VoC begets VoC

I’m always championing active use of your Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights.  After all, I say, if you’re just collecting your Customers’ insights but not doing anything with them, that’s a huge waste of resources.  Normally when I talk about that, I’m referring to the importance of having a robust and enterprise-wide Process Engineering (PE) function within your company:  A group of process experts whose job it is to take those insights and put them to use improving and updating your procedures, processes, and policies so as to better align your Customers’ experiences with your Brand Promise.  It’s the engine of your CX function; it’s what makes all that effort worthwhile in the first place.

But, did you know you can also use your VoC insights to inform…your VoC work itself?  When you gain insights about gaps between your Customers’ experiences and your Brand Promise, surely you’re feeding into the bigger CX ecosystem with direction on where to improve your processes.  But you’re also offering insights into what better questions you can ask within your VoC program itself.  Although you need to have more going on than just surveys, usually they’re the biggest (and most visible) part of the VoC program.  But surveys aren’t usually all that dynamic.  It isn’t often that brands crack them open and update the questions they’re asking.  That’s a shame because with the freedom that many survey vendors allow for their clients these days, updating and changing your survey questions is often relatively simple. (more…)

By | 2021-11-10T15:52:56+00:00 November 10th, 2021|Categories: Consulting, CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics, VoC|0 Comments
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Are we challenging CX?

One of the roles we, as CX professionals, play, is that of change agents.  I realize that’s a term people toss out there when they want to seem important or progressive in business, but when you think about it, one of the core jobs we have is to challenge people to take a different perspective; that of the Customer.

In fact, a Process Engineer who used to work for me would say all the time that we need to ‘take off our corporate hat and put on our Customer hat.’  It was a great metaphor, and we even had hats made up for the entire CX team that read “Customer”, one of which I still have on my desk at home. (more…)

By | 2021-11-03T15:33:41+00:00 November 3rd, 2021|Categories: Consulting, CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics, Process Engineering|0 Comments
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Better than NPS? Brand Alignment Score

I’ve written previously about how silly things like Net Promotor Score’s ‘Likelihood to Recommend’ question can seem.  I think, generally, that comes more from a place of complacency than downright lunacy.  It’s more likely people are asking questions like that less because they’re off their rocker than simply because, well, that’s what everybody is asking.

So the solution to such groupthink, I think, is to start…thinking.

(more…)
By | 2021-09-09T15:56:20+00:00 September 9th, 2021|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics, Process Engineering|0 Comments
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Just stop with the KPIs already

Okay, so this is going to be controversial.  Scandalous, even.  But I’m going to come right out and say it:

Please stop with the KPIs.  Just quit it already.

Whether you’re using NPS, C-SAT, CES…whatever it is, you’re only hurting your own CX efforts.

And I’ll tell you why:  Because you’re not getting anything out of it.  Not out of your top-line metrics, at least.  If I ask you what your NPS tells you, you can probably go on about Customer loyalty, likelihood to repurchase, share of wallet, and many other great things that have come out of white papers and case studies over the years.  That’s awesome, and I’m sure the entire leadership team is intrigued.  You may have even validated those academics with evidence from your own organization. (more…)

By | 2021-06-30T14:56:25+00:00 June 30th, 2021|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Leadership, Measures & Metrics, Process Engineering, ROI of CX, VoC|0 Comments
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Quantitative versus Qualitative

I just got off the phone with a colleague and we were having a conversation about data.  He brought up some good questions and points and so I figured I’d jot a few of them down here before they went right out of my head again.

The gist of the discussion was the difference between quantitative and qualitative data.  He was having some trouble explaining the difference to his boss.  One line of questioning I asked right off the top was, “Why is this a controversy?  Why the heck does this even matter?  How did this become a topic of conversation?”  It’s always useful to get to the bottom of why someone is asking a question so as to better address it in the first place.  Plus, this seems more like an academic inquiry rather than something that’ll actually make a huge difference in what they’re doing.

It is, however, pertinent in a discussion like this, because I’ve used the mechanism that quantitative data can tell us where to look, while qualitative data can tell us what to do once we get there.  More on that in a moment. (more…)

By | 2021-03-23T15:05:44+00:00 March 23rd, 2021|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics|0 Comments
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Metrics: Output vs. Outcomes

Y’all know I’m a big fan of metrics.  Long before I was in CX, I was in Process Engineering (Lean Six Sigma and Operations Research), and long before that I was an analyst.  My BS is in Mathematics, and I teach Statistics at the Air Force Academy.  So yea, I dig numbers.  I write about them a lot.

I was chatting with a colleague the other day and he had an awesome turn-of-phrase regarding metrics that I’d never heard of before.  He’s the leader of an international organization and we were talking about strategies and how important it is to ensure that leadership’s highfalutin strategies and visions are made real to team members in their own day-to-day work.  This is a standard theme in leadership and management:  Sure, we can design strategies and missions and visions for our organizations, but of course it’s the folks working on executable actions every day that are the champions who carry the deliverables across the goal lines.

Naturally, that turns to metrics.  But simply having metrics isn’t enough.  If you leave it to the visionaries and the leaders (CEOs, Presidents, Boards of Directors) to name the top-level KPIs but don’t boil down what that means that I, as a part of the team, am supposed to do, we’ll never get anywhere.  Turning numbers into results requires communicating, and sometimes translation.  My friend offered a great way of framing the challenge of driving higher-level metrics into operational, measurable goals.

He said, it’s the difference between Output and Outcomes, and it helps frame out how we all work together to deliver for our Customers. (more…)

By | 2021-02-04T15:58:13+00:00 February 4th, 2021|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics|0 Comments
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Processing your survey results

Recently I fielded a question about NPS survey data:  How do you process it?  How do you use it?  I popped off a quick response, but I’d like to go a little deeper on the topic here.

First of all, it’s not a specific NPS question.  It doesn’t matter what sort of survey you send out or (exactly) what sort of question(s) you ask.  I’m also limiting this article to a discussion about survey data per se.  There are tons of other sources of data that should be part of your broader Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.  But this is just about the data that comes from your surveys.  From those surveys, at the end of the day, you’ll likely be faced with two different types of data, each with its own purpose:  Score data and Amplification data. (more…)

By | 2021-01-21T16:47:10+00:00 January 21st, 2021|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics, VoC|0 Comments
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Your CES isn’t telling you enough

With all due deference to Matt Dixon, sometimes “effort” is a tricky thing to define.  I worked with one team that ran around and around about it constantly it seemed.  Matt’s Customer Effort Score (CES) metric basically asks the Customer to rank his or her satisfaction with the amount of effort expended to solve an issue or otherwise accomplish something.

Now, right away you can see the question begged:  How do we even know the issue has been solved in the first place?  This, of course, goes to an age-old conundrum of how we can ensure a Customer’s issue has been solved before we send out a survey for feedback, regardless of the survey type.  After all, it’s insult added to injury if we ask, “hey, how’d we do?” while the Customer is still waiting for a solution.  But let’s put that issue aside for now as it’s a common concern (NPS, C-SAT, and all the others have the same limitation). (more…)

By | 2020-12-03T16:04:08+00:00 December 3rd, 2020|Categories: CX Strategy, CX Thoughts, Measures & Metrics, VoC|0 Comments
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