QuestionPro Blog

Trendwatching isn’t just for designers and marketing and design professionals.  Market researchers want to know what’s hot in the world of measuring customer experience as much as everyone else!

I’ve pulled together some of the new and trending ways that customers provide information and organizations collect it.

1. Tracking Social Media Conversations.  Focus groups used to be the only way to get that special “voice and body language” of the customer without all the cost and logistics involved.  Social media applications provide a virtual “room” where the conversation is all about your company or product.  There are firms that specialize in this specialized kind of market research.
2. Real time reviews. The growth of sites like YELP have emboldened customers to tell the world about what they love and what they don’t love about their latest customer experiences.  Organizations should take the opportunity to  have their own space or presence online where customers can connect directly with employees and give their feedback.  Respond to customer feedback and build your brand.
3. Customers will want multiple levels and platforms for feedback.  In addition to your regular online surveys, be sure to provide a space where customers can offer their ideas.  IdeaScale is a great way to get customers involved in the product improvement and development process.  Customers who are involved in contributing their ideas are loyal customers and enthusiastic referrers.
4. Sharing information across company departments. There are vendors and technologies that now allow you to track customer feedback across sources such as e-mails, call centers, blogs and comments online.  Check out ResponseTek, for example.  They provide an entire suite of services that will help you route important customer feedback to the appropriate department manager BEFORE they’ve left you for a competitor.
5. Customer feedback is everyone’s job. An overarching trend is to have employees from across the organization carry social media accounts and interact with customers as they “chat” about your company, product or service.  Instead of having all the feedback run through one department, companies will find it necessary to create an infrastructure that allows the information to be collected, processed, reported and acted upon by key managers in each department.
6. Moving away from score-keeping to experience improvement. Companies are spending less time obsessing about tracking scores and the movement of the scores on surveys and caring more about the open-ended responses that customers provide.  In other words, a score of 7 out of 10 doesn’t tell you what to do to improve an experience.  But 100 requests for 24/7 online customer support via chat is feedback you can do something about.

As you can tell by the six trends I’ve outlined here, there is an overarching shift away from surveys that happen in intervals of quarters or months to on-going conversations with customers in order to quickly and effectively improve the experience.

I had such an experience recently when I chatted with Marc Gingras, founder and CEO of Tungle.com (the new meeting scheduling tool).  After discovering Tungle (via word of mouth), I was so excited about this calendar tool that I wrote about it in my blog.  About a day after the post went up, I got a personal e-mail from Marc thanking me for the post.  After another month or so, Marc scheduled a phone conference with me to chat about the tool.  He asked me what I liked, and what I wished that it would do.  Not only that, but he encouraged me to tell my friends who also used the tool to send any ideas directly to him.  Before you say that this is impractical, understand that Tungle has multiple channels of feedback collection and they have incorporated personal conversations as part of this feedback.

How to Take Advantage of These Trends

1. Create a “customer experience” champion in your organization. Companies are starting to create departments and people who basically serve as the depository of real-time customer feedback.  They receive all the feedback and notify the appropriate managers immediately.  They are given the freedom to take care of customer problems and improve the experience.
2. Start monitoring social media chatter. Encourage employees to open corporate social media accounts.  Create account names that mention your company name.  For example @NPRscottsimon is the Twitter ID for Weekend Edition host Scott Simon on National Public Radio.
3. Use IdeaScale to gather product improvement information.  Focus groups can be expensive and IdeaScale is a wonderful and cost-effective tool to engage customers in voicing their needs and wants.
4. Open up your blog articles for comments. Use the feedback you’ve already received from customers to create blog articles that educate and inform your customers about the improvement programs you have going on.  Invite them to provide their input and respond to that input.

What trends have you noticed and what do you recommend as a way to take advantage of these trends?

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer. She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers. Her blog is Strategy Stew.   You can reach her directly at Ivana@thirdforce.net.

Net Promoter has been a popular business metric for years.  We understand the number’s appeal; it is a well thought-out and reliable predictor of sales growth.  But it can fail your organization in one of the most critical ways.

Back before I was ever in the software-for-retailers business, I was simply in the retail business.  I owned and operated a chain of retail stores.

One day I had the idea that it would be great to circulate a weekly memo to everyone in my company.  I’d outline our goals for the week, celebrate victories, observe trends and champion ways to improve. My first one weighed in at 3 pages, and included two charts and a photo.  It looked like an advertisement for desktop publishing software.  I was pretty proud of it.  That is, of course, until I realized that none of my employees could recall anything I’d written.

Following weeks saw the editor’s knife, and after a few months what remained was a weekly one-paragraph memo of fewer than forty or fifty words.  In 16-point type.  Each memo focused on not more than one concept together with some employee attaboys.  People read it, absorbed it and acted on it.  My broader literary abilities would have to lay dormant, pretty much until you came along.

My lesson was that my front-line employees had their own daily routine and priorities, which are intimately connected to the substance of their daily job on the store floor.  Absorbing bigger business concepts and incorporating that information into how they performed their jobs could only happen if I didn’t overload them with too much stuff.  And the point where even very good employees tune-out is a lot lower than most managers realize.

The Problem with Net Promoter. Net Promoter, developed by consultant Frederick Reichheld, is a well thought-out and reliable predictor of sales growth.  You calculate Net Promoter by applying a formula to the result of asking your customers to grade how likely they are to refer your organization to a friend or colleague.

But there’s a problem.  Like version 1.0 of my employee memo, it is too complex to be used as a tool to coach the front lines of your organization.

To illustrate my point, try this two-part test.  First, see if you can remember the formula for calculating Net Promoter off the top of your head.  Over the years I’ve asked this question of a wide variety of people, and almost nobody can remember how to do it.  It’s so unintuitive as to escape the memory of almost everyone.

Second, try to imagine yourself and your front-line managers explaining that formula to every new hourly emplooyee hired in your company, and including that explanation in every review and staff meeting occurring throughout your organization daily.  It’s a formula for making eyes glaze over.

Let’s Remember Why We Measure. The goal of measuring customer experience isn’t just so you can know where you’re pleasing customers and where you’re not.  It’s to enable your field teams to change their behavior such that the customer experience improves and, presumably, sales go up by virtue of improved retention.  And that change requires enough simplicity that necessary actions are totally clear and can remain front-of-mind during your employees’ work day.

And the truth is that you don’t really sacrifice much by keeping it simple.  It’s not clear to us that the complexity of Net Promoter yields you anything.  When we compare store lists of our clients’ locations stack ranked by Net Promoter with, for example, a simple average grade on Recommend to a Friend those lists are remarkably similar.

Keeping it Simple. Though we generally ask the Recommend to a Friend question first, we always follow it with not more than a handful of the most actionable questions relating to the success of our client’s business.  And we always present the results to customer-facing employees in the simplest, clearest way possible.  (Usually a simple 30-day average grade.)  Employees waste no bandwidth trying to interpret what are clear, easy results.

Net Promoter might well have an application in your organization at the executive level.  But when it comes to driving up performance where your customer-facing employees are concerned, we’d encourage you to employ a much simpler measure.   Your employees will thank you.

About the Author:  Max Israel is the founder of Customerville, a Customer Satisfaction Measurement Solution for Multi-unit Operators that can help you create happier customers and drive sales.