MarketTools Blog

This blog post revisits some practical tips from from Jolinda Decad, one of our MarketTools CustomerSat Research Consultants, who offered up great advice on survey design best practices for Voice of the Customer programs in a 10-minute interview that you can listen to here.

Here are some of Jolinda's key considerations to keep in mind when you develop your customer feedback surveys:

• Focus on a specific purpose: As you begin development, resist the urge to pull together a cross-functional team to start brainstorming survey questions. The best surveys focus on a specific purpose and ask only questions that are relevant and actionable. The more people involved, the more likely the purpose will be clouded and the more difficult it will be to get the information you need from the survey.
• Clarify survey objectives: What problems are you trying to solve by asking customers about their experience? Often companies are looking to understand how to meet their customers’ evolving needs within a particular touchpoint, and it’s helpful to think through the end-to-end customer experience within that touchpoint. For example, if you’re evaluating customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll want to think through the typical contact center experience and determine questions you could ask about each aspect of the experience, such as how long they are on hold, how they are greeted, how their issue was handled, if there was any follow-up, etc.
• Anticipate action: Think through how you might incorporate the survey results into decisions and actions. This will help you in two ways:
   
  First, it helps you determine the demographic variables you need for decision-making. If you want to make decisions based on customer segment, region, product lines, etc., you can ensure you include these demographic variables in the survey to more easily segment the data for analysis.
   
  Secondly, you can ensure that questions are asked in a way that drives clear action without setting false expectations. For example, if you sense that some customers want longer support hours but need a better idea of the number of customers that actually require this, you will want to ask whether the current support hours are meeting their needs without asking a question like “would you use support after-hours if it were available?” Not only is this question leading the respondent, it also sets the expectation that you’re considering extending support hours, which you may determine isn’t necessary if only a small percentage of customers feel their needs are not being met.

Check out the interview with Jolinda to learn more about how to design a great customer feedback survey from one of our EFM best practice consultants.

And as always, MarketTools offers ready access to experts in the fields of survey design, customer loyalty, and market research who can provide advice about best practices.  Let us know how we can help you!
 

Often when I’m working on global customer satisfaction surveys, I come across a common concern from business leaders outside of North America.  These leaders tell me they have seen their customer satisfaction scores compare unfavorably to scores from North America, even as they do all the right things to build up customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Year-over-year, they see their scores improve, but the North America scores go even higher.  They are concerned that management sees this gap and concludes that they are doing something wrong, and sometimes this concern even leads them to be resistant to the whole survey process.

And they’re right to be concerned.

As researchers, we know that there truly are cultural differences between survey respondents, and as much as we may caution our clients that Voice of the Customer / customer loyalty scores across regions aren’t directly comparable because of these differences, it’s human nature (and a very legitimate business question) to wonder how different regions measure up against each other.

So how can we disentangle true regional differences from artificial cultural ones?  Like most things in survey research, it all starts with solid questionnaire design!

Here are a few tips for improving cross-cultural customer satisfaction surveys: 

• 1.    Label only the endpoints of the ratings scales in your survey.  Fully labeled ratings scales present a translation challenge across multiple languages which can introduce cultural bias.  Are “Excellente” and “Bueno” the same distance apart on a scale in Spanish as “Excellent” and “Good” are in English?  The fewer points you label, the less likely you are to skew your scale due to translation issues.
   
• 2.    Use even scales.  Avoid offering a scale midpoint—some cultures are predisposed toward selecting a midpoint response if it is made available. 
• 
  3.    Avoid using “Agree” and “Disagree” as the anchors of your ratings scales.  Some cultures tend toward the “agreeable” answer more than others, which can skew cross-cultural comparisons for questions using agreement scales.
   
• 4.    Use extra care in selecting metrics.  Top- and bottom-box metrics as well as NPS focus on scores at the extreme high or low ends of the scale, neglecting scores in the middle.  This can amplify cultural differences since some cultures tend to use the middle of the scale more while others tend to respond more toward the endpoints.  

  5.    Consider including a control vignette.  Control vignettes ask the respondent to respond to a specific scenario that is presumed to be interpreted identically across cultures in order to establish a cross-cultural baseline.  

  I have seen very elaborate vignettes that pose a hypothetical scenario external to the respondent; for example:  Sally is a long-time customer of Acme, is very happy with their products, and recommends Acme to her friends.  How would you rate Sally’s overall satisfaction with Acme?  Other vignette techniques ask the respondent to name a company they personally consider “Best in Class,” and then to rate that company on the same key survey metrics they are rating the subject of the study on.

  These vignette techniques allow you to establish a theoretical maximum score on your key measures for each culture you are interested in.  You can then compare your own scores to these theoretical control scores—and the amount by which each group is underperforming the theoretical max can be compared across cultures.

Don’t let fears and misconceptions about making cross cultural comparisons stop you from getting the data you need to run your business!  These techniques will help to ensure you get the best possible cross-cultural data.

► Learn more Best Practices for Customer Survey Design

This is the fourth in a four-part series of posts about best practices for setting up an effective employee feedback program.
•    View Part 1: Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program
•    View Part 2: Employee Feedback Survey Design: Asking the Right Questions
•    View Part 3:  Analyze and Act on Survey Results

Last month we started our series on best practices for employee feedback programs – beginning a discussion just in time for the holiday season about giving employees the gift of an open, anonymous place to provide feedback and input.

Unfortunately, many internal feedback programs are not given the same priority as external feedback programs (such as customer surveys or partner surveys), often resulting in lack of interest and low employee participation – which means more difficulty in getting the data that you need.  Getting the help and support of enterprise feedback management (EFM) experts with experience in employee surveys can help you ramp up your employee feedback program quickly and make it a success.

Here are some questions to help you determine when it’s time to seek outside help to run your employee satisfaction program:

• Do you need help designing your employee survey?  
  Many companies don’t have the internal expertise to design a survey that reflects their major areas of focus and KPIs (key performance indicators).  Even if your company has a strong market research department, your internal researchers might not have the content expertise and experience to effectively conduct an employee survey.  In these instances, you should consider using an outside vendor with a track record in employee feedback programs.
• Is the information from your employee survey a critical component of your company’s Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) program?  
  As an example, a call center organization may want to track and compare customer perceptions of service together with the perceptions of your call center employees in order to identify areas for training and improvement.  In cases like these, a vendor with broader expertise in EFM programs can help you ensure that your employee survey program maps to the content and structure found in your company’s customer and partner survey portfolio.  
• Do you have the level of employee participation that you would like?
  A low level of employee participation in your survey program could be a result of faulty communications, a sense that nothing will come of it, or a poorly executed survey.  A hastily put-together survey that is not aesthetically pleasing will give the wrong message – that the company doesn’t value its employees enough to do it right.  An outside vendor can provide advice on how to effectively convey senior management commitment and help design a survey and communications plan that will generate excitement and involvement.
• Do you need a proven method for ensuring confidentiality to your employees?
  Most ad-hoc survey solutions don’t provide the mechanisms needed to either hide identifying employee information or to delete identifying information automatically from the database. A feedback management vendor can help provide a robust survey platform that can assure this level of confidentiality.  Employees will feel even more assured if the survey is managed by a third party with the responsibility of making sure that this information is not provided to management or HR.
• Do you need to segment your employee survey findings by group or manager?  
  An experienced EFM vendor can help you set up a robust enterprise feedback management system that will enable you to ask the right questions of the right groups, slice and dice the data from survey results, and ensure that the right people get access to the right data.
• Do you need assistance in analyzing and reporting the data?  
  Handling a large dataset for a fairly complex organization can become quite overwhelming.   An outside vendor with a robust range of basic to higher-level analytical tools, augmented by researchers experienced in internal survey programs, can provide the analysis and reporting needed, with the added benefit of third-party objectivity.

Remember that throughout the process – planning your employee feedback program, designing effective surveys, communicating your goals, analyzing results, and implementing follow-up steps to promote positive change – your ultimate goal is to increase employee satisfaction and loyalty. Bringing in EFM experts to help you develop and implement your survey program can be the critical step that will allow you take your employee satisfaction program to the next level.

This is the third in a series of posts about best practices for setting up an effective employee feedback program.
•    View Part 1: Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program
•    View Part 2: Employee Feedback Survey Design: Asking the Right Questions

In my last two blog posts, I outlined the steps required to set up an employee feedback program, including organizational requirements and survey design. Today we’ll get into the fun part – analyzing employee satisfaction survey results and taking action!

Analyzing Employee Survey Results:  Turn Data into Wisdom –and Avoid “Analysis Paralysis”
One of the biggest challenges with running a comprehensive employee feedback survey program is that the rich amount of data delivered can be overwhelming. You may feel compelled to pay equal attention to all data collected, and it might seem impossible to get to the essential truths. The analytic tools in an enterprise feedback management solution (like MarketTools CustomerSat) can help determine the short list of improvement areas that will have the most impact on increasing employee satisfaction.

A best practice is to begin with a Key Driver analysis, which identifies those attributes most highly correlated with overall employee satisfaction but where performance is relatively weak. The first phase is to identify the key topic areas that drive overall employee satisfaction.  The next phase is to identify the key attributes that drive satisfaction within each of these key topic areas.

Once the key areas are identified, it’s important to drill down to identify whether the identified areas of improvement are company-wide or limited to defined segments of the company (such as role, tenure, region, or organization), based on the rating criteria selected.  This will help determine which of the targeted areas for improvement are systemic and should be addressed globally, and which ones should be addressed at the local level.

Presenting Results: Do it Quickly and Make it Easy to Digest
Employee survey results should be presented in varying levels of detail to make it relevant to roles within the organization – starting with a top line analysis, then diving deeper into detailed analysis and organization-specific analysis.

Top line analysis: The top line analysis should be presented within a week of survey close, and should provide C-level management with performance on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across and within business units, by identified segments.  If your survey was conducted as an additional wave in a continuing survey, the top line analysis should also provide trending information on KPIs over time.  

Detailed analysis: The detailed analysis provides granular information to the top line analysis and includes reporting for all questions in the survey; key driver analyses to determine priority areas of focus; and a deep dive via cross-tabs to detect the level of significant difference between employee segments or by employee tenure.  The open-ended comments should be categorized into themes and used to effectively provide further insight into areas identified as strengths and weaknesses.

Organization-specific analysis: Each of the broad organizations within a company, as identified by function/senior VP for example,  should receive a key driver analysis for findings within their own area, so that they understand what drives satisfaction of their employees as well as their employees’ comments. Ideally, these reports should be created for them, along with access to their raw data for further exploration.

Getting the Right Information to the Right People: Determine Internal Feedback Requirements
It’s important to determine information needs by role in the organization. C-level executives and Human Resources will usually have access to all employee survey results.  They generally require the ability to slice and dice the data by business group and region in order to identify pockets of vulnerability versus systemic problems across the organization. 

Business group leaders and region leaders will most likely want to see a high-level analysis of the overall company results and then have the ability to do a deep dive into their own group’s data.  Depending on roles, you may decide to control access to data across business groups as well as data about regional differences.

Employees are usually provided with an even more general overview of the company survey results than what their leaders receive, but they may also have access to detailed data about their own team for action planning.

For any level of management, variables that could make it easy to identify an employee should not be included in the survey reports. If an analysis needs to be run with the identifying variable(s), then reports should be configured to preserve anonymity.

Action Planning:  Ensure Survey Results Lead to Improvements
The analysis of Key Drivers allows you to identify and prioritize areas for action, and target initiatives that will have the most impact on building employee satisfaction and loyalty.  Management should determine short-term versus more long-term initiatives, as well as identify some quick wins that produce improvements that are visible to employees as a result of the survey program.

The process for planning and implementing your employee survey  should have generated a strong level of employee engagement – and that level of interest and awareness should be maintained during action planning.  When communicating the survey results and follow up action to employees, you should indicate which initiatives will be pursued on an organization-wide basis.  Idea forums and ad-hoc surveys will allow you to elicit management and employee input for these organization-wide initiatives.

Business-specific results should also be communicated to the relevant teams and business groups, which can set up task forces to formulate “local” initiatives and establish accountability.  HR should monitor the follow-up action plans, and progress on initiatives can also be tracked via ad hoc surveys.

Reviewing the Survey Effort
After the survey effort concludes and while the experience is still fresh, the employee survey planning team should assess the survey program and identify areas for improvement. Be sure to identify what went well, what could be improved from a process point of view, and which questions or other survey content will need to be revised.  Be sure to review the open-ended comments to benefit from employee suggestions for improvements.  

Stay tuned for the final installment in this series of best practices for employee satisfaction survey programs, which will conclude with an assessment of when it's time to seek outside help to run your program.

This is the second in a series of posts about setting up an effective employee feedback program.  You can view Part 1 in the series by clicking here. 

When it comes to designing employee feedback surveys, there’s clearly a right way and wrong way to ask questions. In my last post I talked about the initial steps in setting up an effective Employee Feedback Program. This time, we’ll get into the details of how to ask the right questions to ensure effective analysis.

Addressing the Right Topics:  Determine Content Areas
An overall employee satisfaction survey should cover all relevant topic areas associated with the employee experience.  These typically include at least the following:

Job responsibilities
Resources, training, and development
Work group experience
Feelings about manager
Compensation and benefits
Rewards and Recognition
Company strategy and direction
Assessment of senior management

Focusing on What’s Most Important: Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The employee survey needs to be kept at a manageable level (a maximum of about 100 rating questions) to avoid burdening respondents with a lengthy survey-taking experience, and to focus on what is most relevant to the employee experience.  Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the core measures that will be tracked in each survey wave.  The typical KPIs for an employee survey include overall job satisfaction; likelihood to continue to work for the company; and likelihood to recommend the company to a friend or colleague.  In addition, the KPIs would also include overall satisfaction for the question topic areas identified above, including job responsibilities; resources, training, and development; compensation and benefits; etc.  Your Human Resources department may also have an additional set of KPIs based on standards for your industry.

Developing the Employee Survey Questions:  Keep  Relevance and Ease of Use in Mind
The content of the survey will be driven by the topic areas and the KPIs.  The questionnaire structure is generally organized by topic, with drill-down questions to measure important aspects of each content area followed by an overall satisfaction question specific to that topic. As an example, drill-down questions in the topic area of "Feelings about manager" might include questions about fairness, coaching, quality of the employee-manager relationship and quality of communications.  Here are a few parameters to consider when developing survey questions:

• Where surveys consist primarily of questions that ask the employee to give ratings on a set scale, consider some variation in question style to increase engagement and more insightful feedback.  Rating questions are best presented in a grid, so that the space for answering is economical, attractive, easy and fast to complete. The overall satisfaction question for that topic (the KPI) will follow the grid, along with an open-end question that provides an opportunity for the employee to provide comments.
• The majority of questions (typically 80% or more) should be exactly the same from wave to wave, using the same rating scale, since the purpose of the survey is to track performance over time. You can also take the opportunity to focus on “hot topics” that might be important at a particular point in time – such as a new process or a significant event such as a drastic change in strategy. These “hot topics” might be included in one or two waves of the survey and then replaced by a new set of current issues that are most relevant to employees at the time of the survey. 
• Combining an ongoing set of questions with “hot topics” provides a combination of stability and currency – in recognition that most elements of the employee experience remain stable over time, but also acknowledging that management will want to seek employee input into the issues, concerns, opportunities, and decision points that arise in a changing organization.
• Think about whether you need to develop specific sets of questions for particular employees, whether on the basis of job role, country, etc.  For example, a set of questions might be directed to client-facing employees that would not be relevant for employees who do not interact with customers.  Another example is showing employees of a specific country only questions about benefits that are available to them at their location, and not displaying the full set of benefits available companywide.  The intent is to show the right questions to the right employees, which can be accomplished via survey logic built into an effective survey design.

Determining the survey content should be a collaborative effort, driven by HR but with significant contributions by senior management in order to ensure buy-in and acceptance of the results.

Capturing the Voice of the Employee: The Importance of Open-ended Questions
It's crucial to provide employees with the opportunity to provide further input through open-ended questions asking for comments in their own words. From the employee’s point of view, it shows management’s interest in and receptiveness to whatever the employee has to say, and it’s an opportunity to provide details in their own way.  From management’s point of view, open-ended comments provide a vivid voice of the employee to help explain what’s behind the numbers. These employee comments might also provide insight into other issues and concerns that may not be included in the survey but are nevertheless important to employees – indicating topic areas that should be added to subsequent waves of the survey.

Including Key Variables to Help with Analysis
The employee survey should include specific variables that allow you to segregate employees into groups for analysis, such as their department or organization, role, region, location, etc.  It is crucial to avoid including variables that can identify the specific employee, such as employee ID number, birth date, start date, etc.  If a variable such as tenure is important, an alternative to uploading specific start date (which could identify an employee) is to set up tenure bands, such as less than one year; one year; two to three years; etc.  It is also important to ensure that combinations of particular variables cannot identify a specific employee, such as role combined with location.

Evaluate each variable to determine why it may be important for analysis. For example, the variable “age” might be important for analyzing employee satisfaction with various benefits, such as 401K benefits, since the assumption is that it becomes increasingly important to older employees. Again, it's important to set up an age band rather than specific ages, since that could identify an employee.

Knowing How to Measure: Rating Scale
Almost all the questions in the survey will be rating questions, where the respondent indicates their response to a question with a number from a set rating scale.  MarketTools CustomerSat recommends a 10-point rating scale ("rate your response on a scale of 1 to 10") for the following reasons:

• 10-point scales are becoming an industry-standard, which increases the likelihood of being able to benchmark KPI results with those of other companies.
• 10-point scales are very intuitive and understandable to employees worldwide – we live in a 10-point world.
• 10-point scales allow for granularity to track performance over time.

Stay tuned for upcoming installments, where we will continue our overview of best practices for Employee Feedback Programs with:
     • Analysis of Employee Feedback Results
     • Reporting and Action Planning.

Not sure what to give your employees this year? Here’s a gift that keeps on giving: providing a confidential forum for employee feedback. I know, it’s not exactly the jelly of the month club, but its effects will last longer and certainly leave a better taste in their mouth.

Giving employees the opportunity to provide feedback through confidential surveys increases employee engagement and can make an immediate impact on morale – even before results are analyzed and action plans are put in place. Just letting them know you care enough to listen goes a long way in showing your appreciation. And as fans of the service-profit chain will note, employee loyalty is a key element in fostering customer loyalty .

The process for designing an effective employee feedback program is similar to that of your customer feedback program, but with some key differences in focus. Over the next few weeks we’ll provide best practices for conducting a successful employee feedback program, covering the following topics:
• Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program
• Employee Feedback Survey Design
• Analysis of Employee Feedback Results and Reporting
• Action Planning

Part 1: Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program

Gaining Commitment and Understanding Scope and Objectives
Employee satisfaction surveys are almost always driven out of the company’s Human Resources department, but it’s crucial for HR to gain the commitment from the entire management team to support the program. Before beginning an employee survey program, the team must first ensure there is agreement on the following:

-  Scope and objectives of the employee survey
-  What will be measured in the survey
-  Commitment to support and/or lead the follow-up phase
-  Commitment to acting on the results (most important!)

Timing it Right
The timing of your employee survey is crucial. Be sure to allocate enough time to run the survey, analyze the results, formulate recommendations, and generate at least a top-line report with action plans prior to any strategic planning or planned employee events. The survey should also be timed for a period that is not consumed by other HR events, such as performance evaluations or during intensive times such as end of quarter, end of year, etc. To keep momentum high, the deployment period should be limited to two weeks and the survey deadline be communicated to employees. The period can always be extended if the targeted response rate has not been reached.

Communication, Communication, Communication
Conducting an employee satisfaction survey is a significant event within an organization, with an excellent opportunity to generate excitement regarding management’s openness to employee feedback and camaraderie within work groups. Communication is crucial to fostering excitement and encouraging all employees to participate in the survey and follow-up action planning.

Some communication tips:

• Consider incentives or contests between workgroups with prizes for those with the highest response rate.
• Pre-survey communications should set the stage, build momentum, set expectations, and provide specific information about the survey process (when and how the survey will be conducted, what to look for, etc.).
• Pre-survey communications should initially come from the CEO, with follow-up by HR.
• Be sure to set expectations on how survey data will be used – for example, it’s important to get a sense of employee perceptions around pay level and how it impacts their job satisfaction, even if pay increases may not be implemented during difficult economic times.
• Create momentum with continual progress reports and due date reminders. The communications should be consistent in its timing (e.g., every other day) and upbeat to create excitement.

The response rate for an employee satisfaction survey should be at least 80%. Anything less signifies a lack of employee engagement and may reflect an employee attitude that nothing will change as a result of the survey program. It may also reflect a concern for confidentiality, which we address below.

Making it Safe to be Honest: Ensure Confidentiality
Ensuring confidentiality is crucial for obtaining frank and honest feedback from employees. It is important to minimize information that has the potential to identify an employee and to eliminate identifying information after the employee submits the survey, including name and email address. These measures should be communicated to employees and they should be cautioned to not self-identify themselves through their open-ended comments.

In addition, managers need to be assured that the results for their organization will not be shared with other teams. In the MarketTools CustomerSat platform, this is accomplished via security roles that designate that each manager only has access to the results of their own organization’s reports. All communications should include a specific reference to how management confidentiality will be ensured.

This is only the beginning! In our next post, we’ll cover question design for employee satisfaction surveys, then follow with the best ways to analyze the survey results.

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.

Last week I was fortunate to attend the 5th Annual Customer Experience Management and Retention Conference in San Francisco, where MarketTools was a platinum sponsor. It was an excellent opportunity to hear about what matters most in the customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty space, directly from executives from Fortune 500 companies.  With attendees from around the globe representing nearly every major industry, we covered topics ranging from social media’s impact on customer feedback to the relevance of NPS.

What conference attendees didn’t see: there really is a Golden Gate Bridge behind all that fog.

What surprised me most was that despite the diversity of topics and situations, nearly every presentation touched on a basic premise outlined in the often-quoted service-profit chain: employee satisfaction is CRITICAL to customer satisfaction. I’ve heard this mentioned in many presentations and often glossed over, almost as an afterthought. Not at this event. Clearly companies have gotten the message loud and clear, and the leaders are addressing this challenge head-on with programs designed to be implemented from the ground up to improve employee satisfaction- and more importantly, employee engagement- across the enterprise.

Here are some of the ways these leading organizations are working to engage employees for improved customer satisfaction:

Role Playing/Empathy:  One of the speakers spoke about the challenge of training technical field service technicians on empathy. These people were trained to fix machines, not support humans. As their job increasingly involves direct customer support, they need to improve their listening skills to provide the proper level of care. She uses role-playing exercises in the field that require on-your-feet thinking, deep listening and focused engagement, which help the technicians build skills they can take into the field and use to provide better customer service.

Language: One of the executives I spoke with pays special attention to the words employees use and carefully guides their internal conversations to instill the right level of empathy for customers. For example, contact center employees at his company had originally been trained to “deal with tickets” rather than “deal with customers.” He’s asked them to replace the word “ticket” with “customer” from now on, and to catch themselves when they complain about “dealing with tickets.” He makes a point of reminding them that it’s a wonderful thing to have customers to deal with, and it’s a lot more fun to have the purpose of your job “supporting customers” as opposed to “closing tickets.”

Small and Frequent Rewards: Several of the presentations spoke to the idea of motivating and rewarding employees in small ways on a regular basis, instead of in large ways once a year. For example, rather than spending large sums of money on an annual holiday party, one executive hosted monthly, inexpensive barbecues at every regional office to give people an opportunity to relax together and celebrate their successes. Another spoke of the idea of creating a sense of community in offshore call centers through office poster-design contests. Others spoke of simply acknowledging top performance in an all-company email on a weekly or monthly basis-- something that costs nothing but provides acknowledgment and motivation.

Keep in mind this perspective did not come from HR department representatives, but from people responsible for Operations, Customer Support, Marketing and Sales. So it appears that the side benefit of working for a company committed to customer satisfaction is that you get to work for a company committed to your satisfaction. I’d love to hear some comments on how you’ve seen this work (or fail) in organizations you’ve worked for.  It should make for an interesting discussion!

 Many companies invest significant resources designing and deploying a Voice of the Customer program.  With these kinds of investments in time, people and money, you would think that the entire company, from the CEO to the person who sweeps the floors would be aware of the goals and objectives of their program.  The sad truth is that in many cases, the people who have the greatest impact on satisfaction and customer loyalty  – the people on the front lines – are not even aware there is a customer feedback program in place, let alone understand the roles they play in the success of the program.

This is why internal communication of your Voice of the Customer Program is just as important as the communications you send externally to your customers.  To help maximize your investment and reap the greatest benefits from your program, we recommend a few simple best practices:

1)    Announce your Voice of the Customer program formally to the entire company through a communication (email or letter) from the President or CEO. This shows the program is supported at the highest levels in your organization. In the letter, be sure to outline the goals and objectives of the program, as well as the roles individuals can play in the success of the program. 

2)    Management should also share results on a periodic basis and provide the team with improvement suggestions and coaching where needed. This should be done on a macro level (sharing high-level results across the company) as well as a micro level (sharing relevant specific results with people that touch customers individually).

As with any relationship, at home or at work, communication is essential for success.  Sharing tangible, relevant and specific results help bring your Voice of the Customer program to life and motivate everyone to participate in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
 

As Voice of the Customer / customer loyalty researchers, we recognize that at the root of every loyal or disloyal customer is a history of interactions—calls with sales, tech support, maybe an installer or a billing specialist.  We know that each one of these customer interactions has the power to impact customer loyalty.

The survey process is an interaction as well.  It is a chance for the customer to tell you how well you are performing.  Like any other interaction, it can be handled well or handled poorly.

Our best advice to researchers designing their feedback program is to channel the principal tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, “Do No Harm”.  This should be the primary consideration in the decision making process at every step of designing/implementing a satisfaction measurement program.

Obviously the first step is to work with the right partner so you know you’ve designed an excellent survey (just the right length, focused questions, only the required open-ended questions, etc.).  This is critical.  But don’t spend weeks refining and vetting the survey instrument, just to leave other key parts of the interaction to the last minute (or even until after the survey is live!).  Here are some other areas that should be given equal consideration when designing a feedback program.

Pre-Survey:
A personalized email is generally preferred to a generic greeting.  However, personalization requires a reliable database.  I would rather receive an email with “Dear Valued Customer” than any of the following:

Dear MIKE MILBURN  (why are you yelling at me?)
Dear mike milburn  (only acceptable if gauging opinion on the poetry of ee cummings)
Dear milburn mike  (do I even need to explain?)
Dear tbd unknown  (am I a client of yours or not?)
Dear Mrs. Milburn  (would be ok if it was for my wife, this one wasn’t)
(By the way, avoid Mr., Ms., or Mrs. unless you are absolutely sure, and even then, don’t)

Is your database ready for the survey process?  Even if it is accurate 99.5% of the time, 10,000 emails could yield 50 upset/turned off invitees.

Follow up on specific requests:
Often companies will include a survey question asking respondents if they want someone from the company to contact them.  If a respondent says yes, then contact them — you have now set an expectation that you need to follow through with.  It sounds simple, but many companies turn this kind of opportunity to interact with an individual respondent into a reason for the respondents to feel as if the company doesn’t value them when they neglect to follow up.  Loyalty is an emotion; hurt feelings will quickly damage the relationship.

Also, companies may ask if the respondent needs certain materials, documentation, etc.  Again, if someone says they  need it, provide it.  I have seen programs where, 6 months in, the client has removed this type of question because they realized no one in their company had been following up on it since the program began.  That is 6 months of setting expectations and not fulfilling any of them.

Do you have the infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of contact or information requests?  If not, you are better off not asking these questions until you do.

Survey follow-up (in general):
The ability to follow up in real time with respondents who give low scores to your survey can be very powerful.  Imagine this from the respondent’s point of view:  Let's say I had a bad experience, I expressed it in your survey and that same day I get a phone call from your company.

“Hello, is this Mike Milburn?  Thank you for providing feedback recently on your service experience.  I understand things were not handled up to our usual standards.  I’d like to take a minute to discuss…”

Think about it.  I am no longer a nameless person throwing my feedback into a void.  Someone saw my responses and acted on it.  I’m now part of the solution.

Much better than this call:  “Is this Mike?  Yeah, Mike, why did you give us a 2 on courtesy and professionalism?”  (Hmm, I wonder.)

Companies spend millions of dollars putting the right messaging campaigns together.  Yet, when following up with respondents in critical one-on-one interactions, these events are often left to the whims of the individual reaching out to the client.

Do you have a scripted, structured follow-up mechanism in place?  If not, how do you know these interactions are being handled in a consistent, professional manner?

A feedback program is another opportunity to interact with your clients.  How you interact with them is up to you.  At every step of the process, let “Do No Harm” guide your decisions.