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Five Customer Loyalty Fixes for Telecom Companies

When was the last time you heard someone rave about an experience they had with their Internet, television, or mobile phone service providers? Going by numerous sentiment-measuring reports, the likelihood is that such an occurrence is very rare.

Let’s change the question around: When was the last time you heard someone complain about their experience when dealing with a telecommunications company? The likelihood is that we don’t have to think long and hard to remember about a poor experience that we’ve heard or read about.

Despite the telecom industry’s cutthroat market environment in which brands steal competitors’ customers by buying out existing contracts and constantly undercut rate plans to get customers to switch, few have made customer centricity a priority. This shortcoming is evidenced by the industry’s low Net Promoter scores in Satmetrix’s recently released 2014 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks. With a score of 39, Tracfone had the highest NPS among cellular phone service companies, while DirectTV’s NPS of 34 ranked it highest among cable and satellite television providers. Bright House Networks’ NPS stood at 20, even though it was the top-ranked company among Internet service providers. To put these scores into perspective, USAA gained NPS scores in the 80s for banking, automotive insurance, and home and contents insurance.

Further, television and Internet service providers were among the companies receiving an average of “poor” ratings in the 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings.

So why are customer experience metrics for telecom companies continually low? And more importantly, why does it seem like there have been no customer strategy advancements despite the constant threat to their customer loyalty? Perhaps it’s because they’re all in the same boat. “The best-in-class companies are not faring much better than those that are ranked at the worst positions,” Chris Burton, senior vice president for communications, media, and technology at TeleTech, notes.

Traditionally, telecom providers have looked at cost and coverage as two of the main areas of investment. In fact, even marketing messages seem to target these two factors as main differentiators. Verizon, for example, uses maps of the United States to compare its 4G LTE coverage with coverage areas of other providers.

But in an intensely competitive market, where companies are constantly trying to one-up their competitors, lack of investment in customer-centric measures is seeing clients considering other companies, with some actually pulling the trigger and making the move. While cost and coverage are important factors for customers, on their own, they are not enough to avoid churn. “It’s no longer enough to just be the cheapest offer,” notes Martin Morgan, Openet’s director of marketing. As Don MacNeil, CMO for Xo Communications, explains, in today’s uber transparent market, customers can easily find out more about the companies they’re doing business with and also about their competitors.

Further, even though many customers are tied down by contracts, a negative customer experience could very well drive them to a competitor once their contract is up, if not before. T-Mobile, for example, is even offering to pay the much-dreaded early termination fees of customers who want to switch carriers for their postpaid plans. If other companies follow suit, customers will have the option to break their contract anytime their current provider fails to deliver on their expectations, or they come across a better offer. Experts share five actions that telecom companies should take to attract new customers and retain existing ones:

1. Move towards a customer-based focus: Organizations across all industries suffer from departmental silos. Especially when customers buy more than one service from a company, it’s imperative that the organization makes the necessary investments to create a 360-degree profile of its customers. As Burton explains, some telecom companies are trying to consolidate their CRM systems to have a more holistic view of their customers and enable the delivery of better customer service. Further, improved customer visibility will allow telecom providers to reiterate what other industries have been doing for some time-offer services and products that best fit an individual or a household’s needs. “They need to steer away from the one-size-fits-all approach and instead offer products and services that address the needs of different segments,” notes Michelle Nowak, vice president of product management at CSG International.

2. Invest in first-contact resolution: Customers want their problems addressed and rectified immediately. However, as Burton notes, many telecom providers rate poorly when it comes to first-contact resolution, reflecting negatively on their customer satisfaction scores. There are a number of steps that companies can take to resolve issues immediately, including investing in training for contact center agents and providing agents with access to the information they need to give customers the answers they need. Ryan Pellet, senior vice president for strategic consulting services at Nexidia, also recommends using insights from contact center calls to determine what is making customers unhappy and making them want to churn. Information from individual calls, he notes, needs to be put in context of the relationship between a client and the company to better understand whether this is the first time that particular customer had a problem or whether this is a recurring complaint.

3. Focus on an omnichannel experience: With customers communicating with brands over multiple channels, organizations need to make sure that they can connect these different touchpoints and provide continuous experience across the board. While brands are trying to provide new ways for their customers to get in touch with them, the different channels are often siloed. Burton uses the example of a customer who starts an inquiry with a company by engaging with chat support when he realizes that the issue is complicated and he would rather get on the phone with an agent. “But many times there is no direct way to connect to the agent, and when the customer finally navigates the provider’s IVR maze, he’s often connected with someone new who doesn’t have visibility into the chat conversation.” In order to improve the experience, telecom companies need to consider investing in technologies like unified communications platforms and the cloud, as well as unifying the organization internally to connect the disparate channels and provide seamless transitions for customers.

4. Provide proactive warnings and information: In today’s connected world, customers expect to be able to communicate anytime and anywhere. Loss of a wireless connection or Internet access is, for many people, an experience they will go to extremes to avoid. Nowak says one service that telecom companies should invest in is warnings and alerts when customers are about to reach their data limits. This, she notes, is especially important for those on shared plans who might not know how much data others in the group have used. “Use real-time data to notify customers about what they’re buying and what they’re consuming,” Nowak recommends. Ulla Koivukoski, senior vice president for Comptel’s analytics business unit, agrees. “We need to proactively reach out to a customer before he calls us,” she notes.

Organizations should go a step further and use such opportunities to inform customers of other plans that might fit their needs better. “Understand their needs, quantify them, and offer them the right services.” Koivukoski uses the example of Bangladesh-based pre-paid mobile provider Robi Axiata, which is leveraging data to determine what services customers need and then letting them know about the packages that make the most sense to them. Further, Morgan highlights that these offers need to be timely. “If a customer is using his mobile phone to watch a video and encounter a problem with data, send him a message with an offer to make up for that issue,” he recommends. “Apart from being relevant, an offer needs to be timely or it will stop being relevant.”

5. Identify high-value customers: While all customers are important, there are certain segments that are more valuable than others. Telecom companies need to first determine the attributes of their high-value customers and then identify these clients. The next step, Burton notes, is to determine who, among this group, is most likely to churn, for example those clients who are approaching the end of their contract. Not only can organizations make sure these segments are routed to higher tier agents who can provide a better experience, but they should put structures into place to proactively reach out to these customers with relevant offers and information. For example, a cable company which knows that a particular household enjoys watching movies might offer that account a month of free movie channels or credit to use towards the purchase of on-demand movies.

Acquiring new customers is neither easy nor cheap. This is why organizations need to make sure those new customers are satisfied enough to want to continue doing business with the brand. Otherwise, companies are in for an endless cycle of acquisition without retention, a practice that will drain their coffers.

Finding the Right Vendor(s) For Your Voice of Customer Program

Are you looking for a vendor or vendors to support your voice of the customer (VoC) program? Or are you reviewing your current VoC vendor(s)? Selecting the right vendor or vendors can be hard! Why? The VoC vendor landscape is difficult to decipher. There are many but relatively small vendors, and they rely on an interconnected network of partners, acquire each other at an impressive rate, and regularly expand into new spaces. And companies often already have a number of vendors they work with. In my recent webinar about VoC, most of the attendees had from three to five vendors that supported their VoC program in some shape or form. But there are a few beacons to help orient you in your quest:

– The VoC vendor market is an ecosystem. What vendors are the right “lid” for your “VoC program pot” depends entirely on your internal capabilities and the characteristics of your VoC program. We identified customer feedback management (CFM) platforms and VoC specialist vendors. CFM platforms support VoC programs with a robust set of capabilities that include feedback collection, integration of feedback with other data in a centralized data hub, analysis, reporting, and closed-loop action management. VoC specialists offer a subset of VoC platform vendor capabilities. Their areas of expertise range from surveying customers in order to generate measurement data to mining your unstructured feedback with text analytics, monitoring social media data, and consulting to help establish or evolve a VoC program.

– Look at how VoC vendors can support your key VoC tasks. Although vendors in the same category are alike in many ways, there are also some significant differences you need to take into account. For example, in capabilities like advanced survey management, advanced analysis, data integration, responding to customer feedback, and supporting processes to improve taking action on customer feedback.

– Exercise due diligence and look beyond capabilities. Ask yourself which professional services your program requires, whether you need an on-premises solution or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, what pricing models work best for the types and volumes of your data sources, and whether you need a local vendor office in certain countries. Read more about this in our latest research. We at Forrester just published two reports (based on a survey among VoC vendors) to answer some key questions we get from CX professionals:

– “Voice Of The Customer Vendor Landscape, 2014.” What does the complex VoC vendor ecosystem look like? What are the capabilities of some of those vendors? How will the VOC vendor market evolve in the future? (Hint: We will see some consolidation.)

– “Voice Of The Customer Vendor Go-To-Market Strategies, 2014.” What are other factors that drive success in vendor relationships, and how should you go about selecting a vendor? So in detail, this report answers questions like which vendors offer SaaS versus on-premises solutions? Where do they have offices? Which pricing models do they offer? What kind of professional services do they offer? What are your challenges when selecting the right VoC vendor(s)? We’d love to hear from you.

About the author: Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research.

Is There Such a Thing as NPS for Social Media?

We’ve seen NPS gaining in popularity as brands are looking to better tie loyalty measures to guest behavior and growth.Without question, the attraction to NPS for many is its simplicity. Are the raves outnumbering the rants? However, there’s growing debate about the validity of the NPS as many believe it is too simple and too good to be true.

Why do we need NPS or even the ability to benchmark loyalty? Isn’t the beauty of social media that it gives me the opportunity to cull the worldwide web for my data as well as that of all my competitors? Exactly. Which leads directly to today’s challenge for brands: If social media is dominating any conversation about customer feedback and that its connection to guest loyalty is in its infancy, how does NPS fit into this evolving frontier?

NPS is described as a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a brand’s customer relationships, serving as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research. Interesting. Social media and the various monitoring tools available in the marketplace today make many claims about their ties to loyalty.

The ease of NPS is that only your 9’s and 10’s are considered Promoters. The bottom tier, 0-6, are the Detractors. Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters and voila–you have your NPS. But let’s look at the hospitality industry, for instance. What about all these existing guest surveys that spent the last decade focusing on moving from an 8.4 to an 8.6? Can we get our best-performing hotels to maintain their superior service? Move the worst to less bad? And, maybe along the way help those middle performers eek up the scale? We thought 8 was tolerable, and in some brands even commendable. However, if you’re calculating overall satisfaction or other measures counting 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s as “high” marks, your percentage is likely overinflated due to the preponderance of 8’s — or satisfied customers who are unenthusiastic about your brand and just as open to competitors. Ouch!

Same goes for social reputation score. Trends show improvements across the board as the vast majority of ratings and reviews are positively skewed. The bulk of the remaining are neutral and only a small percentage are negative. TripAdvisor was reported in 2012 to have a global average of 4.04 which means good news for operators, but how does that translate for NPS?

Using some basic numbers, which have been reported over the years, let’s assume 65 percemt of all reviews are positive, 25 percent are neutral, and 10 percent are negative. The NPS for the entire hospitality industry sits at a +55. Not bad. Now, how useful is it? In time it would be worthwhile to know if this is trending upward or downward. Is it seasonal? How are my main competitors doing comparatively? What we don’t know from this basic calculation is if those positive reviews qualify as Promoters? Probably not. And, if that is the case, how do we decide if someone is truly a Promoter? Is it only the 5’s? That is a good starting point, but it doesn’t tell the complete story.

NPS is an easily digestible measure of loyalty, especially for organizations that felt that focusing on overall satisfaction failed to deliver results. The mantra of simplicity has marketers wanting to find a way to compare apples (traditional surveys) and oranges (social media) or at least put them on level playing fields.

Will there be a unified standard? NPS has major obstacles to overcome before it could be widely recognized in many industries, let alone in social media. While the insights gained by using NPS can be useful, without a proper customer-centric system to support it the score alone is flawed and incomplete.

A perceived lack of actionable insight from more traditional approaches to customer satisfaction or NPS is one of the reasons pushing companies to investigate how they can best leverage social media intelligence to augment the this information. Marketers are just beginning to understand how social media analytics can fill in information gaps. Digging into customer sentiment to find out more about what influenced a customer decision is the current priority. Including sources such as reviews, ratings, and qualitative comments gives marketers a broader view of their business, but any single source is only that-a single measure.

In order for Social NPS to have real viability, the mechanics on how to calculate it must be applied uniformly. Marketers must also acknowledge that Social NPS is limited because of the bias in representativeness. This means that social, even at its very best, does not represent the full breadth of your customer base. Increasing the number of enthusiastically loyal customers, your Promoters, is a worthy endeavor. NPS is a metric not the means to do so.

8 Reasons To Master Customer Experience Ecosystem Mapping

A customer experience ecosystem map is a visual technique that connects end-to-end customer processes to the ecosystem of employees, partners, capabilities, processes, technology, information and interfaces involved in delivering the experiences. Without these maps, companies regularly perform “blind-man-and-the elephant” exercises in which different silos of an organization see only parts of the customer’s experience related to their own jobs. A customer experience ecosystem map breaks down this tunnel vision to help systematically improve or re-design experiences to deliver value. Customer Experience Ecosystem Maps are evolved from service blueprints, which experience designers have used since at least the mid-80s. They essentially start with a customer journey map that depicts the experience a customer has in a scenario that describes the context and the outcome the customer seeks to achieve. But it doesn’t stop there. It continues to map the value stream responsible for delivering the experience.

Why bother with this exercise? Here are eight reasons:

1) Create empathy and a shared understanding of the customer experience. Departments work from their own internal perspective and only have a partial understanding of what the customer experiences. Ecosystem maps create a shared picture of the end-to-end customer experience – and connect diverse departments that only have a partial perspective. In order to create a shared understanding of what a customer experiences, United Health mapped the key moments across a customer’s interactions with the firm. It provided packages to all managers that includes the 3’x4′ map, cards that describe key customer goals and issues, and instructions for how to use the map to inform improvement projects.

2) Improve communications and processes between front and back office. One B2B software company knew that a “change request” was a particular pain point for customers. Through the process of mapping the customer’s journey and ecosystem for this scenario with a cross-functional group, the group realized that the change agreement often took longer and required more internal resources than actually delivering the additional services to customers. One of the key problems was simply that account managers had false assumptions about what legal required for the process.

3) Focus employees and partners on strategic activities. Employees and partners need to stay focused on the things that drive the most value to customers. Firms have long used Michael Porter’s “activity system maps” to articulate the actions that create differentiation for a company in the market. Ecosystem maps can perform a similar function with a couple of distinct advantages: a) they are easier to create, which makes them more accessible to a wider variety of staff, and b) they take an outside-in approach, starting with the outcomes that target customers seek and then shaping business process to deliver maximum value.

4) Identify duplicated capabilities that create inconsistency and waste. Mapping the end-to-end journeys for particular customer scenarios point out the duplication of efforts internally that not only waste resources, but also creates horrible customer experiences. One financial services firm used this exercise to illustrate that a customer upon the death of a family member needed to submit two separate death certificates for different business units which each created their own inheritance process.

5) Identify low-cost fixes. One credit card firm that mapped the customer experience ecosystem identified simple fixes to a problem, such as training and incentivizing off-shore call centers in a similar manner as on-shore call centers. For a health insurer, understanding the dynamics of its customer experience ecosystem helped it discover that it didn’t need to expand its physician network…instead customers had a problem navigating the current network and the way the company presented it made customers feel like it was limited.

6) Make the business case for projects single departments couldn’t make. When Boeing began a project to re-vamp its online customer portal for mechanics, it had over 20 different personas reflecting internal departments, not real customer behavior. By rationalizing these personas by behavior (rather than internal departments), and then mapping the customers’ journeys, the group found enormous synergies for putting in place a common financial system.

7) Prioritize funding for projects. Journey and ecosystem maps helped Elsevier – a provider of scientific, technical and medical information and services – create a prioritization matrix that showed how ideas that emerged from the journey maps stacked up in terms of the effort to implement them and the benefit from implementing them. This helps the change management team manage the queue of projects and monitor the results of previous initiatives.

8) Reframe metrics. Performance measurement should start by focusing on customer experiences that matter most. Charles Schwab centered its initial measurement program on several critical customer journeys that correlated with the health of a client relationship, which included: onboarding, providing a mortgage, and delivering consultations to review a portfolio. For more information about mapping and applications of the customer experience ecosystem, check out Forrester’s Customer Experience Ecosystem Playbook or inquire about hosting a workshop at your company. Or join us in London next month for Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals EMEA, November 19th and 20th.’

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

Beyond the Suggestion Box: 7 Novel Ways to Collect Employee Feedback

Engaged employees are a necessity for an organization to thrive and business leaders are recognizing the importance of a highly engaged workforce and its impact on customers as well as the company’s bottom line.

In fact, according to The Temkin Group, companies with strong employee engagement efforts have above average customer experience, financial results than those with weaker efforts.

However, one study after another paints a bleak picture of the state of employee engagement, which still worries many organizations. The State of Employee Engagement Activities, 2013 report, published by the Temkin Group earlier this summer, notes that only a quarter of employees at large companies are highly engaged.

This figure is troublesome especially in the context of the recently launched State of the American Workplace report, where Gallup highlights that 18 percent of full-time workers in the U.S. are actively disengaged in their work and a further 52 percent are not involved in, enthusiastic about, or committed to their work.

Listening to employees is one of the main drivers of employee engagement. The next step is to turn this feedback into action. However, the Temkin Group’s research among more than 200 customer experience professionals found that although most firms measure employee engagement, less than half place a high priority on taking action based on employee feedback.

In fact, the recently published benchmark study about performance management by NICE also found that only 12 percent of organizations have a program in place to invite ideas from frontline workers.

The majority of organizations use an annual survey as their main-and sometimes only-way to collect employee feedback. While, as Elizabeth Mayes, executive director for corporate human capital, mergers, and acquisitions at TeleTech, notes, formal surveys are helpful because they are highly quantifiable, the best organizations are trying to find novel ways to collect feedback from their employees, including leveraging technology. Here are seven ways to supplement the annual survey with additional feedback collection strategies:

  • Conduct focus groups with employees: Organizations often carry out focus groups to get qualitative information from their customers. Mayes recommends extending this strategy to employees. Focus groups allow employees to engage in a discussion and build on each others’ ideas. Mayes notes that focus group feedback tends to be very accurate because employees feel safe in the focus group environment.
  • Make employee feedback public within the organization: “In today’s culture, openness is the key,” notes Diane Berry, Coveo’s senior vice president for marketing and communications. She recommends providing a dashboard that allows employees to see their colleagues’ feedback. This, Berry admits, might be risky if people are complaining about the same thing and the company isn’t addressing the problems, but would also allow employees to see what others are saying and encourage them to contribute their feedback.
  • Introduce gamification: According to the NICE study, gaming techniques are infrequently used and less than one-third of companies are exploring some form of digital rewards. The organization notes that while gamification is often equated to fun and entertainment, gaming mechanics also work as a powerful way to measure and motivate performance. Matt Storm, director for innovation and solutions within NICE’s corporate marketing, suggests leveraging gaming techniques to encourage employees to provide feedback. Storm notes that some organizations are implementing tools that allow employees to make recommendations about particular work practices, for example overcoming an objection from a customer while trying to make a sale. Other agents can like specific tips.
  • Encourage managers to collect feedback: The relationship between employees and their managers can be a very valuable source of information. “Conversations are very important and can lead to a lot of information,” Mayes says. She notes that companies which are really committed to employee engagement tend to organize manager forums where they share what their direct reports are telling them. TeleTech, for example, is conducting manager roundtables, where supervisors are encouraged to discuss what they’re hearing from employees, giving the company essential feedback.
  • Provide a space for ongoing feedback: Forward-thinking business leaders understand that employee feedback is crucial for their organizations and want staff members to provide employee insights to them regularly. Stacey Nevel, Confirmit’s VoC program design director, suggests creating a permanent online space where employees can go and leave their feedback. “The information is timely,” Nevel notes. In fact, this system is very similar to how organizations are constantly soliciting customer feedback. One way of doing this would be through a permanent link on the company’s Intranet. “Employees are providing feedback about something that just happened rather than waiting months until it’s no longer relevant or they’d forgotten,” she says. Further, such a system will allow organizations to identify any problems and nip them in the bud. If done properly, such a system encourages engagement since employees will recognize that someone is responding to their feedback on a constant basis.
  • Understand employees’ goals: Daniel Debow, cofounder of Work.com, notes that managers should look at their reports’ goals and leverage this insight to better understand employees’ needs. Debow explains that through their goals, employees might be giving important feedback to the organization, outlining what they would like to learn more about or specialize in. Managers should use this insight to start a conversation with their employees, allowing them to gather more feedback.
  • Invest in thorough exit interviews: An employee’s insight into the company doesn’t become less valuable when he’s leaving the company. Mayes notes that exit interviews can be a great way to collect feedback. “It’s a very valuable tool,” she says. Demographics can play a part on the effectiveness of exit interviews as information-gathering solutions. Mayes says while employees in the United States tend to be very candid, others have tried to be too conservative because they want to leave on good terms with the company.

Finally, Confirmit’s Nevel recommends steering clear of surveys that aren’t anonymous since this might skew the data if employees don’t want to be totally honest out of fear of repercussions. TeleTech’s Mayes suggests avoiding gathering feedback on individuals. “Don’t ask for feedback about colleagues or a direct boss, but gather this in one-to-one discussions,” she says.

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

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