing" and "piping" techniques you can design your questionnaires to be concise while gathering lots of actionable and useful data, and do it without annoying your customers to the point where they won't give you the feedback you need.

Convergence of CFM and VOC

A number of research organizations, including Gartner and Forrester, have recently written about how Customer Feedback Management (CFM) and Voice of the Customer (VOC) are converging in businesses, based on the spread of new social media technologies for gathering qualitative feedback.  I came across great article written by Leslie Ament of Hypatia Research (http://www.www.hypatiaresearch.com/) that is a good description of how and why this is happening as well as what to think about if you are considering incorporating the new social media feedback channels into your customer feedback processes.

Customer Feedback Management (CFM) has traditionally been almost entirely based upon customer surveys.  Mainly, customer satisfaction surveys.  But, in the last several years also on customer loyalty surveys.  CFM's purpose was to gather operationally useful customer information for customer retention, sales intelligence (i.e. prospect identification) and marketing input (largely by IDing super loyal customers to do case studies on).

Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, though also reliant upon customer surveys - often customer satisfaction surveys or sometimes CSAT questions in broader customer surveys, also included customer feedback via market research studies, data from call centers, bulletin boards, chat rooms and the like.  A variety of analytical techniques are used to distill the customer's "voice" from the data.  Today, the number of on-line feedback sources includes twitter feeds, blog commentary, Facebook, LinkedIn and other on-line communities, as well as all the other stuff.  VOC initiatives were organized around the need to maintain a clear understanding of company value proposition, competitive strength and weakness, new market opportunities, new requirements for existing products and the like. 

Technology is beginning to allow a blending of customer feedback channels such that a fuller picture of the customer can be achieved by incorporating the best elements of CFM and VOC. 

CFM was driven mostly by the customer service and sales organizations.  VOC by Marketing.  So it would seem that some new "Customer centric" structure needs to emerge in organizations to manage the convergence of all the customer data as well as the reporting and business process dynamics that will result. This is a point Bruce Tempkin has been making in his commentary at his blog "Customer Experience Matters" (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/).  Anyway the article follows below.  Enjoy!

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/14784

Feedback Enhanced Selling

Improving Sales Processes using Pre-Lead, Lead and Prospect feedback

As a career business development guy, I've always been intrigued by the potential of feedback enhanced selling.  And, in particular since I began representing QuestBack, a feedback management tool.  Yet even for me, until recently it seemed like collecting feedback from leads and prospects was just as easily done via direct e-mails or phone calls.  After all, what else are sales people supposed to do except directly communicate with leads, prospects and customers? 

When I look at sales jobs today, often the expectation is for sales people to contact 100 people per day by phone.  Now, no one expects anyone to have conversations with 100 people daily.  But these firms want their sales folks to dial 100 times a day in order to have maybe five meaningful conversations.  Every time I see this it bothers me.  It would appear that companies are willing to pay people to engage in behavior that results in essentially a 95% failure rate.  And, with buyers not answering their phones at all, will the number of calls be 200 a day next year or 500 five years from now?  I don't know.  But ten years ago expectations were for sales people to contact 50 leads per day.  So, the number is rising and unless a new process is found, its likely to continue to do so.

So the question is:  Is there a way to get from 5 conversations in a day to 6, 7 or 8?  I think possibly there is.  Using web or e-mail based surveys may offer a solution.  Some reasons leads don't engage with sales people are: Timing is wrong (no plans to buy for awhile), Solution "fit" is bad, or more preferable alternatives are available and "on the table".  Hence, no desire to talk to your sales people and no contact is made.  If done well lead feedback will help sales reps with timing their calls to contacts, with understanding the contacts needs and with avoiding contacting leads where no fit exists.  Result, less stressed sales reps, more targeted calling, more prospects in the funnel, happier and more qualified leads and prospects.  All good stuff.

Some thoughts on when to gather feedback from leads or prospects:

• During website visits.  Surveys should be offered to visitors regarding the information being presented.  Idea is to identify if the information provided is sufficient and helpful or if they want more or even a contact from you.
• After a lead enters ther sales funnel.  Survey should be done to ascertain sales cycle stage, needs analysis and timeline perception. Idea is to gauge interest level, understand budgets, determine competition and understand perception of your company's offering.
• After a sales person has made direct contact with a lead.  Idea is to determine if the lead learned what they needed from you to move forward.  And, did his perception of you improve or deteriorate?
• After an inside sales representative designates a lead as a prospect.  Idea is to validate the action and learn what the new prospect perceives about your offering that causes him to be interested in additional dialogue.
• After a "key account manager" has been in contact with a prospect.  Idea is to validate that the prospect sees the product fit and sales cycle in the same way your KAM has reported it.  Collecting feedback 30, 60 or 90 days after a relationship has been started should help with understanding the possibiltiies for a sale occurring.

Technology already exists to automate a great deal of this kind of effort. QuestBack has even built a series of templates to use for automating feedback collection from leads and prospects during the sales cycle.  An example of QuestBack's sales process feedback approach can be found here: 

http://www.questback.com/areas-of-use/private-sector/lead-generation/

A Repost of a Good Net Promoter discussion with pros and cons...

I've written in the past about the Net Promoter methodology for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.  If you've read any of my Blog posts, you'll realize that I'm a big fan of net promoter. And, I frequently recommend its use to my customers.

Earlier today I was browsing a LinkedIn group where I'm a member, when I came across this post (which was a repost) of an article originally published in MarketingWeek magazine. 

I thought the article gave a pretty good account of the Pros and Cons associated with Net Promoter and its use.  So thought I'd share it here.  Enjoy.  The url is:

http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=374834583&gid=1772348&type=member&item=44620162&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emarketingweek%2Eco%2Euk%2Fanalysis%2Ffeatures%2Fhow-to-get-more-from-your-score%2F3023551%2Earticle&urlhash=iHgy&goback=%2Egmp_1772348%2Egde_1772348_member_44620162