Technology and your Net Promoter Program How to Use Enterprise Software to Manage and improve How to create the Customer a customer Experience So experience program You Can Increase that builds Retention, retention, Repurchase, repurchase, and and referrals Referrals Author, Matt Barnard Studies reveal that even modest improvements in the customer experience can have a huge impact on loyalty, profits, and growth. 1,2 That s why there has been a surge of interest in customer experience programs. Around the globe, companies of all types and sizes are implementing customer experience programs to measure, monitor, and improve customer loyalty. Many of these organizations initiate programs at a departmental or regional level and then expand them as their benefits are proven. All too often they discover that success creates a new set of challenges. They need more-sophisticated data collection and analysis capabilities, their tools don t scale well, they aren t sure how to translate information into action, or they find that expanding their program across lines of business or geographies is more complex than they expected. This white paper illustrates how the right enterprise software can help your business extend, enhance, and accelerate the benefits of your Net Promoter program. It summarizes the core functionality and capabilities you should look for, and it describes best practices for operationalizing an effective, software-based customer experience program. 1
A Framework for Success To understand which software capabilities are most important to the success of your Net Promoter program, take a closer look at why large-scale customer experience programs sometimes fail to produce desired business results. There are three key reasons: Feedback is fragmented. Data is collected and stored in organizational silos that aren t connected. Marketing, sales, service, and other departments all gather feedback but can t share it with other departments, branches, regions, or lines of business, so the customer experience across the organization is inconsistent and difficult to improve. In many cases the software tools simply don t have the capability to scale up as the Net Promoter program is deployed more widely across the enterprise. There is no way to gather, analyze, monitor, and report on customer feedback in a consistent way across multiple points of interaction. Individual customers are lost in aggregate results. Customers become pixels in a pie chart, and no one responds when a specific customer needs attention. Customers become frustrated and don t renew or refer others, which means a loss of near-term and future revenues and possibly negative word of mouth. Employees are not empowered to act. A recent Gartner report indicated 90 percent of companies fail to follow up regarding what action was taken as a result of voice-of-thecustomer feedback they received. 3 In fact, Forrester s 2010 Customer Experience Index found that less than one-third of firms with customer experience programs closely monitor the quality of their interactions with target customers or systematically incorporate customer needs into decisionmaking processes. 4 And because of the data fragmentation issue, employees often lack the information, insight, or authority to take swift action when customers have issues. How can enterprise software help turn customer feedback into customer loyalty? The right software will create a framework that empowers you to do three things: Align the enterprise. Because the customer experience transcends functional boundaries, you need the ability to monitor the health of all your customer, partner, and employee relationships as well as measure the customer experience at all points of interaction. This will give you a deeper understanding of where improvements are needed, helping you focus your actions and investments. Drive action. It s not enough to simply measure customer satisfaction and track loyalty scores. You must act on that information. Your enterprise software should give you the power to analyze feedback from every angle (market segment, product line, or region), monitor the experience to find the root causes of problems, and distribute real-time feedback so employees can take immediate action to improve the customer experience. Manage complexity. To successfully implement a customer experience program, employees will need to embrace the customer and his or her experience. To do that you need to give them tools that make the customer status easy to understand and create efficiencies within the daily workflow. You can do this by leveraging applications employees already use and giving them powerful insights into customer behavior through reports that identify key drivers of customer loyalty so you can focus your strategic initiatives and capital investments where they will make the most difference to your customers. The following sections describe the software capabilities and the best practices that will deliver on these requirements and help you improve customer retention, repurchase, and referrals. 2
Aligning the Enterprise: It s All About Consistency There are many reasons why customer experience programs become disjointed and fragmented, but the result is always the same: inefficiency, missed opportunities, and disgruntled customers and employees. The right software, used the right way, can help align the enterprise around a common set of tools and practices and keep the enterprise aligned as the customer experience program succeeds and scales up. That leads not only to more-satisfied customers and employees but also to better financial results. Remember: the goal is to create a better business, not just loyal customers. Establish a Common Loyalty Metric A single, standard loyalty metric can keep the organization focused by providing a proven measurement of your company s performance through your customers eyes. For most companies, the Net Promoter Score (NPS ) serves this requirement. Co-developed by Satmetrix, NPS is the standard for enabling organizations to improve loyalty and drive growth. It categorizes customers into three groups based on their willingness to recommend your brand: Promoters are loyal customers who keep buying more and refer others. Passives are satisfied but unenthusiastic and vulnerable to competition. Detractors are unhappy, impede growth, and damage your brand through negative word of mouth. This simple segmentation allows you to improve the customer experience by working actively as an enterprise to increase the number of Promoters and reduce the number of Detractors. And as research has consistently shown, the quality of the customer experience is tied directly to the quality of financial results. A recent study by Forrester Research shows that for a typical $10 billion company, a modest improvement in the customer experience can drive $284 million in incremental annual revenues. 1 There is, however, much more to a successful enterprise-scale customer experience program than simply keeping track of the loyalty score. As the customer experience program grows and expands, you ll need to standardize and bring consistency to other aspects of your approach. Create an Enterprise View of Your Data Many organizations have a disjointed approach to collecting and reporting customer data. Surveys are gathered using multiple collection methods and tools. They are sent out at irregular intervals or sent redundantly from multiple departments. Contact data for customer interactions often originate from different sources or regions. Results are collected and stored in multiple databases and are reported in different ways across the business. This leads to an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of how customers perceive and interact with your organization and worse the process itself often frustrates otherwise satisfied customers. To expand the value of Net Promoter within your organization, you need to create an enterprise view of the data. This means monitoring the health of your customer, partner, and employee relationships as well as measuring the customer experience at all key points of interaction, from the website to service delivery, installation, billing, and support. It also means managing customer contacts to prevent over-surveying and to more easily manage communications. Finally, an enterprise view of data should provide a link between financial data and feedback to reveal how different customer touch points drive loyalty and business performance. Properly implemented and used, technology is able to give you a deeper understanding of where and how to enhance your products or services, leading to more-focused innovation and investment. Standardize Reporting across the Organization 3
Information needs to be available in real time to every stakeholder across the organization. To achieve this, capture customer survey and segmentation data together to allow reporting by business segments such as region, account, or call center and across survey programs. Look for technology that offers the ability to share data through push reporting, data exports, and sharing capabilities within the application. A robust database of NPS information will identify pockets of high and low performance across segments and will give you a holistic view of the customer experience by enabling combined reporting of NPS for multiple touch points and segments such as region or product. You might also consider using clear labeling for thedifferent levels of customers; for example, emoticons such as a smiley face for Promoters makes it easy for your employees to identify and associate with a customer s status. Bring Consistency to Data Collection In a fragmented, multisystem environment, it is all too easy to survey customers more often than you intend to or even when they have specified that they don t want to be contacted at all. Driving your program with a common software application enables you to manage touch and do not contact rules consistently from one place. A single-technology approach also limits the skill sets needed to manage your program and keeps costs such as education and software license fees at a minimum. Link to Financial Results Linking your NPS with other business metrics helps you understand how customer loyalty is driving the fundamentals of your business. NPS can also be linked with key operational metrics such as number of days to deliver a product or call center hold times. These links can then be applied within the technology to understand the impact of customer loyalty on business performance without requiring further analysis in a spreadsheet. Driving Action: Empowering Employees to Close the Loop The technology that underpins your Net Promoter program should enable employees at every level of your enterprise to follow up with customers based on their survey responses. This means employees must be able to see, understand, and respond immediately and completely to issues that have an impact on loyalty. Find a software application that allows you both to make operational improvements for quick wins in improving customer loyalty and to run analytics that help you understand where to invest to increase loyalty over the long haul. The following are a few core capabilities you will need to drive action. Real-Time Alerts Individuals in your business should be notified automatically, in real time, when customer followup is required. You should be able to easily create business rules to ensure that the reason for recontact is clear and the right person is notified. For example, a simple business rule could be: If the survey respondent gives a score of six or lower to the recommend question, send an alert to the account manager. The recipient should easily see information about the customer and his or her survey responses. Alerts should be presented to users in their native working environment, such as e-mail and 4
customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as shown in the following figure. You should also consider best practices around closing the loop, including making sure that there is a clear action owner as well as identifying stakeholders who should be notified of the customer s response. Reminder and escalation alerts are also commonly used to ensure that the closed-loop process is followed and that all customer issues are resolved in a timely manner. Finally, depending on how you plan to manage your program, you may want to seek out technology that gives you the flexibility to configure the alerts and e-mail templates within the user interface. Figure 1: Example of an automatically generated alert when customer follow-up is required. Frontline Learning The person conducting the follow-up should also be able to track actions and capture learning after speaking to the customer. This frontline learning should be aggregated and utilized in reporting outputs as a further point of root cause analysis. The real issues that prompted the customer s feedback score and comments are extremely valuable for understanding what you can improve within your business. Management Oversight Governance reporting is essential to verifying that customer follow-up occurs. Set business rules that send reminders to the alert owner if actions are not logged within the established time frame; also drive escalations, such as notifying the account director if the account manager has not logged a change in action status within one week. It is critical that reporting shows open and closed followup actions so that you can easily mange closing the loop. Root Cause Analysis Closing the loop quickly with individual customers can create quick wins in improving NPS. Changing business processes to become more customer-centric will improve loyalty across your entire customer base over the long term. This requires analysis of the root cause of what creates or detracts from loyalty in your business. It also requires buy-in from the operations group within your organization to help implement change. By taking a data-driven approach and making investments through your customers eyes, you activate levers that will improve business performance. The following reports are recommended for root cause analysis. 5
Identifying What Drives Recommendations Through proven analytical techniques such as correlation analysis, you can understand the key drivers of loyalty for your business. These may differ by touch point, region, and product, so you should be able to filter the data to deepen your understanding. First, however, you need to identify the areas of the business you want to measure in your survey. Have a strategic conversation with your customer experience vendor or your internal team to ensure that you are looking at the appropriate drivers. A good report will also help guide the actions you should take based on correlation with loyalty. Analyzing the Gaps If you incorporate importance and satisfaction ratings for key experience attributes into your Net Promoter survey, a gap analysis can highlight areas where you exceed or fail to meet customer expectations. It simply calculates the difference between stated satisfaction and importance. It s quite simple yet very powerful when trying to understand how to make improvements based on customer feedback. Figure 2: A gap analysis helps you understand key gaps in customer experience delivery. Trending Performance Data over Time The Net Promoter discipline is about improving business performance by making changes to the way your customers experience your organization. If you can track the outcome of changes over time and compare changes in different regions and segments, you can identify areas of concern or progress quite easily. Then use root cause reports to more accurately assess what is and isn t working to improve loyalty so that you can focus your investments. Depending on your business practices, you may want to look for more-advanced analytical tools that allow you to aggregate averages, test for statistical significance, and weight key metrics. Drilling Down to Account-Level Analysis For business-to-business organizations, not all client stakeholders have an equal impact. In that environment, it is critical to map recommendation behavior across the individuals in an account and group them by their level of influence. For example, an account with a Detractor who is the budget holder requires a different approach than an account where Detractors are mostly end users. This data view enables account managers and directors to really understand where their relationship stands, and it enables them to quickly take action to resolve issues with key customers within an account. 6
Managing Complexity: Finding a Solution That Scales with Your Program The complexity of an organizationwide Net Promoter program tends to grow with its success. Scalability and security of your application will be key considerations as well as tools to help you to manage these complexities. Let s walk through some best practices for managing a robust enterprise-scale customer experience program. Personalizing and Localizing the Experience You should always try to communicate with customers in their native language. This shows respect and helps ensure higher engagement and response rates for your program. If you are collecting surveys via email, deploy your e-mail invitations and surveys in all the relevant languages. It s a good idea to send native-language e-mail alerts to the stakeholders in your business, too. On the other end of the user experience, employees will also need to interact with the application you choose. Certain applications can be translated into other languages so that the menus and the reports are easy to read for business units in other parts of the world. A translator tool is helpful when looking to translate a survey you are creating. It provides two side-by-side windows so that you can see the survey in one language and more efficiently translate it into another. You should be able to personalize the survey for the customer, such as using his or her name and mentioning the specific transaction event or product used. Also look for survey logic capabilities to ensure that you can personalize the interview based on the customer s history. Analytics and Reporting Flexibility Customer feedback collected by large global companies can quickly become overwhelming. To understand NPS performance by key segments, your application s analytics must enable users to instantly filter and slice data to identify pockets of above- and below-average performance. We have talked about this already, but it is important to note a few key details about filtering data. It s easiest to manage reporting when filters are grouped into templates based on the survey they are tied to especially when you have a large number of surveys. In addition, you want the ability to not just narrow down results but also organize them by group to see one trend, such as NPS performance, across different segments, such as a region or call center. Figure 4: Data filtering enables drill-down to key segments. Simplified Searching When you are collecting massive amounts of customer data, it is helpful to be able to query feedback quickly to answer a customer question, to see data for a specific keyword within feedback, or just to pull up a contact record. Effective enterprisewide software applications enable easy searching of customer data to find particular records and results. For example, advanced solutions may include a search box enabling intuitive searching for customer feedback and contacts. Sometimes you will find Boolean logic that allows compound searches to pull up records that match multiple criteria, such as a certain NPS score and keyword within customer feedback. You should also look at what you can do with the feedback once you search for it. Can you take action or assign someone else to? Can you see that customer s full survey results? The flexibility of the application you choose to manage your program will directly affect its adoption by your employees. Role-Based Dashboards and Reports Net Promoter information should be acted on quickly, so you will need real-time access to what 7
yourcustomers are saying as soon as possible after the event. Reporting should be offered in different ways to meet the user s needs. For example, executives and end users tend to prefer dashboards and e-mail push reporting, whereas analysts and managers often prefer to use realtime analytical tools to drill into specific areas. It s important that the information shown is always relevant and up-to-date so that it can be used to make business decisions. Ultimately, you want to create role-based dashboards for your users so that the right information is given to the right person at the right time. Many customer experience programs distribute role-based information through push reporting. Users should be able to create and distribute reports that are customized for the recipient s role. By limiting the data so that only relevant information is shown to each user, a unique report can be created for each recipient. For example, an account manager would receive a report created for the account manager role but showing only his or her accounts. You will also want the capability to schedule these reports so that they recur at certain intervals and provide updated data automatically to your internal stakeholders. Figure 5. Satmetrix provides a nifty twist on push reporting by integrating directly with Microsoft PowerPoint to allow you to create the reports from within your presentation. Simplifying and Expediting Data Collection Gathering customer data is often the most challenging aspect of a Net Promoter program. The customer data you currently store will have a strong influence on other areas of your program, such as the data collection method you will use and your ability to report the results. The software should make this process easier by offering multiple data collection options and integration with existing data warehouses such as CRM applications. Restricting Access to Data by Role While making NPS data actionable is critical to success, not everyone needs to see all the customer responses. Allocate data permissions to individual users to ensure that they see only information that is relevant to them (e.g., my account, my region, my agents ). Permissions should be easy for you to edit, as responsibilities will constantly shift within your organization. Automating the Application of Business Rules Using technology to underpin your Net Promoter program enables you to automate complex processes and business rules. Your software solution should provide the capability to govern your program easily. Here are some of the typical elements that you will need to manage: 8
Survey type. Determine which surveys to send to customers and when to send them. Wave management. Manage the duration of survey waves or determine when a survey should be collected post-transaction. Sample quality. Ensure that the correct customer and segmentation information is included in contact files. Manage overcontact. Make sure that customers are not approached too often. Manage opt-outs. Ensure that customers who opted out are not recontacted in the future. Alerts and escalations. Ensure that the right people are alerted and notified when an action needs to be taken. Increasing Response Rates Ensuring a high response rate (the percentage of customers approached who respond to a survey) is important to creating confidence in the trustworthiness of your data. Knowing where responses are good and poor across your program is critical so that you can take corrective action in underperforming areas (by changing collection approach, improving contact quality, increasing precontact efforts, or reducing your questionnaire length). Making Changes to Your Program Easily Many companies want to be able to log in and manage their programs whether it s a simple maintenance task or actually creating user roles themselves. At a minimum you should be able to easily control the following elements of your program: Designing surveys and collecting feedback Creating and deploying alert and notification rules Creating and scheduling reports, imports, and exports Defining communication templates (alerts, notifications, and escalations) Managing program do not send lists Creating and defining user roles 9
Determining which data users have permission to see Accessing user login and change history Bringing Customer Insights Front and Center with Satmetrix Software Satmetrix Xperience, our software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, combines all the critical customer experience management elements into a single powerful software application. These elements include transactional, relationship, and ad hoc survey capabilities; a powerful text-mining engine to categorize and report on verbatim comments for deeper insights; and easy-to-use, dynamic analytics and reporting. It s the only software that does this and more. Delivers an aggregated view of the voice of the customer across multiple touch points for a unified view of the customer experience. You can integrate with CRM and financial data to see the impact that the customer experience has on business performance. And you can use Net Promoter Score, or other loyalty metrics, to measure and monitor the total customer experience. Enables immediate access to actionable information in the employees native workflow, encouraging fast action. Through e-mail and Outlook integration, employees get real-time alerts about customer issues along with recommended actions so that problems can be resolved quickly. PowerPoint integration provides a fast, scalable way to quickly create and distribute rolespecific reports. And the automated analysis of verbatim comments uncovers trends behind customer sentiment to turn unstructured feedback into actionable insights. Accelerates success through embedded tools that leverage our deep expertise in successfully executing complex customer experience programs. Our extensive library of best-practice questions helps you design an effective questionnaire for improved response rates to ensure actionable feedback. And if you need more guidance and advice, we include direct access to a searchable knowledge base of Satmetrix thought leadership resources, such as webinars and case studies, to accelerate your success. Satmetrix Xperience is a standards-based, scalable, and secure SaaS application, meaning there s no hardware or information technology support required. The turnkey nature, speed of deployment, and costeffective hosting make it a smart and stress-free investment. We re Experts in Delivering Best-in-Class Customer Experience Programs. Satmetrix certified professionals leverage best practices from more than a decade of successful implementations to design, deploy, maintain, and enrich your customer experience program. We offer a continuum of education, implementation, and best-practice consulting to expand your 10
capacity for managing customer feedback, identifying trends, and spotting pitfalls and opportunities. Get the details. And get started. Designing, implementing, and managing an enterprise-scale Net Promoter program can be complex. Operationalizing your Net Promoter program doesn t need to be. With the right enterprise software, you can take your program to a higher level. You can get the right information to the right people right away so employees can take the right action. Whether your needs are simple or complex, Satmetrix is ready to help you provide an excellent customer experience that delivers higher conversion rates, increased wallet share, lower churn rates, and improved retention by bringing insights from customer feedback front and center. Satmetrix customer experience management software makes it easy to gather, analyze, and report information throughout your organization. And our professional services team will help you pinpoint and hit the right targets with training and education, support, and best-practice consultation. Call us and take the first step toward building a superior customer experience program. Or, for more information, visit www.satmetrix.com. 888. 800.2313 (North America) or +44 845 371 1040 (Outside North America) About Satmetrix Satmetrix is the leading provider of successful customer experience management programs and the codeveloper of Net Promoter. We offer a winning combination of software (SaaS) and bestpractice consulting that delivers actionable customer feedback to drive growth, fuel innovation, and amplify positive word-of-mouth. Satmetrix has a proven track record of accelerating the success of large-scale, integrated customer experience programs with more than 700 enterprise deployments in 40 languages. References 1. Bruce D. Temkin, Customer Experience Boosts Revenue, Forrester Research, June 22, 2009. 2. James L. Heskett, Thomas O. Jones, Gary W. Loveman, et al., Putting the Service - Profit Chain to Work, Harvard Business Review, July - August 2008 (reprinted from 1994). 3. Jim Davies, Chris Fletcher, Kimberly Collins, et al., Voice of the Customer: The Gartner CRM Team s Perspective, Gartner, June 10, 2010. 4. Bruce D. Temkin, The Customer Experience Index, 2010, Forrester Research, January 11, 2010. 2011 Satmetrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Satmetrix and the Satmetrix logo are registered trademarks and Satmetrix Xperience is a trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc. Net Promoter and NPS are registered trademarks and Net Promoter Score is a trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc.; Bain & Company; and Fred Reichheld. 11
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