MarketTools Blog

Kerry Bodine of Forrester recently wrote a preview of their 2011 Customer Experience Predictions report, and one particular area caught my eye:

“More parts of the organization will seek to get into the customer experience game. As customer experience takes a more central role in overall corporate strategy, more departments will take an interest and pursue active involvement. In particular, product management and marketing will both look to start building out experience platforms around core product and service offerings in order to engage customers more deeply across multiple channels. The IT group will support all of these efforts per usual, but operations and HR will also get thrown into the mix as customer experience efforts expand into the redesign of internal business processes and customer-centric hiring, training, and compensation practices.”

We couldn’t agree more. As enterprise feedback management programs for customer experience and voice of the customer evolve, they almost always expand across the organization into other departments and regions.

We’re seeing customers start with a few transactional surveys within a specific area like customer support or field services and then quickly move into areas like product development, marketing and HR. True EFM involves capturing feedback from multiple audiences across multiple touchpoints using multiple channels.

True EFM: across lifecycle events, touchpoints and audiences

But you already knew that. So what’s different for 2011? 

Sharing feedback across the enterprise. If you think this sounds obvious, you likely haven’t run a traditional EFM program. First of all, data is often hard to get at. If you use a sophisticated solution like MarketTools CustomerSat, you can get reports that make it easy to analyze and slice-and-dice data.
Now what do you do with that data? Leave it in a report for management to review quarterly? Visit it yearly to note whether satisfaction is trending up or down? Sadly, this is pretty common among early-stage EFM programs, making it difficult to see results that create an impact.

To truly drive increases in customer satisfaction and loyalty, all employees should be accountable for the customer experience. And to drive accountability, it’s crucial to provide actionable feedback data to everyone who directly or indirectly touches customers – from your executives to your front-line staff.

This means giving employees access to metrics they can personally affect, such as providing call center employees with up-to-the-minute results of transactional surveys focused on key objectives like courtesy and technical knowledge. Giving supervisors access to metrics for all of their regions so they can easily compare and pinpoint where a specific improvement is needed. And giving executives access to overall satisfaction metrics over time so they can understand if business process improvements are working and helping to prioritize investments. By empowering employees at all levels to understand their specific impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, you’ve not only got a rallying cry that can drive increases in profitability, you’ve got a company that can truly call itself customer-centric.

In my next post I’ll talk about how CustomerSat is innovating the way we share data throughout the enterprise with new tools like role-based dashboards.

In the meantime, join our upcoming webinar next week ("Listening is No Longer Enough") to hear more examples of how leading companies are taking Enterprise Feedback Management from a small few to an enterprise-wide initiative.  I hope to see you there!