Customer Performance Management for the Enterprise

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The form in which the results of performance measurement efforts are communicated to the organization may affect the urgency with which people act.” Service Profit Chain, Heskett, Sasser, Jr, Schlesenger

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CustomerConnect™

We know that a majority of senior executives want customer focus to be a top priority. They recognize that improving the customer experience is a significant factor in the future success of their companies. To that end, companies are finding that they must make significant investments in capturing the voice of the customer. However, actually using customer feedback to effect the kind of change that will enhance performance is more of a challenge. Performance management involves more than just sharing customer feedback with top-level executives or managers, and commanding them to use it. Key insights must be readily gleaned from what is often a mountain of data and shared across the business. Business users have to have access to information that is relevant to their role and level.

CustomerConnect™ Approach
CustomerConnect™ Program
Analysis and Reporting
Process

CustomerConnect™ Approach

CustomerImpact’s unique CustomerConnect™ solution builds on the premise that customer satisfaction drives customer loyalty, which results in greater customer retention, higher revenue, and profitability for the enterprise. A well-balanced and integrated program seeks customer input across all touchpoints. Actionable insights, based on key metrics and powered by CustomerTextAnalysis (CTA), are generated and disseminated to all employees, so that they can make timely more accurate decisions, taking the appropriate actions that will result in higher levels of performance. Customer satisfaction increases as performance improves, leading to greater customer loyalty, fewer customer defections, greater operating efficiencies, and revenue growth.

As part of this continuous improvement cycle, we are continually testing and confirming the linkages between performance, satisfaction, loyalty, and business outcomes. Our dashboard design service make immediately visible how those factors correlate by including operational, financial and customer intelligence metrics that are pulled from different data sources. Operational managers are given visibility into their key day-to-day metrics KPIs) in order to ensure that their business activities are always in alignment with enterprise strategic goals. This is achieved through the use of CustomerImpact’s robust and flexible feedback system combined with the survey and dashboard design expertise provided by our experienced consultants.

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CustomerConnect™ Program

The CustomerImpact voice of the customer approach has one goal in mind—incorporating customer intelligence gleaned from disparate sources, such as surveys, emails, account manager notes, and call center notes, into dashboards that are delivered to users across the enterprise. That “voice” must be captured at all points of contact and throughout the lifecycle of each customer. This requires proactively seeking customer input about their experiences and impressing upon them how their perceptions and opinions are valued. How is this accomplished? Through a combination of survey vehicles that periodically solicit their overall impressions based on all their experiences during the past year (or six months) and by asking them for feedback immediately after a transaction has occurred. We refer to these as Relationship and Transaction surveys.

Relationship Survey

A relationship survey covers all aspects of the relationship. Customers may be asked their opinions about product quality, service quality, implementation services, online purchase experience, ease of doing business, price/value, account management, and experience with distribution channels. It is also often the vehicle for collecting customer feedback on the brand, performance compared to key competitors, and performance compared to the previous year. The results often point to the functional areas that are the most problematic for customers. These functional areas that are not meeting established performance levels are targeted for subsequent waves of the CustomerConnect™ program.

Transaction Surveys

These surveys are deployed immediately after the event or transaction has occurred. For example, after closing a case in Technical Support, completion of an installation, or using a company business service, the customer receives the invitation to take the survey while the experience is still fresh in his/her mind. The focus is deliberately narrow, eliciting feedback on that transaction alone. When shown with operational and financial data, actionable insights jump out at you. Examples include:

       Customer Support

• Survey feedback. Expertise of agents, courtesy of agents, time on hold, time to problem resolution, overall satisfaction with Support.
• Operational data. Number of service calls, number of calls by product, number of outstanding service issues.
• Financial data. Maintenance contract renewal %, product renewal/re-purchase%, growth in revenue.
• Benefits. Improve processes; save at-risk customers; pinpoint problems by call center, agent, and product; recognize outstanding staff; improve customer satisfaction.

        Implementation Service Completion

• Survey feedback. Ability to meet timelines, technical competence of consultant, responsiveness to questions, overall satisfaction with implementation service
• Operational data. IT project cost and value, IT project ROI, project duration, number of internal resource days—all by project team
• Financial data. Revenues by department, billable hours and revenues by team and individual
• Benefits. Streamline processes, optimize staffing according to skill level and job requirement, pinpoint and address problems, provide targeted training to consultants

       Employee Business Services Usage

• Survey feedback. Availability of relevant information, usefulness of service, responsiveness of staff, overall satisfaction with specific business service.
• Operational data. Number of requests for information, number of users of this service, number of staff to provide support and implement the service.
• Financial data. Dollars spent by users of service, costs of staff, employee turnover, costs of hiring.
• Benefits. Streamline processes, provide clear and relevant information, optimize staffing to realize greatest payback, improve employee satisfaction.

Related CustomerConnect™ Programs

Other feedback programs that look at the entire customer lifecycle include:

• Win/Loss program. Looks at which competitors were considered, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you won or lost. This information is used to inform the Marketing messages, arm Sales with pertinent information about how you stack up vs. competitors, pinpoint and address problems in the sales process, and ultimately increase sales.
• Churn program. Identifies churn patterns and their causes, where defecting customers went and why. This information is used to take actions to prevent future defections and learn what it would take to bring defectors back.
• Benchmark program. Looks at the performance of competitors, comparing how you stack up on the same metrics. It also provides valuable information about their sales and pricing practices. This information is used to refine your product roadmap, devise sales strategies against specific competitors, streamline processes, examine hiring criteria, and consider changes in training. The ultimate aim is to increase revenues through new sales, up-sell and cross-sell successes.

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Analysis and Reporting

Customers who take the time to provide feedback, whether it is positive or negative, are providing valuable information to the enterprise that conveys the following:

• Which metrics are most important to them
• How the company is performing on those metrics
• What causes the most unhappiness
• What improvements they would like to see
• How they prioritize new features, products, and services
• Overall satisfaction
• Likelihood to continue doing business
• Likelihood to do more business
• Likelihood to recommend

By applying CustomerImpact’s analytic tools to the responses, including the open-ended comments (see CustomerImpact’s Customer Text Analysis program), clients will be able to walk away with a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities they face at the corporate level, as well as at the regional, business unit, product line, business function, branch/office and account levels. And for employees in customer-facing positions, customer intelligence identifies where recognition or further training is needed.

In order to improve performance at all those levels, the insights that will drive appropriate actions must be available and understandable to all staff in a timely manner. Dashboards quickly provide an overview of what’s going on across at all levels of the company and many are updated in real time to convey the current state of the business. Previously, analysts had to sift through endless spreadsheets and cross-tabs for slicing and dicing. Executives/managers who wanted access to the data had to log in to their accounts, receive email communications with static images of the data, and/or plow through multiple databases with operational and financial data. Today, dashboards are becoming the new face of reporting. Is a picture worth a thousand words? The answer is yes if it contains relevant information presented in a way that is clear and compelling. CustomerImpact’s CustomerConnect™ program delivers dashboards to users who will be able to track performance versus corporate strategic goals, decide on steps that must be taken to improve performance, and implement those action plans.

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Process

CustomerImpact adds value from day one, working with clients to design, deploy, and manage their customer intelligence program using skills acquired over many years running hundreds of surveys and surveying thousands of customers. The four steps are:

• Discovery and Discussion—learning about specific business challenges, previous learnings, customers, data sources and formats, and key performance metrics
• Design—creating questionnaire(s), email communications, and business rules
• Test/Deploy—test questionnaires, email communications, and languages; deploy; and monitor
• Reporting--See five-step process in Dashboard Design Services

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