Transforming Traditional Customer Satisfaction Research into Modern Enterprise Feedback Management in Seven Critical Steps

by John Carroll III

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research sits at the intersection of two major business trends: the rise of customer experience as a strategic imperative and the advent of software as a data democratizer. The first means that companies are more committed than ever to actively monitoring and managing customers' experiences. The second means that companies can actually operationalize customer focus across the enterprise without going out of business. Together, these trends are driving a sea change in satisfaction and loyalty research by highlighting the shortcomings of traditional approaches and enabling new solutions.

To examine the contrast between old and new, consider the three elements of EFM:

Enterprise: Traditional research programs focused on supporting high-level executive decisions. Just think of the standard customer satisfaction tracker where results ended up in a thick slide presentation delivered at an annual strategic planning meeting. The outputs might have been interesting, but they left most employees in the dark. By contrast, modern programs operate at an enterprise level, influencing routine business decisions on the front lines and in middle management as well as strategic decisions made at the top. For example, SAP delivers customer insights to thousands of salespeople and account managers every day to enable more customer-focused - and profitable - relationship management.

Feedback: In traditional c-sat programs, the concept of feedback was essentially limited to survey responses, and these narrow inputs naturally led to narrow value. Modern programs expand the concept of feedback to include much bigger data - with more volume, variety, velocity, and value - from sources such as CRM systems and social media, resulting in more integrated and comprehensive insights that can influence operational decisions. For example, JetBlue combines its post-flight survey responses with hundreds of transactional and operational data points to provide a more complete picture of the customer experience and identify specific operational issues to address, from individual TVs that need repair to flight delay thresholds that warrant atonement.

Management: Traditional programs were all about measurement, tracking common metrics over time and reporting results in executive scorecards. While they provided interesting information, they lacked any direct connection to action and delivered limited business value as a result. That's why modern programs have traded "measurement" for "management." They still provide scorecards, but they include metrics and other insights related to specific customer behaviors and the actions needed to change those behaviors profitably. They also create a "closed loop" of communication and action that enables employees at all levels to apply customer insights in real time. For example, Webster Bank follows up with thousands of customers each year after receiving negative survey responses. Banking Center Managers turn roughly 80% of those unhappy customers around and even lead 10% to make incremental product purchases with the bank.

Seven Steps to Deliver EFM Success

While the journey from traditional research to modern EFM isn't easy, it is well within reach. Evaluating dozens of organizations that have - and have not - made this journey successfully, we have identified seven basic steps that program leaders must follow in order to guide their firms into the future.

1. Clarify your strategy. First, program leaders must ensure that business strategy and financial goals directly relate to the employee and customer behaviors the EFM program will influence.
2. Map your journeys. To focus on what matters, firms must then prioritize "moments of truth" in key customer and employee journeys and document the actions employees will take upon a triggering events in those journeys.
3. Design your system. Based on journey mapping outputs, program leaders need to define and incorporate the right customer and employee listening posts to capture high volume, variety, velocity, and value feedback and connect it to action.
4. Implement your technology. To make the system work at scale, firms must carefully select and implement EFM technology and connect it to the broader technology ecosystem in place to enable desired data collection, analysis, reporting, and intervention activities.
5. Align your processes. Companies then need to drive organizational adoption by tying new EFM practices into key existing processes such as communication, training, and compensation.
6. Demonstrate your value. With some time and effort invested, leaders must measure and share program results to maintain and expand support.
7. Renew your commitment. Like other major efforts, you can never "set it and forget it" with EFM. With a solid program in place, continuously return to step one in this process, determine what needs to change, and drive that change through to keep things fresh and relevant.

Looking for a more detailed read on these seven steps? Check out the full article (pages 38-43) in the October 2013 issue of Quirks.