Too many businesses focus solely on the minds of customers and forget the importance of connecting emotionally – to customers’ hearts. What drives their passion, loyalty and engagement?

 Attitudinal Information = Emotional Information

Measuring attitudes is a relatively new thing to do. The purpose is to understand the “spark” of the relationship. What was it that got them interested in the first place, and what values drive them to remain interested and engaged?

This information can be uncovered through asking attitudinal questions when gathering customer feedback. A critical step is to understand the role that emotion plays in the consumer decision-making process.

Given that customers remember the emotion of a brand experience, it is logical that much of their attitude about a brand is based on the emotional connection they have formed with that company. Yet many businesses continue to act like much of what drives their customers to buy is solely based on other factors, such as baseline products and features.

Customers get emotional about their business relationships, much like personal relationships. That helps explain these staggering statistics:

• According to Target Training International, more than 60% of all customers stop dealing with a company because of perceived indifference on the part of an employee.
• 70% of the reason customers leave a company has nothing to do with the product, and 84% of customers that leave do so for poor service. Forum Corp.
• Tarp Worldwide research found that customers who experience mild or strong dissatisfaction will tell between 9 and 16 other people.
• Up to 80% of defecting customers describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before they leave.  Business Week, October 2006

These statistics exemplify the issue facing businesses today – customers make decisions about staying or leaving a business relationship based upon a multitude of factors – and attitude and emotion play major roles. By collecting feedback in real time, and at all possible customer interaction points, a company can learn firsthand what customers think when interactions happen and why customers become emotionally charged.

Get a Complete Customer Relationship Picture

Customer attitudes reveal the softer side of the business relationship. Knowing why customers do business with you is critical to maintaining that relationship and to adding new customers in the future. The difficulty in business is that many of the solutions today reveal only a portion of what is needed to really understand the customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a good example. Most CRM-derived information is transactional in nature. It is solid information – critical to any business – but it doesn’t tell the entire customer relationship story. It tracks the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’ of the business relationship.

The missing element is often ‘why.’ Why do your customers do business with you? To uncover the ‘why,’ you must understand the basic principles driving any business relationship. A good relationship survey will reveal this. However, a relationship survey should not be your only Voice of the Customer component. Use it as part of a comprehensive program with transaction-based surveys, ad-hoc surveys, and unsolicited feedback management. Together they can offer you a clear picture of what your customers think, what drives their emotional connection with you, and how you can move the needle.

My Facebook status today reads, “I’m hoping this morning’s travels will inspire another interesting blog post.” Right after I posted that, a thought popped into my head:  it’s not my travels today as much as my destination that has inspired me. I’m on my way to our headquarters in Utah to meet with my team for our Quarterly Business Review. This got me thinking about how our clients might review their businesses…especially as it pertains to their Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives.

Gathering feedback from your customers helps you understand what you’re doing well and not so well for them. However, if that’s all you do, it’s like living in a bubble. It’s important to put all of your scores and feedback into the broader context – how well do you do stack up against your competitors? This is applies not only to financial/operational metrics, but also with your VOC data.

I’m talking about benchmarking, which means making comparisons to help you understand the perception of your business relative to the competition in the minds of your customers.

1. Competitive Benchmarking helps you determine your performance relative to a primary competitor or a set of key competitors. Competitive Benchmarking data can be obtained in several different ways.

          Third-Party Surveys:  Engage with a third party to conduct a blind competitive survey. This is the cleanest survey approach, but it’s also the most expensive.

          Your Surveys:  Add some questions to the end of your relationship survey that ask your customers to rate one or two of your competitors with which they’ve done business. This approach is a little less clean and perhaps even a bit biased because you’re asking these questions only of your customers. As long as you view the responses in that light, you can still get a decent benchmark.

          External Metrics:  Get access to syndicated results for ACSI, JDPA indexes, NPS, Forrester CxPi Customer Experience Index, etc. that are relevant for your industry, product, etc. Ask a comparable question or set of questions in your own survey(s) to benchmark.

2. World Class Benchmarking is a slightly different approach where you’re not necessarily interested in benchmarking question to question or score to score. In World Class Benchmarking, you ask your customers to tell you about a “world class experience” they had with another company – any company, regardless of industry. What you’re looking for is a way to identify who your customers look up to when it comes to service, products, literature, training, etc.  You then study that company inside and out – you might even partner with them or find a mentor in that organization, depending on who it is – to identify best practices that you can put to work in your own company.

My final thought about how clients review their businesses brings me to Internal Benchmarking, which entails taking the feedback you’ve gathered and comparing scores, ratings, or indexes internally – within your own business, i.e., benchmark business units, locations, sites, etc. against each other. Identify your stars and your dogs, compare practices, and have your stars mentor your dogs.

Ok, it’s time to go update my Facebook status to “another one’s in the can.”

What are your employees talking about? What keeps them up at night about their job? What distracts them from their day-to-day activities?

During tough economic times, employee stress levels are up. This directly affects their job satisfaction, which impacts the way they treat customers. This can hurt revenue and profits.

Most business managers agree that good employees have an impact on customer satisfaction. At Allegiance, we call this the Spillover Effect and define it as the statistical relationship between employee engagement and customer engagement.

When employees are engaged, they believe are doing something valuable for their organizations and that their efforts will make a difference. The positive feelings that employees have about their jobs and employers influence the level of service they give to customers. These positive experiences “spill over” to customers, who become advocates for the company’s products and services.

Allegiance recently published a paper called “The Spillover Effect” based on one of the largest research studies conducted on engagement. This study found that disengaged employees hurt one out of every 10 customers. The paper identifies job enhancers that are effective at creating employees who are likely to be emotionally engaged. Critical job enhancers include:

• Having a positive impact on the lives of customers and team members
• Having opportunities for learning important new skills
• Having the ability to offer suggestions
• Completing whole jobs from start to finish
• Receiving feedback about the results of efforts
• Feeling free to perform the work the way they believe is best

Engaged employees contribute to the bottom line. As their engagement is reflected in their service to customers, they are helping to create more loyal customers. Highly engaged customers buy more products, refer potential customers to a company, stay longer and give more feedback, which, in turn, gives companies the opportunity to address issues and concerns and preserve potentially lost revenue.

I’m a little late working on this blog post because of a family emergency, but it seems fitting that I write it this morning – and on this very topic – as I fly from Long Beach to Salt Lake City, using both this airport and JetBlue for the first time. After driving 40 miles to the airport, I’m hoping for a smooth experience as I make my way through these “firsts.”

As JetBlue is well known for its brand promise of bringing humanity to air travel, I am looking forward to the “JetBlue experience,” to find out what it’s all about. The company touts more legroom, free DIRECTV and XM Satellite Radio, and free-flowing snacks at no charge. (What? No WiFi?) It also has a Customer Bill of Rights, should we be delayed and stuck on the tarmac for some reason. (I hope we don’t have to experience that portion of the promise.)

So what’s all the hubbub about a brand promise? A brand promise is the expectations you set with your customers.  It’s a combination of the brand purpose and the reality of what the brand can deliver. It defines the benefits a customer can expect to receive when experiencing your brand – at every touchpoint. It must be delivered consistently at every touchpoint so as to create predictability. Customers will select your brand because they know that, every time they choose your brand, they will have the same experience. This doesn’t happen on the first interaction – it takes many interactions for customers to begin to trust your brand.

And that introduces another concept related to the brand promise – trust.  The brand promise sets expectations, and expectations are aligned with trust. Predictability begets trust, and trust begets loyalty. Over time, I expect that I will trust JetBlue to deliver the same excellent experience every time.

Expectations are an integral part of your customers’ satisfaction levels. As a matter of fact:

Expectations – Performance = Satisfaction

Let’s think about that for a second. Customers try your brand with a set of expectations (your brand promise) in mind. How you perform against those expectations leads to some level of satisfaction. If performance meets or exceeds expectations, then customers have a higher level of satisfaction and/or loyalty. If performance is less than expectations, then the brand promise has been broken – no explanation needed on what that means for your company. One sidebar to note here: consumers have higher expectations of iconic brands.

A critical and required component of delivering on the brand promise consistently is to socialize it with your employees. We have all heard that engaged employees drive engaged customers.  In order for employees to hold up their end of that deal, they must first know and understand the brand promise. It needs to be communicated to employees (starting with the employee onboarding or orientation program), and it must be reinforced regularly.

JetBlue’s brand promise is to bring humanity to air travel.  I read that the company defines humanity as friendliness, flexibility, and caring.  JetBlue’s founder and former CEO David Neeleman was quoted as saying, “The JetBlue brand promise dictates how employees execute at the various stages of the customer experience, from the time customers check-in at the gate to the time they land and claim their luggage. And consistency in the experience is key, or else the brand suffers.”

Has JetBlue lived up to its brand promise for me? Well, as I said earlier, it takes time and several interactions before you feel that brand predictability. It’s too early to tell. The flight attendants are friendly, but their service hasn’t really been unique relative to other airlines I’ve flown recently (including Southwest, Continental, Delta, and American). As I write this, about half way into the flight, the DIRECTV system is still not working…stay tuned!

Getting executive buy-in is crucial to any successful VOC program. Here are three main points to keep in mind when working with your executive team.

1) Give the executives an opportunity to provide feedback, before the program goes live.

Keeping executives informed will help to ensure the success of any program and will allow you to make necessary corrections early in the VOC process. Often the executives will empower you to make decisions. However, keep them apprised of the program’s progress to avoid any delays later in the process.

2) Make sure the executives know and understand the goals and objectives of the VOC program.

Understanding the strategic direction of the organization and knowing what is expected with the VOC program is crucial to the success of the program. Having clear goals and objectives will ensure that you stay on course and make the right decisions for your organization.

3) Understand how the executives are being measured for a successful VOC program.

To ensure future career advancement, it is imperative that you know the metrics by which you will be measured. Therefore, a successful VOC program should include specific benchmarks for evaluating the performance of you and your team. To support the program success, keep the executive team connected with the customer by continually sharing customer comments and feedback gathered through the program.

These three key points will help you ensure executive buy-in for your VOC program. By focusing on the primary business needs and the value the VOC program will bring to the organization, you will ensure a successful outcome.

For any VOC initiative, it is just as critical to conduct employee surveys as it is to survey customers.  Employee engagement drives customer engagement, and without understanding the hearts and minds of your employees, your VOC initiative will be incomplete. 

Conducting employee surveys within your organization presents opportunities for you to show employees that you care about them and their needs. At the same time, it provides employees an avenue for providing feedback about the company, culture, management, tools, resources, training, and more.  For survey results to be most effective, employees need to trust that they can provide candid feedback in an anonymous fashion without retribution.

Even more important than conducting these surveys is to act on the results – and then to hold managers accountable for creating action plans and executing on them. However, is it a good or standard practice to compensate managers based on their employee satisfaction scores?  This is a practice that is difficult to support, given the following complications caused by providing incentives to managers based on the satisfaction of their employees.

1. Any time you tie survey results to a bonus plan, managers will waste time and energy trying to find fault with the overall program design, survey questions, or data quality – instead of taking the candid feedback at face value, taking ownership, and putting the feedback to work. 
2. Tying compensation to employee feedback also leads to situations that I refer to as the “car dealer syndrome,” which includes gaming the system, bribes, and other seedy behavior.
3. The potential to earn more money because of these results can also lead to retribution for low scores and poor feedback; employees need to know they can provide feedback without fear of recourse for negative feedback.

If you want to reward your managers, use objective measures, such as employee turnover, that can’t be tinkered with.  If you feel the need to reward managers, do so based not on the scores and the feedback, but on the execution of action plans created as a result of the feedback.

Having said all that, I do believe that company executives should certainly have a portion of their bonus plans tied to both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction scores.  Creating a customer-centric culture begins when you first focus on your employees and make their satisfaction a priority.  This culture can only be created and driven by those at the top.