Be sure to check out the Jan 21 webinar with Todd Rowe of SAP as he discusses why a survey is not enough for a complete VOC program. In this webinar, Todd will discuss:

- The new role of surveys in the world of customer feedback / customer insight
- New ways to listen to customers and aggregate data without asking your staff to read thousands of replies
- Competitive advantage of next-gen VOC technology
- The new VOC tool set

To learn more or register, go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/323150952

Most of the CEO’s I speak with agree that innovation and improved customer service is the key that will help their company emerge from the recession stronger than their competitors. To accomplish this requires employees with good morale and solid productivity. The problem may be that if your employees are like 55% of American workers, they are suffering from poor morale which is leading to dropping productivity and stifled innovation.

According to the Conference Board research group, employee job satisfaction in America is at a 22 year low with the largest percentage of workers suffering from poor morale and low productivity (http://bit.ly/4ViPWr).

The study reports the low job satisfaction stems from:
• Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.
• Incomes have not kept up with inflation.
• The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.
What really stood out to me was a quote from one of the research participants who said he wished bosses would take time to listen to worker’s ideas – and their difficulties on the job.

Many companies today are focusing on listening to their customers to find ways to improve customer service and drive product innovation. However, your employees represent the whole of your company’s brain trust. Many of our customers have also set up Voice of the Employee initiatives with the goal of identifying ways to improve employee morale, better engage their employees, identify ways to save money, improve procedures and in short, do things better and faster.

Since the same tools used to survey customers can be used with your employees for little or no incremental cost, you might seriously consider setting up a Voice of the Employee program.

We would love to hear your comments and thoughts on this.

From our work helping companies make the most of customer and employee feedback, we have developed something we call the feedback progression scale. This scale gives us a way to understand where a business is in terms of using feedback and surveys to grow customer loyalty and engagement.

So where are you on the feedback progression scale? Is your company using self service tools for simple ad-hoc customer satisfaction surveys? Or are you doing regular event driven transactional surveys such as at the point of purchase or when a customer complains?

Do-it-yourself surveys are easy and quick to implement. However, you may not have the expertise in your company to craft a survey and analyze the results properly. And how do you coordinate with other departments in your company to ensure that you are not surveying the same customers again and again?

Companies at the final stage of the feedback progression scale make VOC analysis a part of the company culture. Data collected through feedback and surveys is shared across multiple departments. Self-service and transactional surveys are combined with feedback management analysis to give a complete and real-time picture of the voice of the customer. This methodology continually compares feedback metrics with certain company outcomes. This allows the company to use a scientific-based index or score and to reward employees and departments based on those metrics.

Bruce Temkin’s recent blog posting “16 Voice of the Customer Recommendations” points out that actively managing the feedback process and providing wide access to VOC insights within the company are among the best practices by award winning VOC practitioners. See the full posting here: http://bit.ly/4zhRHe. The recommendations and comments in his post apply to what we describe as the muti-department and multi-channel VOC/EFM program in our progression scale.

We would love to hear your comments and thoughts on this.