I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar with JBara and Marketo in which we discussed how “Customer Success Managers” (who are typically focused on customer retention and cross-sell/up-sell expansion within their existing customer base) have implemented customer surveys to support their goals.  Mike Stocker, Customer Success Team Lead from Marketo, spoke about the specific process he uses at Marketo, while I discussed successful strategies and tactics from other companies, including:

• Knowing your customers sentiment (“temperature”) with complete certainly before you contact them
• Making best use of customer interactions to drive sales
• How to construct a questionnaire to manage the customer success process

We had a great turnout, and so there are interesting results to our poll question to understand what experience the attendees might have with Net Promoter as a system, instead of feedback as a score.

To watch the webinar click here
(which will take you to the “Implementing a Successful Customer Survey” recorded webinar at http://www.jbarasoftware.com/upcoming-webinar-best-practices-in-surveys/ )

Waypoint Group hosted a local networking group we have endearingly entitled BICEP, Bay Area Innovative Customer Experience Professionals.  It was a fabulous opportunity for local customer experience folks to gather over lunch to share challenges and collect best practices from other local companies.  As one of the attendees expressed, “It was a fantastic way to discuss my program challenges with peers and gather great new ideas for how to drive very specific improvements!”  Represented were CX & Net Promoter professionals from Cisco, Intel, SAP, VMware, USF, PeopleMatter & Integris Performance Advisors.  Autodesk, HP & Symantec were also among the RSVP list, proving there is TONS of interest for this type of open forum, attended by, & provided for, local Bay Area customer experience practitioners.

Some of the take-aways offered by the participants included…

• Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) is a free service for creating word clouds for displaying comments
• A practice that moved the needle:  Even if the overall scores are “OK”, do take the time to read verbatims and follow-up with people who asked questions or stated issues
• Connect your Voice of Customer Program with your company’s lost-customer program by linking the financials of each lost customer to the costs of “proactive” service.  For companies with “trapped” customers, model the cross-sell offers to see the lost opportunity cost.
• Using Sales Pipeline data may be an easier way to show sales execs the power of customer feedback.  Pull out pipeline data from your B2B sales team and show the connection between pipeline and scores.
• Analysis tip:  Aggregate scores according to your company’s organization (e.g. by region, by product, etc), and show growth rate against Ease of Business score.  You’ll see “market share givers” vs. “market share takers” and how scores relate to sales performance.
• Create a 1-page list of specific customer verbatim comments for each of your company’s departments to show their impact on the customer experience.
• Impactful survey question:  “If you had a few minutes with NAME [your company’s CEO], what would you tell him/her?

Bottom-line:  Make sure to position your role as not one of running surveys, but instead to capture Voice of Customer in an actionable way.

We are thrilled to be able to provide a productive forum for local practitioners running customer experience programs.  We are planning our upcoming holiday event to be held in downtown San Francisco.  If you are interested in joining us, please let me know by sending an email to juliets@waypointgroup.org.

Hope to see you in early December – !

MindTouch provides software and services to help enterprises deliver exceptional “help” experiences.  We recently sat down with Corey Ganser, the Customer Experience leader for MindTouch, to discuss MindTouch’s customer experience program and how it benefits them.

When I initially started with MindTouch I was leading the Customer Support department and I needed to understand how well MindTouch was doing in the customer’s eyes.  How could we improve?  As a smaller company, being customer-focused is critical, and a main competitive advantage.  Therefore the focus was on ensuring customers were happy and not on ‘tickets closed’ or other internal metrics.

While our initial measure of customer success was focused on end-user interaction with the Support organization, we realized that was too narrow.  We leveraged Net Promoter – adding a periodic “relationship” questionnaire that also uses the “recommend” question – to make sure customers are happy overall.  We also ask what can we do to improve MindTouch, and that’s where we learn critical customer priorities:  While the majority of that feedback is around product enhancements, we also learn quite a bit about how to improve our communications, training, documentation, and processes.

One of the most critical elements was to shine the light on this effort across the company.  To make it work, the key component was to develop strong internal relationships.  I made sure I had a solid understanding of each department’s objectives, initiatives, and processes.  Only then did I collaborate with the CEO and executive team to provide the required insights to the rest of the organization.

In that regard I was able to make sure that the feedback and required actions fit with existing priorities and didn’t just “throw feedback over the wall.”

MindTouch has grown.  We’ve been able to tie this process to individual customers that have grown over time.  Relate it to a personal experience: Have you ever felt that a company has listened to you?  What would you do if they did?  Note that while this effort secures sales growth from existing customers, it doesn’t stop there. 
 

The benefit of a referral is huge, and you only get it if you ask for it.

There is also a connection between employee loyalty and customer loyalty:  People stay, they are happy, and that drives results.  We’ve been able to hire smarter to bring in the right DNA.

On the “dark” side, we found early on how important it is to follow-up with everyone.  We have found that feedback deteriorates if we don’t follow-up, even if it’s just a “thank you” for positive comments.  We must respond back to the customer.

The most critical part is the follow-up process.  After I triage the issue, the rest of the organization takes action on all feedback.

• When a customer responds to the recommend question as an “8 or higher”, they are happy with MindTouch so we reach out and ask for case stories, referrals, and even up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.
• For Scores of 7 or lower, within 2 hours we reach out to find out why and what’s bubbling under the surface.

Second is to use feedback in the Account Management process.  Complementing our Support experience process is a periodic, relationship program that goes out to more people.  Of particular importance is to engage the “quiet” people who may not respond.  Our account managers understand the importance of building relationships, so they use the process to unequivocally know how things are going, and what’s working or not.  Of course, they are finding new sales opportunities through this process as well.

Going forward, we’re continuing to refine customer-facing communications and also improve our internal, employee facing insights.  One example of this is an overall dashboard for each customer showing customers’ “temperature.”  The more we can help drive action, the better off we’ll all be.