“Listening” to Your Customers
To succeed in business, whether for-profit or non-profit, you must deliver what customers want to buy with the right mix of features and pricing plus high quality in the offerings and the service, sold in more-than-sufficient volumes. To meet this prime objective you must find out from and “listen” (hearing and reading) to your customers and analyze in a very timely manner what they have said for insights that will guide you in developing and improving your products and services.
One means of doing so is gathering, analyzing and drawing inferences from operational data such as first contact resolution and repeat calls and e-mails (i.e. customers would not be happy with companies if they had many interactions on the same matters.) Yet you do not hear or read what they are saying, good or bad. Call recordings and chat and e-mail captures are one such set of tools to obtain these “voices of the customers (VOCs).” The information they provide, obtained via speech and text analytics is limited though by what is there;; if you wanted to find out what customers thought of your product or would they recommend your firm to someone they knew, you have to ask this.
Customer surveys, launched at or shortly after their exchanges, provide direct insight by eliciting meaningful insights with well-drafted questions.
Enter EFM
Enter enterprise feedback management (EFM), which is a sophisticated set of software that manages survey creation, deployment, and analysis.R With EFM, departments can collaborate in creating questions that can generate rich insights that could help each of them: Engineering/service design, distribution, marketing/sales and customer service and support create more profitable offerings.
EFM tools are deployed via the Web and increasingly through IVR and SMS. They are becoming optimized for mobile access as more consumers rely on wireless than on landlines. Most EFM solutions are hosted as opposed to licensed and premise-installed software. There are also EFM applications built into contact center routing and workforce optimization (WFO) packages.
According to Jim Davies, research director of Gartner, EFM tools have three key benefits. First, they are cost-effective compared with running numerous siloed survey tools across organizations. Second, they permit correlations between different surveys from which companies can see patterns such as the correlations between contact center agent satisfaction and customer satisfaction with the same firm. Third, the coordination feature avoids bombarding customers with surveys.
Companies are applying EFM solutions to capture feedback that can be used for operational and strategic benefit.… [They’re] also seeking guidance to address key service issues. Mindshare’s new Mindshare CoachÔ provides just that with specific “where” and “how” recommendations. The technology, [using] data mining and statistical analytics, examines the customer experience elements, prioritizes them, and suggests improvements which will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
“Managers don’t have hours each day to dig through customer feedback and then determine the best course of action, and they aren’t generally trained in statistical analysis,” said Richard Hanks, president of Mindshare.
EFM Challenges and Solutions
There are challenges in employing and obtaining senior management approval for EFM solutions.
A longstanding obstacle with customer surveys, both individual applications and EFM, is achieving sufficiently high response rates to generate valid impressions of customer attitudes, reactions and sentiments. Customers have often been reluctant to fill out surveys: the exceptions being those who are very annoyed with firms or, rarer still, have had exceptionally great experiences.
Suppliers, along with professional services partners, have been working with enterprises to increase response rates, reports Davies, by finding means to “create a sense of connectivity with participants and organizations.” Examples include personalized e-mails, Web forms or IVR scripts with customer information to prompt them to listen or open the communications. Also, questions are being shortened with the right phrasing to minimize the time they spend on providing the answers. The surveys are increasingly [personal] and, where appropriate, fun to answer… compared with checking off boxes.
“If a survey looks like a generic e-mail or sounds like a standard IVR pitch they are going to get ignored,” says Davies. “If it looks or sounds personal and it will not take a lot of time to fill out and [it’s] interesting, your customers are more likely to respond.”…
EFM firms, services firms and companies should look at informing customers in their survey scripts that their previous responses have had impact, observes and recommends Davies. That can include as examples sending the agents whose service they had problems with on a training course or redesigning the button on the oven they had bought and called about to make it easier to use.
“By letting customers know it was worth their time to complete that survey because they have been listened to and action was taken on what they’ve said, the next time they get a survey they will be even more willing to fill it out because they know their voices are being listened to,” says Davies.
As customers shift from landlines to wireless for voice and text-based channels, this is posing new challenges in attracting them to and enabling their responses to surveys. Mobile devices use a wide array of platforms that applications must mesh with. Their small screens and keyboards, both tactual and virtual, make survey replying difficult to accomplish.
EFM suppliers are responding by adding support for Blackberrys, iPhones and smart devices, reports Davies. The solutions now permit wireless users to take surveys by pushing buttons on iPhone screens as opposed to having them click on e-mail links that go to Web sites. Down the road are speech-recognition-based solutions that collect responses off responses to directed-dialogue interactions, converting speech to text.…
Erich Dietz, senior sales director of Mindshare, cautions firms about overusing SMS surveys. If they are too aggressive they will quickly oversaturate the channel and drive up increased privacy concerns among consumers.
“Given how frustrated consumers are with spam, we believe they will be they will be even quicker to pull back from SMS if they perceive companies are abusing the channel,” says Dietz.
One of the key characteristics of text messages and the social channel is that customer feedback data from them is unstructured, unlike formal surveys. Mindshare’s new Mindshare RevealÔ, a robust text analytics platform allows extracting structured information value from unstructured opinion-based customer comments. It turns this feedback into actionable information using customer rule sets adaptable to corporate culture, products and services.
The rapid rise of social media is accelerating the issue to the point where companies are risking missing large chunks of information that will impact on their ability to effectively respond to customers’ needs; they are not fully hearing the VOCs because they have only been capturing solicited feedback through surveys.…
As customers turn to social media as a comment and feedback channel, companies need to integrate this mode with EFM to provide, along with call recordings, screen captures, and operational data, complete holistic views of their messages. Davies is seeing some EFM suppliers create social community platforms so that clients can engage with their customers such as through blogs, chats and forums. At the same time they can capture comments and interject their own surveys in that environment.
Mindshare drives operational improvement. Using Mindshare, companies improve operational excellence, foster consumer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and support employee retention. Our industry experts guide clients in building comprehensive enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence through powerful and incisive reporting. Mindshare serves more than 25 different industries including travel, hospitality, restaurant, financial, salon, automotive, and retail. For information, visit www.mshare.net.
