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The #1 Mistake We See in Customer Feedback

February 22, 2010 · 1 Comment

All kinds of work go into getting your customers to share feedback with you. Ironically, the place we see most companies trip up is at the finish line – when it’s time to share those results with employees.

Over the years we’ve worked with a wide variety of companies to help create feedback loops between customers and employees. It turns out that there’s one thing that vexes companies more than any other in making a solid feedback loop really “stick”: the practice of sharing the results regularly with employees.

Why should it be in the plan to share feedback? Sharing customer feedback with customer-facing employees is vitally important because it allows them to make the changes your business needs to improve, or even maintain its service standards. And it works. Simply showing the grades to your employees and allowing them to see objectively how they’re doing through the eyes of real customers naturally changes employee behavior for the better.

Here’s an interesting test we’ve done many times. When we do an implementation for a company and they start by collecting grades but not showing the employees, they establish a baseline. On the week when that company starts showing their employees the grades, they get a nice “bump” in grade quality. No tricky fancy stuff, just show the grades to the employees. Employees make conscious and subconscious changes.

How do we know if we’re doing it right? Simple. You should be able to walk into any one of your locations and ask the employees how they’re doing. If they know how they’re being graded – even generally – then you have connected the feedback loop.

If your employees don’t know how they’re doing, then that’s a problem. We’ve even seen cases where companies that use our software have executive management and front-line management teams who areextremely attuned to how their customer grades are trending, and yet many of their customer-facing employees don’t even know the program exists. Ouch!

We’d even go beyond showing your employees the grades. Really engaging employees in the feedback loop requires that you share positive customer feedback regularly as a means of recognizing great employee performance. Your teams are a lot more likely to stay tuned-in to feedback when they’re getting positive feedback. (We generally find over 90% of customer feedback is positive! For more on this see our post on customer complaints called Complaint Line Effect.)

What happens when we stop sharing? A couple of things. First, the feedback loop stops functioning as employees stop receiving objective information about how they’re doing and how that compares to their peer locations. That’s a huge potential gain in store performance for practically zero additional dollars left sitting on the table.

Second, initiative becomes a burden and a stress on front-line managers because it doesn’t capture the interest and momentum of employees. And that’s a problem. If employees aren’t interested and engaged in the idea of listening to objective customer feedback, then the measurement falls by the wayside when other priorities come up.

Making it work. The companies who make the most of customer feedback systematize the process of getting information to the front line so that regional and district managers aren’t responsible for that work. In our own experience, we frequently push easy, visual reports each week to each location by email. Many of our clients actually push customer feedback results to the POS system! The point is that it needs to be easy so that managers can use the information without having to be responsible forprocessing and routing it.

You’re already doing the work of getting feedback from your customers. Don’t fall down at the finish line!

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.

Categories: Newsletter

Optimized Copywriting: Attract Prospects to Your Site through the Words You Use

February 17, 2010 · 3 Comments

As part of 2009’s Search Marketing Secrets series, you discovered that using effective keyphrase research is one of the top three ways to create breakthrough results for your company.

Keyphrase research allows you to find out what language your prospects are using to find the products and/or services that you offer. By incorporating the results of your keyphrase research into your page copy, you are guiding prospects towards your site – where they can order your products and choose your services.

When you write optimized website copy – that is, copy containing the keyphrases your prospects use – write for two different audiences:

1) First, write for the people who visit your website. They are the ones who buy your products and services. So, your text must be clear and compelling to them.

2) With optimized copy, you’re also writing for the search engine spiders. Once the spiders understand what your web pages are about, they can return those pages in response to prospects’ queries. So it’s important to provide enough cues (keyphrases!) to the search engine spiders so that they “understand” what your pages are about – and always remember that your main audience is the people who visit your site.

Here’s how optimized copy helps your company.

Think of using keyphrases as placing breadcrumbs down so that your prospects can use them to find your site.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that you’re a professional organizer and you’ve found, through keyphrase research, exactly how prospects search for your services. There are a steady number of searches on “professional organizer” and “certified professional organizer.” You’re proud of your certifications and that’s a key differentiator for your business – and so you select these keyphrases as part of your core strategy.

When you put those phrases in strategic places in your text, you’ve increased the chances that the search engine spiders will present web pages from your site when people search on the keyphrases that you’ve placed in your optimized copy.

Search engine spiders have actually become more sophisticated and are capable of doing more than making exact matches between the text typed into a search engine box and the text found on your website –we’ll cover that in a future post.

Optimized content on your site can appear in many formats, including:

1) Web pages where you’re selling your products and/or services

2) Informational articles that educate site visitors

3) Blog posts

4) Press releases/news updates

5) Archived e-newsletters

Next month, we’ll share part 2 of our successful copywriting series – giving you more information to help attract targeted traffic (sales leads!) to your website.

This month’s opportunities:

Knowledge is power – this month, you’ll be filling any gaps in your understanding of SEO copywriting.

Read through the Search Marketing Terms Glossary
A few quick reads about blogging:
1. Discover how to create an editorial calendar for your site’s blog.
2. See how corporate blogs really do influence buying decisions.
Read about how to create effective landing page copy on your site.
Discover what questions your prospects are asking – and then answer them on your site.
Bonus: read back issues of the newsletter here: http://www.thesearchguru.com/email-archive.asp to learn more.
Burning question or comment? Email me at Results@TheSearchGuru.com.

About the Author: Leslie Carruthers is President of The Search Guru, a best practices full services Search Marketing firm creating breakthrough results for their clients since 2004. Leslie can be reached at 440-306-2418 orResults@TheSearchGuru.com.

Categories: Best Practice · Newsletter · marketing strategy

Customer Research Trends for 2010

February 3, 2010 · 1 Comment

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

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.
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.
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.
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.

Categories: Newsletter · customer research

Why We’re Not Fans of Net Promoter

January 25, 2010 · 3 Comments

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.

Categories: Newsletter · customer research

Customer Feedback Programs to Implement in 2010

January 11, 2010 · 2 Comments

Are you STILL doing surveys the old fashioned way? While most traditional methods have their benefits, there are many other new and improved ways to collect customer feedback that will enhance your relationships with customers AND your profitability.

In this article, I’m going to outline some of the wonderful methods I’ve used with clients over the last year and where I can, I will also share some of the programs that we implemented as a result and what those results were.

Reassess Your Strengths and Brand Promise

Companies are a lot like people and go through life stages. Not only that, but economic environments and technologies change and this causes your organization to change in ways you may not have noticed. It’s a good idea to have a branding and positioning expert come in (someone from the outside who doesn’t really know your company) and interview your employees, management and associates over a few days. Their objective should be to get a general feeling for the personality of your company.

Customers have personalities and literally take on the human idiosyncrasies like detail orientation, sociability, extroversion, introversion, and so on. That stands to reason since companies are made up of people and are led by people with preferences for certain ways of doing business. These personality traits attract a certain type of customer who sees value in that. But what often happens, is that we are all too close to things and lose sight of what that special sauce is that our company has that attracts out ideal customers. This is why an internal brand assessment is such a good idea.

I recently conducted an internal brand assessment with a new client. While they were clearly aware of their natural tendency to please the customer and do whatever it takes to make them happy. They weren’t quite sure how to differentiate themselves in that area. We are currently in the process of documenting all the things they do “naturally” and are testing these “services” against what’s important to the customers and what value that has.

You can do the same thing. Simply create a list of attributes and use the “Importance/Satisfaction” question type to test which of these attributes has the most value to your customers. This will show you exactly which attributes to feature and focus on and how to price appropriately. You can take this one step further and ask your customers what other providers they use and have them rate their satisfaction with that provider across those same attributes. This will uncover those two or three attributes where your organization is strongest. Sell to that competitive strength and you will know why they should choose you.

Use Social Media Like a Focus Group

Focus groups can get expensive. But you actually have a focus group of customers chatting about all kinds of things — even your product online.

Use www.search.twitter.com to search on key words to your business and start following the people who are chatting about your industry or your company. Search on your company name or products and services that you offer and see what real-time words your customers and users are using.

Use IdeaScale as a way to gather new product and service opportunities that come straight from your customers’ experiences. There is a wonderful widget that you can cut and paste onto your own web site and then watch the user ideas come pouring in. I’ve used IdeaScale as a way to build involvement and even generate PR by keeping customers informed of new features and products that have been developed from their ideas.

If you haven’t started a Facebook Fan Page for your company – do it NOW. Connect that facebook fan page to your web site and be sure to ask your customers to join your fan page. Make sure that you post links from your web site and your blog to the fan page to inform customers about new things going on in your company. Another wonderful way to use this tool is to generate excitement. Just look at what IKEA did to get customers involved and the word out.

Get Started TODAY

Don’t let another day go by without getting your customers involved in your business and getting feedback that’s honest, true and FREE.

Categories: Best Practice · Branding · Newsletter · customer research

Search Engine Marketing Secret #3 Revealed: Links are Like Recommendations

January 4, 2010 · 2 Comments

This is the last of our “Search Engine Marketing Secrets Revealed” series with The Search Guru, Leslie Caruthers. In the first post, we learned how important it was to focus on search engine marketing because it’s one of the most powerful ways that your customers will find you. Our second secret was to use natural phrases that your customer might use and search for. Leslie has included great resources, exercises and links to help you get the most out of the series; I hope that you’ve been bookmarking them!

3. Links are like recommendations; they tell Google you are important.

Inbound links are links from other websites to your website. Solicit and earn valuable inbound links, as this is an indication to Google that your site is popular, relevant and valued by others, as well as helping the search engines understand better where your site fits into the web and what you offer.

Back Links (Incoming or Inbound Links): hyperlinks placed on other web sites that lead to a page on your web site; quality, relevant inbound links help boost site rankings in the search engine results pages and are an integral part of SEO strategies.
Link Popularity: measure of both the number and the quality of inbound links. Most search engines take this factor into consideration when ranking web sites on search engine results pages.

Carefully crafted link building campaigns:

contribute to Google PageRank
position your site as a hub or authority on the Internet
drive targeted traffic to your website
help your website achieve high rankings for competitive keyphrases and therefore
increase your viability in the search engine results pages to
boost your conversion flow and sales.

And don’t forget… While it is critical to rank well with the search engines, you must never forget it is the human customer that matters – search engines don’t buy your products, services or click on your advertisements; people do.

Next month, we’ll share insider copywriting strategies to get started including those great keyphrases you’ve uncovered!

This month’s opportunities:

Didn’t take on last month’s opportunities? Go back and start there – that’s your best bet – then move up to this list after that.

Bonus: read past blog posts: http://www.thesearchguru.com/blog/ and back issues of the newsletter here: http://www.thesearchguru.com/email-archive.asp to learn more.
Register for Google Analytics if you haven’t yet: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Register for Google Webmaster Tools http://www.thesearchguru.com/google-webmaster-tools.asp if you haven’t yet.
Read through the Search Marketing Terms Glossary and catch up on basic terminology.
Burning question or comment? Email me at Results@TheSearchGuru.com.

Leslie Carruthers is President of The Search Guru, a best practices full services Search Marketing firm creating breakthrough results for their clients since 2004. Leslie can be reached at 440-306-2418 or Results@TheSearchGuru.com.

Categories: Newsletter · marketing strategy
Tagged: Google, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, Search Guru, Web search engine, Website

6 Simple Ways to Give Your Brand a Powerful Online Presence

December 25, 2009 · 1 Comment

Half of all new product revenues come from the introduction and early stages of a product’s life cycle. But what about brands? Can you create a whole new life cycle by re-launching your brand online?

Sure you can. In fact brand managers have been working overtime on finding the best ways to keep their brands at your fingertips . Here are some of the best online brand building tools and how you can use them to build a powerful brand presence online.

Blogging: Blogging isn’t just for individuals. It’s a wonderful way to personalize and humanize a brand that’s being perceived as too big or too corporate. The Wal-Mart brand has really taken a beating in that area over the years. So when I ran into their blog a couple of years ago, I was pleasantly surprised at how fun it was to read and how truly informative the articles were. As it turns out, the writers are all real-life buyers and their writing and bios show a real enthusiasm for their topic. I actually left a comment with a question about a toy and almost fell off my chair when I got an e-mail from the writer with a direct link to where I could get this hard-to-find-toy!
Microblogging (Twitter): Now that Oprah has a Twitter account, we can be sure that Twitter has truly arrived as a “brand enhancement tool.” Today’s consumers want a relationship with their brands. They want to know that there are real people behind the products and services that they buy. Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, Barry Judge has his own blog and Twitters as “@BestBuyCMO” just looking at his Twitter stream makes me feel a little closer to the Best Buy brand.
Online Videos (You Tube): If you want to get your brand ranked highly on Google, then put up a video. If your brand has “before and after” demonstration value, then you can’t afford NOT to use YouTube or post videos on your site. You can’t mention using videos online without mentioning BlendTec’s Will it Blend Videos. These videos are so popular and so viral because they do a fantastic job of BOTH being fun AND demonstrating the strength and features of the actual product. Other ways to use video are to actually teach your customers how to use your product or service
Social Networks (Facebook Fan Page or Group): Starting a group or a fan page on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn is a wonderful way to get your customers to interact with each other about your brand and the ways in which your brand plays out in their lives. Johnson and Johnson’s McNeil Pediatrics sponsors a group on Facebook called ADHD Moms. They provide a space for moms to share info and links to information for moms to share and reference. You might think that creating a group on a third party site would dilute your brand, but that’s not true. Creating groups and communities outside your web space actually grows your brand’s fan base.
Widgets : If having your logo plastered on clothes, shoes and hats is cool, then having your widget appear on web sites and blogs is even cooler. Wal-Mart has developed a series of recipe widgets. These not only keep the brand name on your site – but also whet your appetite for goodies you can pick out at your local store. Inexpensive, Viral, Practical, Communicates your value. Excellent use of widgets to build brand.
Crowdsourcing A great way to move your brand into the future is to use some of the crowdsourcing tools that are available such as UserVoice, Idea Scale or Suggestion Box. Crowdsourcing lets your customers suggest what improvements or changes you will make next. Starbucks was one of the first big global brands to launch crowdsourcing to its customer base through its My Starbucks Idea web site. While it might seem frightening to put the fate of your brand in the hands of your customers, it’s not only an inexpensive way to collect ideas, but it gets your customers involved in the process as they vote ideas up or down. It also serves as a marketing communications opportunity as Starbucks comments on the status of ideas as they are implemented. Customers get to put their two cents in. You get to save thousands and thousands of dollars in market research. As their ideas are implemented, customers become loyal to your brand and refer it to their friends. Does it get any better than that?

Taking your brand online isn’t a choice any more. It’s a necessity. The ways that you can bring your brand to life online are only limited by your creativity. In fact, the technology that’s required to implement any of the tools I talked about here are mostly free or relatively low cost. So there is no excuse to hold back.

Categories: Branding · Newsletter

Case Study: How Small Business Trends Used QuestionPro to Help Choose Best Business Books of 2009

December 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When Anita Campbell, editor of the award-winning online publication Small Business Trends, decided to expand her “Best Business Book Awards,” QuestionPro was the obvious answer.

The 2009 first Best Business Books were really chosen by the editors (Anita and I) with some input from out community. In 2009, Anita wanted more reader and expert input into our business book choices. Besides, it was so hard to pick the top books that we wanted more opinions to help us choose.

We decided to use QuestionPro as a way to allow our readers to vote. I’m going to share some of our insights into this process, what we learned and what kind of feedback we got from the community.

The Picture Layout Challenge

We quickly decided that our survey would be primarily one multiple choice question – where readers could pick up to 5 choices for their favorite books. Then, I had the bright idea of actually using pictures of the books in the question accompanied by the author’s name as text AND a link to either our book review or to amazon.com where they could read about the book.

It wasn’t hard to do, but it was rather tedious:

Find the pictures you want to use and make sure that they are exactly the same pixel size.
Determine how many lines of text you’d like to use – and stick to it. We decided that we could only have 2 lines of text.
Upload the pictures using the multimedia button at the top of the edit survey page.
Add a multiple choice question where you can choose more than one answer.
Now this is where you will need some very basic HTML skills. I know EXTREMELY little HTML and I was able to do this.

Now the challenge that took at least a couple of hours was figuring out how to make the books line up nice and straight. The way to do this is to click on “edit question” and then head over to “settings.” This is where I found these terrific options of laying out the choices in columns:

One thing to keep in mind is that your “answers choices” – in my case, the pictures, are going to be formated and look something like this:

1 4

2 5

3 6

And NOT

1 2 3

4 5 6

This may not seem like a big deal – until you decide that you want to insert more pictures or if some of your text can’t be edited down to 2 lines. All of these things happened to us and caused for about an hour of tweaking.

Success

Ultimately, the project was a wild success! Small Business Trends was able to include over 2900 reader votes into its Best Business Books choices. We also created another survey where experts were able to contribute their votes to the editor’s picks. Once the first survey was done, we simply copied it and made some tweaks to customize it.

This has to be THE MOST creative way I’ve used QuestionPro so far. The staff was amazing in helping me work out the kinks and tweak the settings in order to get fantastic results.

As the book editor for Small Business Trends, I want to thank QuestionPro for their support through this project.

Categories: Best Practice · Newsletter · QuestionPro · customer research

How to Change From One Rating Scale to Another

December 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

If your organization is committed to staying on top of the latest trends in tracking performance, then you’re most likely going to come across an unexpected decision; which rating scale to use.

This isn’t usually a problem when you’re starting a tracking process — but what about those of us who have chosen a scale and for a variety of reasons are considering changing it! What then?

What Options Do You Have?

Start Fresh. You can always draw a line in the sand and start fresh. Be sure to communicate to your management teams and everyone involved in the process that you will be starting fresh. One thing you can expect is your scores or ratings to either go up or down drastically, so you will have to prepare everyone involved in the process that you are setting a NEW BENCHMARK and that your ratings haven’t shifted up or down – they are what they are with this new result.
Run Parallel. If your organization cannot afford to start fresh, you might consider running parallel surveys and gathering two sets of data as you make the transition from the old rating scale to the new rating scale. After you’ve gathered enough data, you can compare the two scales and see what impact this has on your metrics.
Interpolate. Yet another option is to run a test survey with your customers asking them to answer the same question using two different rating scales. This will give you the ability (over time) to predict where the old rating would fall in the new scale.

Why Switch At All?

There are advantages and disadvantages no matter which scale you choose. Not only that, but there are academic camps at each end of the spectrum and in between. In other words, you have to choose the scale that matches your objectives.

Say that you started doing the Net Promoter Score in your organization using the “Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair and Poor” rating. And now, you want to go more traditional and use a 10 point scale. What’s more important to your organization? Is it having the trend data or is it “matching up” to what Reicheld recommended in his book; The Ultimate Question? If it’s more important to you to match up and benchmark your organization, then the pain involved in transitioning might be worth it. If your organization is large and your customers might be confused, then the transition might do you more harm than good.

Don’t Switch Without Doing The Following:

Communicate. This can never be emphasized enough. Be sure to communicate inside your organization early and often. Make sure that everyone in the organization understands that there will be changes in the ratings and fluctuations — simply because you are changing scales. This is normal and to be expected.
Pick a time that is uneventful. Switching your rating scales after you’ve installed a new computer system isn’t a good idea. You want to pick a span in time when it’s about as stable and uneventful as is standard in your organization. You will already see shifts in scores and ratings – you don’t want to mix in REAL shifts due to an actual change in practices.
Be Patient. Measuring customer satisfaction or organizational performance are emotional issues — especially if you have people whose compensation is based on the results of these surveys. Please be patient with the transition and focus on performance and service instead of the survey.

Switching from one scale to another isn’t as cut and dry as you might think. As soon as you get into the details and the results, you’ll soon realize that it’s a bigger decision that requires a little extra thought. But don’t let that deter you from making a change that will ultimately benefit your organization and your customers.

Stay current with what’s happening in the world of feedback and measuring satisfaction. Go ahead and investigate best practices and benchmarking surveys that have been tested by the best organizations in the world; like Net Promoter Score for customer satisfaction and Gallup Q12 for customer satisfaction. Don’t kill yourself reinventing the wheel and don’t be afraid of making a change.

Categories: Newsletter · customer research

The 6-Steps to Persuasively Presenting Your Results

November 23, 2009 · 1 Comment

You’ve successfully launched a survey, gathered results and now it’s time to share them with your audience.

I know, reporting research results is supposed to be cut and dried. No emotion, no opinion, just the facts. That might be true for academia and basic research, but in the world of business it’s all about using the results to help us make “good” decisions. Here is a great way to synthesize and summarize your results in a way that will help your audience easily process what the results mean and then make a sound decision based on those results.

How to Present Your Results and Get Recommendations Implemented

Focus on the Objective as the Burning Issue. In the first thirty seconds of your presentation, remind everyone of what decision you’re trying to make and what the project’s burning issue is. Here’s an example: “Our competitors have already launched Wickety Widget to stellar results, but they are missing out on a key customer segment. Can we interest 1000 soccer moms to buy our Wacky Wodget in the next quarter and take that segment for ourselves?
Tell a story. It’s not news anymore that we base many decisions more on an emotional basis than on a logical basis. Since your data is the logic – give your audience and emotional hat to hang your data on. Tell them the story behind the objective of your research. How did this burning issue develop? What observations or opportunities did you identify that prompted the research. What benefits did you think were possible…if only…? Telling a good story will lend context to the data and help your audience formulate an opinion and make decisions. Use your data as supporting evidence to the key points of the story. In other words, instead of using your data and charts to drive the story, use the story to drive the data and the charts.
Give the Answer in the Chart Title. Charts generally confuse people — especially table charts. That’s why it’s brilliant strategy to give your chart title as a conclusion to what the chart means. For example “85% of our target market prefers the purple flying elephant logo.” This way, when they see the chart, they won’t have to do their own analysis, they will simply confirm what you’ve already told them and this is what will stay in their memory.
State your recommendation as a solution. Right about this time in the presentation, your audience understands the issue, is wrapped up in the story and sees the data that you’ve presented as supporting the story. The next thing they want to see is what you’re going to do about it. What is the recommendation and the solution? This is where you really have an opportunity to shine. Don’t just present the data, take this golden opportunity to think of creative solutions, recommendations and implementation strategies. Look for creative ways to create mock-ups and other physical representations of solutions. Actually seeing a solution gets people excited and relieves them of the responsibility to think of something. You look like a hero and your recommendation just took another step toward becoming reality.
Give them a payoff. Tell your audience why this idea is good for them. How will they benefit from implementing these recommendations.
Tell them how to take action. Come prepared with an action you want them to take. Do they need to approve a budget? Have the paperwork there and ready for their signature. Do they need to get together for another meeting? Have access to a calendar and schedule that date. You’ll never have the audience this excited again, so take advantage of it.

This outline will take a little longer to prepare than your standard Power Point presentation, but it will only take about ten minutes to deliver and will get your audience saying “YES” to your recommendations.

Try it and let us know how it worked.