Last week, Mindshare announced that my role in the company is changing. I’d like to say that it’s not really about my role but about our desire to continuously improve upon the experiences we give our clients each and every day.

Each day changes the landscape of the future. Each day literally outdates the day before it. In such a reality, Mindshare Technologies understands that it can be the best company imaginable, using the smartest technology and offering the coolest experience at the end of one day—and still find itself making improvements the following morning. Knowing how to identify and act on these daily opportunities for improvement is the hallmark of real leadership.

As I step into my role as chief experience officer at Mindshare, I take satisfaction in knowing that my title says much more about the company’s place as an active, adaptive leader than it does about me individually. Last week’s announcement was all about the movement of the company, and I’m just happy to be a part of it.

In the business world, especially today’s business world, companies frequently underestimate the immense value of the customer experience. They often overlook the exploding number of company touch points—places where customers, clients, vendors, and the public in general will experience their brand. And until your company takes pride in delivering a memorable and personal experience, at even the most seemingly insignificant level, you will be at a major disadvantage.

At Mindshare, we are rededicating ourselves to the basics of attentiveness, at every touch point. My role as chief experience officer is to ensure that the Mindshare Technologies brand is unified throughout the company and that every time an individual even brushes up against it in the slightest, they will come away with a positive sentiment.

Whether it’s the look of the company website, the voice of an outbound letter, the personality of our rock star front-desk manager, or one of the countless other company touch points in existence, we will consistently deliver a positive impression.

As a customer, I’ve witnessed the effect of these simple, thoughtful impressions. The impact they’ve had on me is immense—they completely define my purchasing and recommending patterns. And I can attest that the smallest touch point often offers the biggest opportunity for standing out and winning someone’s heart.

As a chief experience officer (for a week now), I am excited to deliver those impressions to millions of people through the efforts of the Mindshare team. We will continue to focus—even amidst our 180,000 daily surveys—on the all-important “sample size of one.”

“Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees. Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.” (Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work, Harvard Business Review, 1994)

There is a strong relationship between productivity, loyalty, employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profitability. So, what is the secret to fostering employee loyalty? Leadership.

Leaders who genuinely care about their people, who are “plugged in” to their organizations, and listen to their employees for suggestions to improve, will develop corporate cultures that naturally support the concept of the Service-Profit Chain. By no surprise, employees who trust and respect the leadership of an organization often feel more empowered and motivated to do their best.

This synergy also results in reduced employee turnover, which is a driving factor that impacts all service levels.

Conversely, the costs associated with high employee turnover are not only substantial in terms of monetary value but also costly in terms of quality and service, which has a direct impact on customer retention and loyalty.

Unfortunately the dynamic between many employees and employers has changed significantly with employee loyalty now at a 3-year low (MetLife, 2011). For some employees, the grind of a daily 9 to 5 job is now simply a means to an end; the end being a paycheck every two weeks or the distant possibility of retirement. As employers look to cut costs through lay-offs, wage reductions and elimination of benefits, employees are being asked to absorb heavier workloads, work longer hours and meet unrealistic expectations (American Psychological Association, 2011).

Given the considerable changes between employees and employers in recent years, it’s more important than ever for leaders to embrace and implement changes that result in employee loyalty. Here at Mindshare Technologies, we’ve been very fortunate to weather the recent economic conditions with strong financial and employee growth. This has given us the flexibility to reinvest in new technologies for our clients – built on ideas generated by our employees.

We’re tremendously proud to have employees who are engaged, passionate about their work, creative, and committed to providing the highest quality of internal and external service. At the heart of our company is a phenomenal leadership team that has created a culture with people who work hard, care about each other, are innovative, and fun to be around.

By constantly improving from our employee feedback, captured using the Mindshare Platform, we were recently awarded the Top 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in the United States.

Click here to learn more about improving employee satisfaction through capturing customer feedback.

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2011 Outstanding Service Awards™. Winners of this prestigious award include: Bridgestone Retail Operations, IHOP, Asurion, Hertz, Comcast, Arby’s, Panera Bread, Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza, Aaron’s, Inc., Sizzler, Bob Evans, Lifetouch Portrait Studios, and more. This year’s recipients are recognized for their excellence in applying customer and employee feedback to improve their customers’ experience.

These awards were presented at our annual Best Practices Conference at the Canyons Resort in Park City, on September 22, 2011.

Customer Satisfaction Award for:

• Most Consistent Rating Across the Enterprise

• Aaron’s Inc.

• Greatest Improvement Using Customer Feedback

• Sizzler USA

• Bridgestone Retail Operations

Enterprise Feedback Management Award for:

• Best Incorporation Of Enterprise Feedback Management Principles

• Asurion

• Comcast

• Most Engaged in the Enterprise Feedback Managment Program: Executive Level

• Arby’s

• Bob Evan’s

• Most Engaged in the Enterprise Feedback Managment Program: Store/Unit/Team Level

• Panera Bread

• Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza

• Best Integratoin of Feedback in Training

• Shari’s

Employee Satisfaction Award for:

• Most Engaged In Employee Satisfaction

• Hertz

• Lifetouch Portrait Studios

• Rookie of the Year Awards:

• IHOP

• Peter Piper Pizza

If I were a betting man, and Steve Wynn’s newest car indicates that I am, I would bet your organization is not extracting as much value as it could from your Voice of the Customer (VOC) program.

Too often businesses maintain an extremely narrow focus with their VOC efforts and utilize it purely for front-line performance management. While I would be the first to acquiesce that performance management should be a core tenet of VOC, I would also state that the program should be used for much more.

To give you a flavor of what I am talking about, ask yourself the following questions:

Does Your VOC Program Assist in Testing New Products?

Typical VOC programs only ask about how a business did today and omit the opportunity to gain insight into new products and services they could offer tomorrow. As a business leader, you should constantly be striving to learn and understand how your business could be adding more value to the lives of your customers. An easy way to begin this process is to simply ask your current customers a few different questions, such as:

• “How could (insert your company name) be adding more value?”
• “You currently use/have used our Product X. Are there any additional products or services we could offer to help you get more value out of Product X?”
• “Please rate your level of interest in purchasing Service X (a new product) from us.”

The questions above are purely intended to kick start the hamster on your ‘idea wheel’, not specific questions that accomplish what I am suggesting. Additionally, I am not insinuating that adding a few questions to a survey replaces your existing R&D and market research efforts. If you test the waters with your customers and ask them what they want in existing VOC channels, you could potentially spur more rapid innovation and significantly enhance your forward thinking efforts.

Does Your VOX Program Inform Customers of Feedback-inspired Changes?

It boggles my mind when I learn about organizations that make fabulous improvements in their products or service based on customer feedback, and they fail to communicate to their customers that this was based on their feedback. Tell customers when you change something as a result of their feedback!

I frequently get asked, “How can I improve my survey response rates?” A simple way to increase your survey response rates is to demonstrate to customers that you are actively using the data they provide. Too often customers think that their surveys go into the ether, and for most companies, survey results do go into a vacuum. Be bold, be different, and celebrate the hell out of customer feedback and what it is delivering to your business. Customers will respond by giving you more feedback.

• Put a brief prompt in your call center IVR telling customers what you did.
• Put up signage in your stores.
• At least do something!

Does Your VOC Program Understand the Context Behind Feedback?

Most often VOC surveys will contain questions about individual employee or overall experience attributes. Such as:

• “Please rate the knowledge of the individual that assisted you.”
• “Did the associate take ownership of your issue?”

While those questions are good, unless you know the underlying customer perceptions and context of the response, the simple quantitative data they produce may be very tough to coach on. For example, Mindshare met with a fashion retail organizationthat uses a knowledge rating question like the ones above. When we asked the VOC leadership team what ‘knowledge’ in bullet 1 referred to, and how they should coach their store associates on the scores, we received some very different answers. It means “knowledge of fashion trends” or “knowledge of the store’s inventory and product location” or even “knowledge of pricing” etc. All are “right”, but all have very different coaching steps and context associated with them.

If there was no alignment among the 4 people in the room, there was probably a disparity at the field and store management level as well. They needed to quickly get to the bottom of what type of ‘knowledge’ is most important to their customer base, and drive that out into their training programs. To accomplish this, we suggested an insertion of a ‘verbatim’ opportunity, an open-ended response where customers could describe what a ‘knowledgeable sales associate’ was to them. This question was live in their feedback system for a short period of time where Mindshare gathered massive amounts of data which we then utilized our comment analytics technology, and “Voila!” – Instant coaching bliss. They now understand exactly what ‘knowledge’ means to their key customers.

My point here is simple: make sure you understand the customer’s perception of any experiential attributes you are asking about in your VOC programs. Without that underlying understanding, your coaching efforts could be a little off.

In Closing – Continually Innovate on How You Use the Voice of Your Customers.

This is just a sampling of some of the innovative things you can do with your existing VOC programs. If you are only doing basic performance management, we need to talk… or talk to your current VOC Advisor, Evangelist, Guru, or whatever her/his title is… because you are not fully leveraging the power of your feedback program and you are leaving precious information and money on the table.

If implemented properly, these insights can be gained in very simple, tactical ways. You can potentially save your business massive amounts of money and provide the enterprise with phenomenal new data. You can avoid survey toxicity, enhance customer experiences, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Let’s put this test to work against the most typical Voice Analytics solutions in EFM/VoC.

Here are a few common, yet less useful Voice Analytics scenarios:

• “I know the top ten keywords used by my customers in phone survey feedback.” (Now what?)
• “I am told I need to have a word cloud.” (Now what?)
• “My competitors were mentioned 143 times by customers!” (Now what?)

See? It’s that simple. The above scenarios cannot easily and usefully answer the “now what?” question. While they are all very interesting factoids, what practical action steps do they drive? If you cannot take action with your Voice Analytics, why bother with it at all?

Contrast those with the following useful cases:

• “My least satisfied customers complain about long hold times.” (Now what? Hire more contact center agents and/or reduce talk times.)
• “When dissatisfied with order accuracy, my drive-thru customers most often use the phrase ‘missing … toy’.” (Now what? Change the assembly process and train employees to double check that toys are included in every bag.)

These Voice Analytics scenarios easily pass the test because they lead to actions that produce measurable operational improvements. When creating your Voice Analytics strategy, make sure your solution can answer the all-important “now what?” test.

Mindshare’s focus: Insights and Action

If you’re going to collect feedback, you need to act on it. Like Text Analytics, your Voice Analytics results should be actionable and drive decisions that result in operational improvements. All analytics must pass the “now what?” test. When you see Voice Analytics results, ask yourself, “now what?” The answer should be an action that drives measurable results for a Return on Investment (ROI).

Research your Text Analytics options. Ask your vendor, even Mindshare, all of these important questions. You’ll be happy you did.

1. Does the vendor’s text analytics platform categorize comments with similar-themed keywords and phrases for comparing and trending? (For example, would the comments “lukewarm cheeseburger” and “the hamburger patty was cold” both be classified under “Hamburger” and “Temperature”?)  Or would you have to mentally group terms such as “cold” and “lukewarm” to understand the scope of a problem.
2. Does the vendor’s text analytics accurately identify the key topics in each comment individually as they come in? Or does it require a large sample size and batch process?
3. Does the vendor’s product ensure the highest quality results by using custom-tuned Natural Language Processing (NLP) semantic rules? Or is it based on simple keyword extraction or statistical probabilities?
4. Is their insight tagging at least 90% accurate overall? Or is it only slightly better than flipping a coin?
5. Does the vendor’s solution minimize setup time with pre-tuned, industry-specific models? Or is the vendor’s solution generic, lacking industry domain knowledge and requiring extensive time and effort?
6. Does their text analytics product seamlessly integrate with your current EFM system (Enterprise Feedback Management) or will you have to manage two separate systems? (E.g. Will you benefit from the cost savings of a fully integrated EFM and text analytics platform?)
7. Does the product automatically highlight correlations between structured survey data (like location, time of visit, and satisfaction ratings) and unstructured survey data (open-ended comments and social media)? For example, would your product be able to find that the phrase “on … cell phone” is highly correlated to poor customer service scores? Or will you have to connect the dots yourself?
8. Does their system send instant alerts when a key issue is detected in a customer comment? For example, if a customer reports “slipping and falling” on a wet floor, is an alert email sent immediately to your corporate office? Or will you find out much later?
9. Are their text analytics results reported in real-time and available 24/7 to managers at all levels of your organization (permission-based)? Or will the results be stale? Can the reports be pre-scheduled to email to managers or must you always log in every time to get what you need?
10. Do they have a turnkey product that can identify the central themes and sentiment in customer comments? For example, could it identify that the phrases “rude cashier” and “check engine light” are showing up frequently in negative context? Or do they require significant training, setup time, and resources to reach that insight?
11. Can the vendor customize their solution to tag comments in categories unique to your business, such as products, programs, competitors, etc.? Or is it limited to measuring generic insights only?
12. Can you navigate directly to source comments about key performance areas or are their results limited to high-level statistics? For example, assume that several feedback comments mention the cleanliness of floors in a store; can you instantly pull up those specific cleanliness comments to identify the root of the problem?
13. Do they support more than seven major languages? Or are they limited to English and not much else?
14. Is their solution fully up and running (already developed) and ready to deploy within just weeks, or are they selling something you’ll have to wait months and years to ever see.
15. Does a team of professional, full-time text analytics experts guide their text analytics solution? Or is their text analytics package just a piece of software with no support?
16. Are they confident enough to show you an unscripted live demo of their solution?  Will they allow you to test it with your own comments to see real results using a sample of your own data?  Or are they hiding behind a staged presentation?

Call us at Mindshare today. Let us show you what the best

Voice of the Customer Text Analytics Solution can do for you.

800.645-5407

The biggest key to creating everlasting sales is to build customer loyalty. The first step to customer loyalty is employee loyalty. Customer loyalty is all about an emotional connection – relationships between customers and employees/products/services. High employee turnover kills credible relationships with customers.

Every business with high employee turnover seems to have some sort of excuse for it. “We’re a college town so kids go home for the summer,” or “It’s a stepping stone for the next best job,” or “We don’t have the money to pay annual bonuses and raises.”

But none of those excuses require high turnover rates. Employees, no matter their age or career level, will find a reason to stay with your company … if they love their jobs. Even cashiers, servers, and call center agents can indeed love their jobs for reasons other than money.

How can you use this to your advantage? Focus on how your managers treat employees. Make each employee a manager of their own destiny and of their customers’ happiness. Give them a little bit of freedom and watch it go a long way. Employee satisfaction isn’t about monthly pizza parties and employee discounts (though those don’t hurt). It’s about genuine respect. Just like every customer, if an employee feels important, they’ll stay loyal.

The longer an employee stays with a company, the better they become at their job, the better they understand their products, and the better they will be at satisfying customer needs. As they stay loyal, turnover is reduced. As employee turnover is reduced, costs decline.
The result: loyal employees, better served customers, lower costs. Plus, with loyal employees, you create loyal customers, which produce higher long-term revenue.

Your Voice Analytics Should Be Equal to Your Text Analytics

Text Analytics is a hot topic right now. Companies with successful customer feedback programs are using Text Analytics. At its very basic form, Text Analytics provides keyword search and a word cloud of topic frequencies so businesses know what’s important to their customers. But many Text Analytics engines do much more than that: trending, root-cause analysis, automatic comment categorization, and much more.

What about Text Analytics’ up-and-coming brother, Voice Analytics? Only a handful of VoC (Voice of the Customer, or EFM – Enterprise Feedback Management) vendors even offer Voice Analytics. And most of those Voice Analytics engines only provide the basics: keyword search and word cloud topics. Why? Because Voice Analytics engines don’t transcribe the whole comment, they listen for keywords within the comment predetermined by the user. For example, if a fast-food manager wants to stay on top of his location’s French fry quality, his Voice Analytics will be tuned to flag comments that mention “fries.” Then, the manager has to listen to that comment to find out what it says.

Frankly, that’s pretty weak technology. But that’s the state of current Voice Analytics engines.

The answer is yes, they should have equal importance. Mindshare believes that the best way to utilize Voice Analytics and Text Analytics is to transcribe your audible comments into text and then feed them through your Text Analytics engine. The two methods become equal in the quality and quantity of their results. Valuable, actionable insights are extracted from both. Plus, transcribed comments make for easy referencing and provide retainable data for use over and over again.

Just remember, transcribed audible comments provide potential insights. Transcription is near-worthless if you don’t analyze the comments to find usable information.

What exactly does everyone mean by “analytics” anyway?  For most, I think it refers to the application of arcane mathematical and statistical techniques to mass quantities of numbers. It’s when data geeks and quant freaks in white lab coats pour over reams of data, invoke some sort of mystical incantation, kill a chicken or two, and out pops some kind of interesting “insight” – whatever that is.

Well, that’s all changing. More and more the term “analytics” refers to a packaged-up application that hides the complexity and does the analytics for you, providing the uninitiated workers the ability to take action based on the data. Mindshare’s Coach^TM product is a perfect example. Store managers don’t have to know anything about ordinal-logistic-dogeewhatsists. They are directed what to do and they just take action. There was a great article last month that discussed this topic in Information Week:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229700319

“It’s official. The term “analytics” no longer refers only to advanced statistical methods and operational research. It’s now shorthand for what people really want from business intelligence: concise, actionable insight that lets them (1) respond to what’s happening now, and (2) anticipate what will happen in the future, rather than just react to the events of last week or last month. Enter prebuilt analytic applications. As the name suggests, these are off-the-shelf apps, ready-made for specific industries …”

Small, pre-built, easy to consume nuggets of analytic goodness.

Yep.  Analytics. Mindshare has it.