MarketTools Blog

Guest blogger Karl Sharicz is Manager, Customer Intelligence at SimplexGrinnell, a Tyco International Company. SimplexGrinnell is a leader in fire and life-safety systems and services, with one million customers and150 local offices throughout the country – and a MarketTools CustomerSat customer.

Having managed our Customer Loyalty and Advocacy program for over 5 years, I’m often asked how to get buy-in from executive management and active engagement across the organization. The answer lies in sharing information and making the program real and actionable for employees at all levels. There are two key initiatives that have worked well for us at Simplex Grinnell:

1) Share the results regularly in a way that shows you take the program seriously.
We developed an annual customer satisfaction report initially to show our customers and prospects that we take their feedback seriously. As we sent it out to our customers, we also decided to distribute to all employees company-wide. This isn’t a couple of PowerPoint slides with dashboard reports – we take the time to produce a formal, designed and bound document that demonstrates the importance of this program. While it certainly helped customers and prospects see that we do ask, listen, and respond to their feedback – it also gained the attention of senior management all the way up to the Tyco International Board of Directors. This helped the executive management team better understand, and therefore better support, our program and paved the way for us to evolve it over time with less resistance when more resources are needed.

2) Take it on the road.
In large organizations like ours, field offices are often somewhat removed from corporate programs, and reports like the one I mentioned don’t always hit home. Everyone knows their Net Advocacy Score (a metric we’ve developed internally) but they are not always sure what it means or how to improve it. To change that, I developed and implemented a series of Customer Advocacy Workshops, designed to review detailed survey findings at the district level. During these sessions, we review the following metrics from MarketTools CustomerSat:
• Customer satisfaction ratings for each service touch-point within the transaction
• The key drivers of customer satisfaction for that district
• Demographics of the customers randomly surveyed in that district
• Verbatim customer comments

Looking at these metrics, along with detailed verbatim comments, helps field-level employees understand real issues and how they can personally make an impact. After reviewing the results, we brainstorm some solutions and the team walks away with an initiative to create a plan within 30 days with one to three things they can do differently to improve the results. It’s important to provide a very specific timeline and keep the focus to three or fewer things they can do to make a difference - anything more than that can get too overwhelming and difficult to measure.

Here are a few other best practices that help make our sessions successful:

• Make sure managers are present. It needs to be clear that this is taken seriously by all levels of the organization so that people are motivated to make the necessary changes.
• Don’t provide names of the customers that completed the surveys.  This prevents the conversation from getting into the specifics of each account and why someone may have provided a particular type of feedback. Regardless of the specific situation, trends are always clear and if someone took the time to articulate their thoughts, it’s worth taking the time to review and discuss it.

We’re a metrics-driven organization, and yet I think reports and workshops like the ones I outlined help to go beyond the metrics to make the information useful to the “feet on the street.”  It’s helped us move from being focused on base-level satisfaction to loyalty to advocacy, and we’ve seen real results that speak for themselves.