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Enriching the Single Customer View through Data Quality

Companies everywhere recognize that ‘knowing your customer’ is critical to today’s business practices. An ideal single view of the customer will help improve customer service and marketing, enhance business intelligence, and meet regulatory compliance. Knowing who your customers are, which products they own, what their history is, and how profitable they are can provide a truly competitive edge.

While most companies already have the data necessary to gain these insights, it is often fragmented or scattered, held in incompatible formats, in legacy systems, generally not well integrated, and always changing – making data hygiene a difficult, albeit essential, element to the accuracy of the single view. Data quality tools and techniques are vital to the process.

What is full contact data quality?

Determining whether two or more records refer to the same customer can be extremely difficult. For example, in one database a customer’s full first name might be referenced as a nickname in another (i.e., Robert versus Bob). This particular customer may also have a valid email address in one data set, but a different email address in another. Customer information fields may also be missing or inconsistently completed. A single view can only be achieved with consistent, current and accurate data.

It is difficult to consolidate duplicate records and match accurate data to the actual customer without a method to determine the data interconnectivity between similar records. Fortunately, “full contact data quality” can help businesses make clear connections throughout and across data sets. The full contact data quality process links historical snapshots of each contact data component to identify the most up-to-date records (i.e., the most current street address on file). The process brings the entire customer record to its most current form, enhancing the single view of the customer.

Beyond validation

Companies often rely on the validation of their contact data and call their DQ efforts complete. As a “rules-based” approach, validation is used to determine whether data fits the required format. If the data is reasonable and possible. For instance, validating a phone number requires that there are 10 digits and no letters in the string. Or, when entering a date, the validation for month is 1-12; entering a ’13’ is not allowable as it is out of range. Unfortunately, this traditional process falls short of true data quality.

Full contact data quality goes further to verify data by comparing that data to a set of reference data for accuracy. By implementing this process, an organization can match its data to USPS data to identify which customer addresses are deliverable, which can be corrected, and which are completely undeliverable. Verified and corrected addresses can then be recorded in a standardized form. The same process of matching customer data to reference datasets can be used to verify and correct full names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and other contact data.

The benefits of verified contact data are significant and include postage savings, reduced return mail, better response and conversions for marketing campaigns, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Connecting with customers is crucial

Possessing verified contact data is only part of the puzzle. Knowing that contacts are reachable is essential. For example, customer John Smith is associated with the following address: 100 Main Street, Anytown, California 92688. We can certainly verify that the address exists and is deliverable, but how do we know Mr. Smith still lives there? Or that he ever lived there, for that matter? The same goes for John Smith’s telephone numbers, and even his email address.

Full contact data quality compares data across multiple sources, including USPS records, telco data, title information, and other public and proprietary information -current and historical. This process first associates and then connects verified contact data to the specific customer. With full contact data quality, an organization has the assurance that a direct marketing or telemarketing campaign, for example, will reach the targeted customers and prospects because they are reachable.

Quality comes from completeness

Just about every CRM system is missing one or more piece of data on any given customer. Fortunately, a skilled data quality vendor can fill these holes with verified street addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and even relevant demographics. With a collection of accurate, reachable, and complete contact data, businesses may now perform more holistic, meaningful analysis of their customers to generate further growth opportunities.

Data quality has evolved significantly over the past 20 years. Just as decision support systems, data warehousing, and business intelligence have prompted more in-depth analysis of the data used to measure and monitor corporate performance, a changing attitude has steadily altered our perception of what is meant by “quality information.” Today, the concept goes well beyond data cleansing, standardization, and enhancement, to include full contact data quality. With its unique ability to resolve disparate representations of a record and then link together all touch points of customer data, full contact data quality offers the means to attain and enhance a true single view of the customer.

Five Best Practices in Data-Driven Selling

The digital trail of information that customers and prospects share offers sales teams rich insights into their behaviors, needs, and interests that can be analyzed and acted on to drive higher conversion rates. The customer data that’s available also makes it possible for sales leaders to test hypotheses for different sales strategies and to examine the validity of offers against the needs of different customer groups.

In this 1to1 Webinar, Don Peppers, founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, and Jonathan Gray, vice president of marketing for Revana, examine progressive approaches to data-driven sales that mesh with the needs of both B2C and B2B customers. They explain how these techniques can help increase conversion rates and other key business metrics.

Attendees will learn:

How customer data and statistical reasoning can be used to achieve sales potential and maximize customer value

Which techniques can be used to drive incremental sales from existing customers

How to increase inbound up-sell/cross-sell rates by matching callers with historical transactional and behavioral data

How predictive models and analytics can be used to forecast customers’ potential value to prioritize leads

How leading companies are using data-driven selling to optimize business performance, including the use of customer data to help extend the lifecycle of current customers at risk of being lost

Speakers:

Don Peppers, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

Jonathan Gray, VP Marketing, Revana

Tom Hoffman, Executive Editor, 1to1 Media

Adapt Business Process Improvement Efforts for Customer Experience

To deliver great customer experiences, firms must first design them and then orchestrate the complex system of interdependent people, processes, and technology that Forrester calls the customer experience ecosystem to deliver them. Customer experience (CX) pros often know a lot about the design part and uncovering customer needs, but often struggle with changing the operational underpinnings required to deliver on the vision. Conversely, business process management (BPM) pros have the chops to re-engineer business processes, but when focusing on the objectives of internal stakeholders in departmental silos or when reporting up into back-office people like COOs and CFOs, they have little interaction with, much less understanding of, customer needs outside of voice of the customer spreadsheets. The good news is that I’m starting to see business process leaders joining forces with their customer experience colleagues to leverage their counterpart’s strengths and ameliorate some of the weaknesses. Ultimately, Forrester believes these two groups need to unite in order to transform, optimize, and continuously improve the outcomes delivered to customers. CX Pros: Consider the strengths business process improvement teams can bring to your effort.

Business process improvement groups can enhance CX teams with:

Credibility. Business process improvement methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma have been applied successfully for decades. These data-driven methodologies provide a disciplined approach that plays equally well with both product and services firms. When Vanguard set out to simplify a complex error-prone process that was causing its clients unwelcome angst, it called in process experts from its Center for Excellence. The result was a faster process with fewer errors and a flood of unsolicited “thank you” notes from clients who raved about the improvement to their experience.

Scale. Firms that have rolled out business process improvement efforts often have a cadre of trained people embedded across the organization. Tapping into this resource helps customer experience pros extend the reach of their efforts beyond the small teams they typically oversee. From the perspective of business process improvement teams, this is a natural partnership: As their efforts mature, they typically embrace customer experience as a core focus.

Valuable tools and process. Methodologies in the process improvement toolkit complement those used by customer experience designers. What’s more, typical process improvement approaches like Six Sigma’s DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, implement, and control) or Lean’s PDCA (plan, do, check, and act) align naturally with common design approaches.

But Business Process Fixes Alone Don’t Guarantee Good Experiences While business process improvements can lead to better experiences by eliminating defects (Six Sigma) or improving efficiency (Lean), these fixes don’t guarantee success.

That’s because business process improvement initiatives can:

Neglect the emotional aspect of experiences. Process improvement teams often overlook the importance of emotion when redesigning a customer interaction. Houston airport spent millions on reducing the total wait time for retrieving bags, a source of many customer complaints. Even though it succeeded in cutting the average wait time in half — down to eight minutes — it didn’t reduce the number of complaints. Customers still spent 88 percent of their time after leaving the plane standing around at the carousel not knowing when to expect their bags. The operational fix overlooked emotional aspects such as anxiety, uncertainty, and distractions that feed customer perceptions.

Narrowly focus within process silos. Improving the efficiency of a particular process within a business silo might be a wasted effort if that process is part of a larger customer journey that extends across silos — or even across companies. Business leaders at FedEx set out to reduce the number of missed deliveries: instances where customers aren’t home to receive a package. A route cause analysis revealed that the problem often started with poor quality information captured when the consumer ordered a product from a retailer or a manufacturer.

Fail to design for flexibility. A dogmatic focus on standardizing business processes — which arguably makes sense for manufacturing products — misses the inherent variability present in today’s services-based world. That’s why American Express turned away from call center scripts and moved toward hiring and empowering employees who can ask probing questions to understand customers’ unique situations and anticipate future needs.

Take an outside-in approach to business process improvement Customer experience teams, business process pros, and architecture specialists need to work together in a coordinated way that benefits customers and, ultimately, the organization. This means learning to understand each group’s respective change methodologies and then aligning them to work together.

To make this partnership work, firms need to:

Shift to an outside-in perspective. Firms need to reframe continuous improvement efforts around the outcomes that matter most to customers. Customer experience methods like qualitative research, personas, customer journey maps, ecosystem maps, and perception metrics help refocus processes, behaviors, and systems to support the desired experience.

Realign the organization. Firms need to revisit their business architecture — the coordinating framework for organizational analysis and change — to redefine how the organization will deliver value to customers in the future. At the heart of this change is a move from traditional, functionally oriented management and governance models to one centered on key customer journeys or scenarios. For example, USAA has identified approximately 100 key ones (e.g. buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad), all of which have owners and cross-functional teams held accountable for underlying processes.

Transform the culture. To sustain the momentum for transformation, firms need to embed their efforts in the organization’s culture. This comes from engaging trusted employees to purposefully design new customer experiences. Begin by building a team of change agents to evangelize and lead improvement projects. Intuit has 200 “Innovation Catalysts,” specially trained design-thinking “Jedis” deployed across the company to help the organization better deliver delight. Change-management guru John Kotter recommends recruiting upward of 10 percent of employees to work on change efforts in order to create lasting transformations. For the deeper insight on how CX and BPM teams can work together, check out my recent research report, “Adapt Business Process Improvement For Customer Experience.”

About the Author: Paul Hagen is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. He blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/paul_hagen

Governance: The Key To Customer Experience Management

At its core, customer experience management comes down to governance. But what is governance, really? You’ve probably got a hundred different governance processes in your organization, none of them exactly the same. The word “governance” may stir up images of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. And yes, teams of senior decision makers are an important component of governance practices at many organizations. But customer experience governance isn’t about a committee that hands out edicts from on high. And I’m not suggesting that you form a police force to issue tickets for customer experience infractions.

At its core, customer experience management comes down to governance. But what is governance, really? You’ve probably got a hundred different governance processes in your organization, none of them exactly the same. The word “governance” may stir up images of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. And yes, teams of senior decision makers are an important component of governance practices at many organizations. But customer experience governance isn’t about a committee that hands out edicts from on high. And I’m not suggesting that you form a police force to issue tickets for customer experience infractions.

Customer experience governance is about helping you drive accountability by assigning specific customer experience management tasks to specific people within your organization. It’s also about developing new business processes and establishing oversight across your company’s customer experience initiatives. When implemented well, governance practices will help you monitor customer experience quality, improve it on a continuous basis, and keep bad experiences from getting out the door in the first place.

In Forrester’s soon-to-publish book, Outside In, Harley Manning and I illustrate the importance of customer experience governance through a case study about the software company Adobe. Adobe recently created a physical listening post in its headquarters where it aggregates the voice of the customer. Flat screen panels, each displaying a different type of input, dominate one wall of the room. Screens on the far left show insights from Facebook, Twitter, and other social forums; the middle screens pipe in real-time video from the company’s call centers in Asia, Europe, and North America; and on the right screens display the top issues bubbling up in Adobe’s customer relationship management system and customer surveys.

Of course, the good folks at Adobe don’t collect all that data just to satisfy their curiosity. They collect it because it’s a critical input into the company’s customer experience governance program.

Adobe has established a customer advocacy council with senior leaders from multiple functions and its two largest business units. Every month, and as needed, this group convenes to look at the latest customer data. They size, scope, and prioritize issues that they believe will make the biggest improvement to the customer experience and have the biggest financial impact.

Adobe’s customer advocacy council partners with another important cross-functional group: the business process improvement council, which sponsors customer experience improvement initiatives and allocates people to work on them. This group also defines the desired end state and measures of success for each initiative. And, in monthly meetings, they review the status of all open projects and make adjustments to resources and staffing as needed.

Now, if you’ve ever managed a customer experience improvement project, you probably know all too well that fixing CX problems can be like herding cats. That’s why the business process improvement council also assigns an executive sponsor for each project, who’s then responsible for plowing through any roadblocks and making sure that people from individual silos are working together.

With this governance model, Adobe has successfully completed a number of short-term projects, it’s managing several long-term initiatives that are currently in flight, and it’s created an ongoing pipeline of additional initiatives for the future. When fully completed, these projects will have a combined business impact of tens of millions of dollars.

Governance is just one of six disciplines that companies must master if they want to achieve the full potential of customer experience. The others are strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, and culture. Of course, most of these concepts aren’t new in the business world, but they do take on a slightly different twist when it comes to customer experience. If you’d like to know more about the six disciplines and how they’ll help you create great experiences for your customers, please visit outsidein.forrester.com.

About the Author:
Kerry Bodine is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. She blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/kerry_bodine and tweets at @kerrybodine

3 Ways to Change the Customer Perception Gap

Customers form opinions based not only on their experiences with your company and products, but also on their broader experiences and beliefs. Consequently, a gap forms between what you’d like customers to think about you and what they perceive to be true, according to Nigel Barlow, author of Re-think.

During his keynote at the Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit 2012 in London, Barlow shared three ways to stand out that will help close the perception gap:

Challenge assumptions: Doing so is what leads to innovation and new ideas. Also, don’t put your organization in a box; you don’t have to be a certain way based on the stereotypes in your industry.

Differentiate: How can you differentiate your organization by actually being different? Too many companies try to “differentiate” by simply improving on what their competition already does.

Rethink your positioning: What business are you really in? Harley-Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles; it offers the ability for riders to become a part of a cool “club”. Virgin Atlantic is entertainment at 30,000 feet, not a mode of transportation. You need to define your “something more.”

9 Ways to Reward Employees to Reinforce Customer-Centric Behaviors

The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in his blog post entitled Your Culture Is Your Brand: “Advertising can only get your brand so far… So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? In a word: culture. At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff–like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customer–will happen naturally on its own.” When Forrester looks at building a customer-focused culture, we believe firms need some precursors in place, such as a clear strategy and vision, metrics that reflect customer perceptions, and governance mechanisms that set standards and hold people accountable for changes. Once those are in place, rewards systems are one powerful lever to keep employees focused on what’s important. My colleague Belle Bocal and I identified 9 ways that companies use reward systems to build a customer-centric culture.

Celebrate target behavior Many companies make the mistake of trying to tie variable compensation (e.g., bonuses) to customer experience metrics too early. What many firms have learned is that the more informal recognition programs can be even more powerful at moving culture than the compensation metrics.

1. Reward those named in customer surveys. At Pitney Bowes, employees recognized by name in favorable survey or feedback receive a gift certificate, and at GoDaddy.com one lucky employee’s bonus is a paid year’s worth of rent or mortgage payments. Circles, a provider of virtual concierge services, gives agents the ability to accumulate points based on customer satisfaction surveys and redeem them for prizes, including additional time off.

2. Recognize people behind-the-scenes. Since 1992, every Valentine’s Day Southwest Airlines has awarded a Hero of the Heart as a tribute to a behind-the-scenes star workgroup that does not have direct customer contact.

3. Empower peers to celebrate each other’s work. One financial services firm allows employees to nominate peers monthly who have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction and bring value to the firm for its “Random Acts of Customer Engagement” award. KeyBank set up a program that allows employees to give each other “Key Kudos” for work that exemplifies a focus on customers.

4. Align rewards to goals. Instead of rewards like golf trips or dinners that have no correlation to customer experience, Fidelity sent those selected to participate in its customer experience Ambassador’s program to the Disney Institute for three days, which included touring Disney to see behind-the-scenes how it delivers its experiences.

Provide perks that improve the employee experience Many companies on their customer experience journey have recognized that employee experience correlates to customer experience. Just as customers have larger contexts in which they use your products and services, employees have larger contexts in which they work for you. Help them navigate those larger contexts and you have employees who can focus more on your customers.

5. Provide services that improve a work/life balance. Based on employee feedback, American Express built and piloted its first backup child care center adjacent to the Fort Lauderdale call center. It added nurse practitioners to the on-site healthcare service, allowing employees to get more of their medical needs (e.g., prescriptions) met without having to take time off. And American Express even got the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to come on-site twice a year so employees could renew their driver’s licenses and car registrations without having to wait in long lines. Similarly, Cisco provides on-site car tune-ups. CDW also uses customer feedback scores to determine eligibility for extra perks, such as the ability to work from home.

6. Offer benefits that lower stress levels. CareerBuilder.com notes, “The inclusion of on-site services such as manicures, laundry, and daycare are enabling employees to cut their errands in half. Massage chairs, yoga classes, and even napping have been encouraged to cut back the daily errands and reduce workers’ stress levels.” To that end, Kaye/Bassman and Le Gourmet Gift Basket allow their employees to have sleep breaks at work, and Zappos offers employees access to a life coach.

7. Treat the frontline reps with respect. American Express changed the title of its agents to “customer care professionals” and provides them with personalized business cards. Volusion uses “support concierge” for its call center reps. Zappos lets call center agents get their own desk to decorate any way they like.

Compensate and promote based on customer-centric metrics While I’ve emphasized the non-monetary side of incentives, tying variable compensation and promotions to customer metrics is a powerful incentive in companies that have established an understanding of how to impact those metrics.

8. Promotion tied to customer experience performance. At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, no one can further their career into corporate management who has not first started on the frontline, as well as sustaining above-average Enterprise Service Quality index scores over time. The account managers at CDW also have customer satisfaction objectives, and cannot become eligible for job promotions until having achieved high satisfaction scores from their clients.

9. Bonuses to customer metrics. American Express created customer experience objectives for everyone in its service organization from senior managers to frontline employees. For its customer care professionals (CCPs), 85 percent of each performance assessment stems from customer feedback scores, and CCPs have an opportunity to earn an incremental 25 to 35 percent above their base salaries. The professional services firm IHS, ties its CEO annual bonus compensation to key customer metrics that measure the company’s “customer delight” performance.

About the Author: Paul Hagen is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. He blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/paul_hagen

Analysis vs. Analytics: What’s the Difference?

“You say tomato, I say tomato; you eat potato, I eat potato.Tomato, tomato; potato, potato. Let’s call the whole thing off!”

Just as there’s a clear difference between how people pronounce the same words, there’s an important difference between analysis and analytics. A lack of understanding can affect how marketers’ ability to leverage customer intelligence to their best advantage.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, analysis is the separation of a whole into its component parts, and analytics is the method of logical analysis. Marketers leverage both to drive all types of decisions, and each specific application supports the unique insight challenges inherent in dissecting customer behaviors.

One way to distinguish the difference between analysis and analytics is to think in terms of past and future. Analysis looks backwards over time, providing marketers with a historical view of what has happened. Typically, analytics look forward to model the future or predict a result.

Both analysis and analytics provide the insight marketers use to value customers accurately, target the right audience, and improve the effectiveness of their marketing budget. And both help marketers transform customer data by exploring and analyzing that data to help uncover unknown patterns, opportunities and insights that can drive proactive, evidence-based decision making.

How marketers use analysis

How many customers responded to my offer? How did my campaign perform over all? How many new loyalty program sign ups did we get last year? What is my customer retention rate?

It may seem easy for marketers to answer these questions, but what makes analysis valuable is the ability to slice and dice the answers in several ways. This provides multiple micro views to reveal deeper customer insight.

Take, for example, the question, “How did my marketing program perform?” A high-level report may produce the number of customer messages sent, the number customers responding, the response rate, and the revenue generated from the campaign. But, through careful analysis a marketer can learn how customers responded by segment, by store, by geography, by datedrilling deeper and deeper to understand customers at a more individual level.

Analysis also helps marketers understand how their programs are impacting customer metrics. This time, let’s take customer retention as an example. The overall retention rate shows a company-wide metric. But dissect what’s behind the retention metric by individual customer segments or by loyalty members or by region and an understanding of which customers are driving that retention rate begins to emerge. Additionally, comparing metrics quarter over quarter, month over month, week over week-whatever time frame aligns with your business-is an analysis exercise that can determine the impact of your marketing programs. Watch metrics over time and trends will appear, providing even more valuable insight.

Marketers commonly use many types of analyses, including customer segmentation, attrition drivers, and market-basket analysis (identifying what’s been purchased by customers). Business intelligence tools support the drill down requirements marketers need to glean these insights. However, more common is a query process where reporting goes back and forth between the technology and marketing teams until an actionable insight surfaces.

How marketers use analytics

Referring again to Merriam-Webster, analytics is defined as the method of logical analysis. A method of logical analysis is typically performed through use of algorithms, which are applied as the “advanced logic” separation of the whole into component parts. This applied logic yields a more comprehensive result based on statistical relevance and helps the marketer by modeling what will happen next or by forecasting what will happen if a trend continues.

For example, advanced segmentation strategies use analysis to group customers based on multiple past behaviors. Customer retention can be improved by then using analytics to predict which customers are in danger of defecting. Predicting the next best product or service can increase revenue and profitability per customer, as well as increase relevancy of your message. Recommendation engines, like we see on many ecommerce sites today, are a form of predictive analytics. Just as marketers use analysis to understand which customers are responding to marketing programs, they can use analytics to predict which customers are most likely to respond, thereby optimizing the marketing budget.

Sophisticated predictive analytics software tools best support these efforts and are typically used by trained statisticians versus the marketing practitioner. While analysis and business intelligence tools support ongoing daily analysis, analytics tend to be outsourced as special projects, unless an in-house capability is available.

Both are important

While analytics is the method needed to better predict customer behaviors, analysis is the process required to answer key strategic questions, and both are important to the marketer. By combining analytics and analysis, marketers can achieve a better understanding of their customers. Using analytics to dissect customer data, marketers can identify behaviors and trends and formulate more relevant, targeted offers and communications to address those trends. With analysis, marketers are able to evaluate the results of their efforts and apply these insights to determine success or make changes. Tomato, tomato; potato, potato; analysis, analytics-while there is a difference, they coexist in harmony!

About the Author: Connie Hill is president and founder of VeraCentra

How Long Is Too Long to Wait for Customer Service?

Would you wait more than eight minutes to speak to a customer service representative on the phone? How good would you feel about a retailer if it took almost four days for the company to answer your email? If you are a customer of Barnes & Noble or Crate & Barrel, you will likely find out. Companies are always discussing the importance of customer service across channels, but how well do they deliver? A new study of the top 100 retailers shows that many have a lot of work to do to keep customers from waiting for answers via email or on the phone. Online rating company STELLAservice recently conducted research on the Web’s top 100 retailers through more than 1,200 calls, emails, and “mystery shopping” interactions. For the phone channel, SierraTradingPost answered the phone the quickest, taking only six seconds to answer. OfficeDepot topped the email list by averaging 48 minutes to respond to email questions. Here are the top 10 for each channel. Of the top 100 retailers, the 10 companies with the shortest average call hold times are:

  1. SierraTradingPost.com (6 seconds)
  2. YOOX.com (11 seconds)
  3. DisneyStore.com (12 seconds)
  4. UrbanOutfitters.com (17 seconds)
  5. Grainger.com (21 seconds)
  6. Nordstrom.com (21 seconds)
  7. Fingerhut.com (23 seconds)
  8. MarketAmerica (25 seconds)
  9. LLBean.com (25 seconds)
  10. Cabelas.com (27 seconds)

The 10 companies with the quickest average email response times are (hh:mm:ss):

  1. OfficeDepot.com (48 minutes)
  2. MusiciansFriend.com (58 minutes, 40 seconds)
  3. Diapers.com (01:23:48)
  4. DisneyStore.com (01:47:40)
  5. Abercrombie.com (01:50:45)
  6. USAutoParts.net (03:38:00)
  7. Gilt.com (04:43:00)
  8. PCMall.com (04:49:48)
  9. Kohls.com (05:02.00)
  10. Coldwatercreek.com (05:06:10)

Only one company, DisneyStore.com, ranked among the top ten for both speediest email support (01:47:40) and phone support (12 seconds). On the opposite side of the spectrum, Barnes & Noble and Crate & Barrel have a lot of work to do to improve the speediness of their service. BarnesandNoble.com had the longest average call hold time (8 minutes 3 seconds), while CrateandBarrel.com took an average of 88 hours to respond to customer emails. Most customers will not put up with having to wait this long to speak to interact with a representative. But, keep in mind that speed of service does not mean the actual interaction is helpful. Once the call or email has been received, customers are more interested in having their issues resolved rather than a quick response. Of these companies, only Kohl’s and Barnes & Noble, the worst in terms of time to answer, are also listed on Forrester’s 2011 Customer Experience Index. It shows that many variables contribute to a good customer experience, with speed of service being only one factor. The customer service channel is one of the most critical interaction points a brand can have with a customer. “We look at every call as an opportunity to build the brand, be neutral to the brand, or destroy the brand,” said Chris Kenny of ING Direct USA at last week’s Call Center Week conference. Many companies can lose sight of this big picture, however, and get caught in focusing on internal operations that may undermine the customer experience. Companies need to consider the customer point of view at every point in their interaction, from how long it takes to answer a call to how quickly an issue is resolved.

The Pros and Cons of Mobile Customer Feedback

Gathering customer feedback can be a laborious process. Gain participating for such input as satisfaction surveys is difficult enough. Persuading customers to fill out a comment card or go online after eating a meal or returning an item is can be even more challenging because of the time lag between the event and the survey. Some companies are moving to the mobile channel to gain more real-time insight while delivering a better customer experience to those customers who provide feedback. There are many positives and negatives to such an approach.

The Pros

“There is no bigger opportunity to efficiently capture customer feelings about a company’s products or services at the point of experience,” says Noel Chandler, CEO of Mosio. “Ninety-eight percent of mobile phones are SMS enabled out of the box with 94 percent of all mobile users having SMS as part of their mobile plans. Nine out of 10 people walking down the street don’t have a pen in their pocket to fill out a comment card, but everyone has their phone with them.”

Boston Pizza is one company tapping into the potential that represents.

The eatery is one of Canada’s largest casual dining franchises, with 340 restaurants. Last year it began testing the mobile waters with text messaging at 30 of its restaurants. The goal was engagement, and it is the first step in its mobile customer feedback strategy, says Paul Pascal, regional vice president of operations for Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

“Mobile tools are a great way to engage our guests,” he says. “They can provide instant feedback. The objective is to find more ways to get feedback from customers. People are getting inundated with email trash, so we wanted to leverage mobile as a way to interact with them in a fun way.”

Working with Empathica, Boston Pizza created tent cards for its tables with a silly yet engaging question for customers: “Should pizza eating be an Olympic sport?” This was during the height of Olympic fever in Canada last winter. Customers texted back yes or no to a short code while waiting for food or during a lull in their meal conversations. Customers then received a text with a link to Boston Pizza’s standard restaurant experience survey. Customers could either connect to the survey using their smartphones or go online. “If they chose to, they could interact right away,” Pascal says.

The experiment was Boston Pizza’s first foray into mobile customer engagement. The survey was not optimized specifically for mobile, and the link was the same one given to customers in other feedback channels like email and POS receipts. “Our first priority was to interact with the guest,” Pascal says. “Mobile tools are the best way to interact because it keeps customers engaged with the brand and helps us stay connected to guests.” He says that response rates were 30 percent higher than that of other feedback mechanisms. “Any way we can gather feedback is critically important.” He adds that many of the customers who interacted via mobile opted in to take future surveys and participate in additional programs.

Pascal points to the instant feedback as the platform’s biggest advantage. “The beauty of mobile is that we can quickly change the questions based on feedback.”

Others agree. “Mobile is the most important interaction channel,” says Jeff Judge, CEO of Signal. “Your phone is the device you’re going to take action on immediately. The inclination is to provide feedback right away.”

The Cons

For all its success, Pascal admits there are downsides to using SMS messaging to collect customer feedback. The messaging costs involved are placed on the customer, who may or may not have an unlimited text plan. The company doesn’t want to put up a communication barrier because of text charges, he says. In addition, the process of getting shortcodes and setting up automated messaging systems is a bit cumbersome and can be costly. And Boston Pizza must balance the convenience of instant text message feedback with the device limitations, such as a small screen and 160-character messages.

These negatives are not unique to Boston Pizza. Many agree that SMS customer feedback efforts are important, but the challenge is in the execution.

Pieter de Villiers, CEO of Clickatell, says that these limitations can hinder almost any mobile customer service activity. “One hundred sixty characters can often be too few for customers to provide full details of a service request, so these programs are often more effective when the expectation is not that the customer will initiate the request over the mobile channel,” he says. He suggests using the mobile channel to update customers on the status of customer service tickets or other follow-up information.

Signal’s Judge adds that there are challenges in making customers aware of mobile feedback channels, which often require coordination with marketing resources. One of its clients, a $44 billion Chicagoland retailer, created signage throughout its stores and at the registers to build awareness of its mobile program. Customers can text at the point of sale to have coupons delivered to their mobile phone, text the store manager with comments, or ask for help locating a specific item.

The biggest thing companies may have to fear is the feedback itself. Acting on the feedback, integrating it with other customer feedback sources, and closing the customer loop are complex strategic issues. “It’s worse not to act on customer feedback than it is to not collect it at all,” Judge says.

“Smart” opportunities

Despite the challenges, mobile is not going away as a customer interaction channel. It is definitely on corporate radars. “It’s the hot-button issue of the moment, says Rick Blair, CIO of OpinionLab. “Using our clients as a gauge, I’d estimate that, while not everyone is currently collecting customer feedback through their mobile apps, at least 90 percent are actively developing a listening program to better engage and support mobile users.”

Because companies are only starting to develop mobile feedback programs, some are choosing to leapfrog over text messaging and go to the smartphone app market instead. After all, smartphone adoption is growing rapidly. Nielsen reports that smartphone penetration in the U.S. is at least 28 percent and rising, accounting for 41 percent of new phone purchases in Q3 2010. Internet-enabled feedback applications allow for the convenience and direct interaction of mobile along with the robust opportunities of the Web platform. Boston Pizza, for example, plans to roll out iPhone and Blackberry apps in early 2011 that incorporate a mobile-optimized customer survey. It will have fewer questions and fit on a smaller screen.

Convergence is on the horizon

The future will likely see more integration of mobile tools, says Mosio’s Chandler. “All in one convergence between SMS, telephony, the mobile Web, and even mobile chat will give the customer the ultimate control on how they want to communicate,” he says. “In the near future we’ll also start to see more companies using SMS and the mobile Web so customers with smart phones can take mobile-browser-friendly surveys. And while it’s probably not relevant for all companies, GPS and location-based integration will allow companies to find out exactly where a customer is when they’re providing that feedback-permission-based, of course.”

Regardless of how mobile feedback programs are used, the goal should always be to learn from customers and build long-term relationships. Gary Edwards, Ph.D., Empathica’s executive vice president of client services, says advances in technology will bring customers and companies closer. “Mobile feedback systems will be more like a conversation,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for dialog and loyalty.”

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