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  Esteban Kolsky 12:18:48 pm on March 19, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communitiy, Continuous Improvement, dashboard, efm, feedback, Measurement, metrics, scorecard, Voice of the Customer

  On Dashboard, On Scorecard, On Metrics and Measurement…

  Wrong time of the year… I was trying to mimic Santa saying the name of the reindeer (you know, “Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!” – yeah, my brain is twisted sometimes, I know).

  Anyway, The idea of this post is to begin a discussion on metrics in customer service.  I covered a little about it during the series of posts on customer acquisition costs and benefits (to refresh your mind, post 1, post 2, and post 3 – go on, read them – I’ll wait).  That was the beginning of a slippery slope.  Following that Pulitzer-prize-worthy series I began to spend more time thinking about it.  See, one of my charters here at eVergance is to start a Measurement practice and I have been doing some work with that, following early work I did work while at Gartner. I created some slides, and some beginning of a methodology and I am getting some good ideas about how to make it work.  I wanted to share my top three “discoveries” I made and get your opinions.

  Discovery #1 – Yes, Virginia… feedback actually works.  Another poor reference, I know.  I have been advocating EFM (enterprise feedback management) since I created the concept while at that research firm named above (I am no name-dropper, once should be enough).  The idea is to tie the feedback you collect with existing data circulating through your enterprise.  Until not long ago we thought that doing so could improve product management, R&D, customer profiles, and BPM.  I am beginning to see Feedback differently now.  When used properly, and it works, it actually becomes the moving force that will help your measurement program progress from Reporting to Analytics to Continuous Improvement (think about this for a while… it is the subject of another post).

  Discovery #2 – United we stand.  Promise, that was the last bad reference.  Most organizations have recently taken the idea of using scorecards, dashboards, and feedback.  Of course, they are all being used in separate projects or pilot programs – even some stand-alone deployments.  Well, guess what?  That reasoning is flawed… you have to use dashboards, scorecards, and feedback around the same subjects, same topics, and same processes.  That’s right – unite your projects and programs already in progress under one common name.  Call it… Continuous Improvement or something like that and enjoy the success.

  Discovery #3 – Start small and go from there.  Now, most people look at Feedback or Measurement initiatives and get petrified by the sheer magnitude of the ultimate solution.  In most cases analysis paralysis takes over and the projects don’t advance or advance very slowly.  That, of course, is not the best way to do it.  You have to experiment, test the tools and your capabilities – see if you can make it work in your organization.  Start small.  Pick one area where you could benefit from (or test) a scorecard, a dashboard, an improved feedback or measurement initiative. “Play” with it and see what happens.  Then, take those lessons and begin to expand it across business units and eventually the organization.  Call the entire process something like, I don’t know, Continuous Improvement and work with it.

  I hope that by now you got the subtle hints of what you are supposed to be doing.  Are you ready for Continuous Improvement?  What do you think about it?
   

• Esteban Kolsky 05:29:00 am on February 25, 2009 | 4 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer acquisition, customer acquisition costs, customer loyalty, efm, enterprise feedback management, loyalty, net promoter score, NPS, Voice of the Customer

  Actions Speak Louder Than Words in Customer Loyalty

  Let me ask you a question: would you recommend me to your friends and family?  Yes, that question… the “L” question.  If you say YES, then you are loyal.  If you say NO, then you are not.  That is an abusive oversimplification of a very, very complex topic – but one that we are able to make mostly because we don’t really understand Loyalty and we do think that everything in this world should be measured.  That question (and its twin sister, “would you use the service or product again?”) supposedly measure loyalty.  Why, there is an entire methodology (NPS or Net Promoter Score) devoted to the study of the answer of those questions.

  Alas, if you have my previous entry on loyalty you know that I think that Loyalty is so badly used in organizations that it is useless.  Thus, asking those questions will not yield any insight into the loyalty of your customers, rather yield some insight into your customers’ ability to answer questions one way – and act a different one.  I have not yet seen any proven correlation between answering those questions and being loyal (sorry Fred).

  Now, let me turn the concept a little bit on its side.  Let’s say for the sake of argument you could measure loyalty.  Let’s say that you want to make sure that your customers would indeed recommend you to their friends and family, or even use the product or service again.  Would you really take their word at face value? or would you rather have some proof, some evidence that they will act as they say they will?  Yeah, thought so.

  Here is the simple way to save yourself the money and not buy into the NPS hype and methodology.  Don’t believe your customers’ words, believe their actions.  Implement frequent shopper or user programs, adopt a referral program – and then see the value of your customers’ actions replace the empty words.  Reward your customers for using you frequently (remember, it costs ten times or more to get a new customer as it does to retain an existing one – use those savings for good).  Pay them, and their friends, for referring new people into your service or organizations.  Make it worth their time to be loyal – and they will.

  What do you think? Take their words or their actions? Have you done this? Want to talk more about it? Leave me some comments or email me.
   
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  Kate Leggett 07:00:11 am on July 15, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: Communities, CRM, efm, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Feedback Management, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Corporations must embrace community content. Your customers are talking about you right now, and you need to be part of this conversation. If you don’t, you won’t understand what is going on and this lack of knowledge will hurt you. You will also be surprised to see a quantifiable return for investing in community content

  What does this community content do for you?

  • It will help you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. Your customers can vote on product enhancements, suggest pervasive issues to fix, and in this way influence your roadmap. The result is a product that is more in-line with your customer’s requirements
  • It can help you with product support by allowing customers to help one another via customer-generated content for knowledgebases, wikis and discussion boards. Jupiter reported in 2006 that “Customer report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail”
  • It can help you during a sales cycle. Communities allow you to identify enthusiastic customers and you can use them to persuade prospects in purchasing your product
  • It can help you in your marketing efforts. You can use the online buzz and conversations with customers to promote your brand or products

  More importantly, community content has a real return on investment (ROI)

  • It reduces the cost of creating content for your corporate knowledgebase – and in translating it into all the languages that your customer base requires. You should calculate the internal documentation, and localization costs for generating this content and compare it to the costs of harvesting community generated content
  • It reduces the need for customers to call in for answers, shifting them to cheaper channels
  • It ensures that the majority or product questions that customers have are addressed. What is the opportunity cost of an unhappy customer who repeatedly doesn’t find the answer that he is looking for in renewal or repurchase revenue?
  • It ensures more satisfied customers. Compare your scores on customer satisfaction surveys before and after leveraging community generated content. Look at answers to questions like “would you recommend the products”, “would you repurchase products”, “how satisfied are you with support”, “what is your impression of our image or brand”
  • It ensures that pervasive product defects are addressed, lowering the cost of support calls and patches. Calculate the number of patches before and after leveraging community advice on product direction and issues to be addressed

  Are you thinking about the ROI of community content? How are you calculating its impact to your business?

   
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  Esteban Kolsky 11:32:12 pm on May 13, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: best practices, Communities, customer satisfaction, customer service, efm

  I read a lot of blogs to get an idea of what’s going on around the world and the industry, probably the same you do. I prefer, instead of taking the ideas at their worth, to extrapolate ideas from other areas into customer service – shake the core beliefs if you may – to improve our current situation and create a better system. Seth Godin has two posts in his blog that got me thinking. He talks about how to improve the role of marketing for an organization, but I could not stop thinking of the implications for customer service… and the power of implementing these two ideas:

  Make big promises; over-deliver

  Connect like-minded people

  We are so obsessed with measuring customer satisfaction that we don’t take the time to think what we could do to replace it or even ignore it. Forget trying to get to 70-75% of satisfaction, ignore the NPS (net promoter score) and the likelihoods to do something – we are talking about long-term guarantees your customers will remain loyal and continue to bring you their business. Two steps to achieve it, but it is a great revolution from where we are. Ready?

  
  First, over-deliver. Often I have expounded on the virtues of SLAs (service level agreements) and the place they have in customer service: managing customer expectations of service by setting the standard. I said, as much as I could, that SLAs are external guidelines – not internal. Our internal guidelines and processes should always, always be set to over-deliver what we promise. We should never, ever simply just do the best we can – we should always do better That is what impresses customers, creates loyalty, and provides stickiness to the relationships. In this time and age, it takes no more than two seconds to move to the next provider and leave the current one behind. Over-delivering is THE differentiating factor you need to stick out among them and to retain your customers.

  
  The second question that comes up, what do you do with your customers when you have them? You know how customer relationship works: what have you done for me lately. You can over-deliver only so many times before the customers get acclimated, your competitors copy you, and the novelty is gone. That is the second punch, the one that knocks them down and keeps them coming. We talked about using communities for collaborative customer service in the past, customers helping customers, but how about for customer retention? Yes, it is a crazy idea – but so crazy it just might work. You build the communities to bring customers to your site, and use it to make them stay… not just for customer service or collaboration, but simply to stay. Connect like-minded people and see what happens.

  
  Final words: don’t just nod your head in agreement (or disagreement), don’t scream at the computer – it won’t make me any smarter or more reasonable. Try this advice… it is not hard to do, and can give you the simple results you need. Oh yeah, let me know how it goes (or, if you already did it, how it went). If you don’t know where to start – or are not comfortable, let’s talk…

   

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