We are looking forward to the upcoming Allegiance Engage Summit 2010 on May 16 – 19, 2010 at the Chateaux Resort at Silver Lake in Deer Valley, Utah. It’s not too late to join us! This year’s user conference will bring together inspirational speakers, customer and employee loyalty experts, industry leaders and Allegiance customers to uncover ways to solve today’s most pressing business problems.

More than 60 percent of the conference agenda consists of panels and presentations by Allegiance customers, who will share insights and experiences on improving Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) and Voice-of-the-Employee (VOE) programs. For professionals in market research, feedback management, VOC, customer retention, loyalty or human resources, the Engage Summit 2010 will provide critical information, best practices and peer-to-peer networking on ways to capitalize on customer and employee engagement.

Keynote Inspirational Speakers

•  Billy Beane, VP and general manager (GM), Oakland Athletics
• Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad
• Rama Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

 Industry Leaders and Loyalty Experts

•  Todd Rowe, Group VP and General Manager, WW Mid-Market Division, SAP
• Bruce Temkin, VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Experience Management, Forrester Research
• Vicky Stennes, VP In-flight Experience, Jet Blue
• Gary Rhoads, Ph.D., Loyalty Expert, Co-Founder Allegiance, Inc.

 Session Topics

•  Creating value and ROI from your survey/feedback data
• Customer and employee panels on engagement wins
• Customer case studies: Zions Bancorporation, Life Time Fitness, others
• Making insight out of the social media boom
• Market research panel on advanced data collection techniques
• Survey Design and Analytics boot camps

To register for the Allegiance Engage Summit 2010, to find out more about this year’s speakers, and to see the conference agenda, please visit http://engagesummit.com. We hope to see you there!

We hear it from businesses every day – how can they gather customer feedback from surveys, social media, Web, e-mail, call centers, etc. and respond quickly to avoid losing customers? And what is the best way to turn feedback into insights that can be acted upon to improve their business?

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

Not long ago, when customers had an issue with poor product or service, they had limited options. Either they could write a letter using pen and paper, or they could make a phone call hoping to talk with someone who could make a difference. Getting the company’s attention was only the beginning. Getting a response was another story.

Today’s world of customer feedback has evolved far beyond a phone call or a letter. A customer today can use a smartphone to make a complaint or use online chat. They can send an email or text to family and friends, or even tweet and blog negative news to thousands at a time. In fact, I recently learned that there are more than 100 million blogs and web forums in the English language alone — and more than 2 million Tweets in a typical day.

The point is, when customers are talking about your organization, do you hear it? And even more important, do you react and respond? Today’s customer really is in charge of the conversation, and businesses today must listen and respond to these new and critical communication channels if they’re going to stay on top of the issues and control the perception of their name and brand.

So how do you build a quality Voice of the Customer (VOC) or feedback program? What are the most important elements for automated feedback technology and solutions? Experts recommend the following:

• Do-it-yourself surveys are still critical for today’s enterprise. Departmental managers need to execute smart surveys on their own.
• Transactional surveys take many forms including receipt-based, IVR, Text/SMS, online, email or print. These are usually departmentally-based programs that rerun the same post-event survey with the intent of rescuing customers.
• More sophisticated VOC programs include relationship surveys that dive deeper into understanding customer attitudes and turnover risks. They usually involve one or many departments, sometimes CEOs or even the entire c-suite, and are part of the company-wide culture.
• New tools to pull unstructured comments from social media platforms are becoming critical to staying on top of unsolicited feedback. You should consider a VOC solution that has this function built in.
• Mobile and SMS surveys are the wave of the future and the way the younger generation communicates. Be sure to incorporate feedback tools that can interact with mobile devices.
• And don’t forget text analytics and text mining tools to round out your solution. These tools will simplify your efforts to understand the many verbatim comments that come into your organization. It’s timely and expensive to sort through them manually. Advanced tools can do this for you.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect VOC system to get started. Get going today. You can improve as you go, and be sure to build in your program a practice to close the loop with customers. They want to know what you did with their feedback, even if it’s not what they were hoping to hear. As Jeremy Whyte, Director of Customer Feedback with Oracle said, “It’s not enough to listen to the voice of the customer — the feedback must be acted upon.”

Customer loyalty is no longer driven by products but by experiences that create emotion. Emotion is created when the customer gets something they are not expecting. Listening to their needs and concerns and then creating an action plan to change your business practices will help you achieve this.

My last business trip resulted in no less than four feedback opportunities: the airline, the hotel, the rental car company and the travel agency.  Each of these organizations sought my feedback to help improve my customer experience.  Marvelous!

It seems every time I buy a product or service, the provider offers the opportunity to give them some feedback through a customer survey. Although the feedback opportunities are wonderful, my service providers are mired in the details of asking about the logistics of their service. Executing flawlessly merely provides them feedback that they delivered what I expected. This is useful information, yet often empty. In fact, we call these feedback surveys “happy charts,” meaning that an extremely high percentage, as high as 90%, of customers, are “happy” with the experience they just had unless a significant service failure occurred or an expectation went unmet.

In the early stages of truly understanding what drives loyalty and advocacy, many of my clients focus on the details of executing a process without failure. Basic service/product quality is really the metric being captured. Yet meeting basic quality expectations isn’t enough today to enchant customers.

Voice of the Customer programs fall behind by focusing primarily on the quality of an experience. Knowing if a customer was greeted properly, if reservations were in order, and if the rental car had fuel are measures of basic service quality, core expectations of value for money. Today’s leaders take the next step and tease out what drives customers to extol the virtues of the experience.

Last year a colleague stayed at a hotel that was very close to the airport and provided a pickup service. He arrived and contacted the hotel for pickup, but they never arrived. Being tired and hungry, he jumped in a taxi. While he was checking into the hotel, the desk clerk asked if he was the gentleman that had requested pick-up. Finding out that he was, the clerk reimbursed his taxi fare. Wow! More than six months later, he still talks about how delighted he was with the hotel and recommends it constantly.

Does your organization know what customers love about you?

The whole love thing sounds a little squishy doesn’t it? That’s the challenge. Gaining the emotional connection with customers is truly the goal of any business. Emotional connection drives loyalty and advocacy. The Walt Disney Company knows what guests love about their experience; Apple knows what users love about their products. Do you?

The next time you review customer feedback results, see if you have the answer to these questions:

1. What did your customers love about their experience with you today?
2. Is there anything that they’ll tell their friends not to miss about their experience with you?
3. If customers could change one single thing about their experience, what would that be?

Look beyond the basic quality of the process to discover the heart of the experience. This will help you build an experience that truly enchants your customers.

It’s now commonplace for companies to ask for customer feedback by email, phone or even the mail. But that’s just one factor in VOC success. CustomerThink research has identified the following five major pitfalls to VOC success:

1. Lack of executive support to drive change

Being customer-centric is easy to say but hard to do without executive leadership. For example, despite proclamations of being “customer-driven,” a large software company found itself out of touch with consumers who felt the vendor pushed the technology and didn’t pay enough attention to implementation and ease-of-use issues. A comprehensive VOC program identified the issues, but what really mattered was CEO driving action. The key to the company’s success, according to the VOC program leader, was that top executives “believe with heart and soul in the importance of a VOC program and then drive real cultural change.”

2. Garbage in, garbage out

With VOC programs, you’re collecting customer feedback (input) so you can get insights you can act on (output). If you ask customers the wrong questions, that’s just garbage in. If your VOC program is built on faulty logic about what really impacts customer loyalty, you’ll waste time and money making changes that don’t matter, or actually make things worse. A worldwide restaurant chain found, for instance, that while good food was naturally essential, the key differentiator was in fact the “hospitality” of team members. This insight helped the chain make better hiring decisions and invest in training that would improve brand reputation.

3. Employees aren’t motivated to be customer-focused

Employees are people and tend to do things in their own self interests. So it shouldn’t come as a shock if rewards to decrease “average handle time”—a measure of efficiency—motivates call center agents to rush to get customers off the phone. Sadly, these tactics usually don’t save any money because the customer calls back or uses other support channels. Take a tip from Zappos, a popular retailer founded 10 years ago as an online shoe shore. In the Zappos call center, “customer loyalty representatives” are measured on First Call Resolution (FCR) and rewarded for the quality of conversations, not speed.

4. Listening with only one ear

Analyzing quantitative feedback from customers is like listening to customers with only ear. The other ear should be used to understand customers through the unstructured and often unsolicited feedback they provide. To start, text analytics can help listen to customers via their written comments on relationship and transaction surveys. But many other sources can provide unsolicited feedback, such as web site forms, email messages, chat messages and call center agent logs. One U.S airline was able to tie comments to a specific aircraft or even a seat number to help find and fix problems that have a direct impact on the customer experience.

5. Ignoring social voices

Consumer usage of social media has exploded in recent years, including blogs, review sites, Facebook and more recently, Twitter. This provides lots of options to rave about great experiences or vent about bad ones. Now, it’s true that social media is a chaotic and noisy world where it can be challenging to “separate the wheat from the chaff.” And besides, how do you know if the complainers are really your customers? Despite these challenges, can you really afford to ignore social voices?

Avoid these five pitfalls and you’ll be well on your way to success with your Voice of the Customer program.

Net Promoter score (NPS) provides a simple and valuable way for businesses to measure customer satisfaction and promotion. The assumption is that the more likely customers are to recommend, the more likely those recommendations will turn into new business and revenue. But the question remains: how to grow the promoter group. Businesses that successfully identify what makes their promoters tick can more successfully bring other customers into the profitable promoter group.

The Allegiance National Benchmarking study found that banking customers with high engagement or emotional loyalty were much more effective at turning recommendations into new customers. This isn’t so surprising considering that customers with high engagement are more than satisfied, so are pre-disposed to do business. In fact, they are excited to do business with a company. Their excitement translates into more frequent and effective recommendations.

Engaged customers not only recommend a brand, but they identify themselves as being proud of their association with it, and they identify that brand as ‘the best’. Their emotional loyalty makes them more likely to recommend and bring in new business. The link between engagement and NPS is clear. Engaged customers had an NPS of 85%, and Disengaged customers were at -80%. On-the-fence, or Swing customer had an NPS of 10%. Allegiance National Benchmarking data for the last 12 months reveals that 32% of banking customers are engaged.

Our data from Q2 of 2009 through Q1 2010 shows that engaged customers are four times more effective at bringing in new customers. Out of almost 2500 banking customers, 779 were engaged customers. Of the 779 engaged customers, more than 1500 positive referrals were made, resulting in 337 new bank customers.

The remaining 1683 customers made fewer than 1000 positive recommendations resulting in only 168 new customers. On average each engaged customer gave positive recommendations to two of their friends or colleagues. By comparison, only 16% of less engaged customers gave any sort of positive recommendation. In other words, it took about six non-engaged customers to make one recommendation.

This same pattern is evident in data gathered by Allegiance clients. It takes about two engaged customers to bring in a new customer, compared to 10 lukewarm or marginally satisfied customers needed to bring in a new customer.

Measuring engagement and its associated drivers can help drive up NPS. By measuring and exploring actionable engagement drivers, a business can then act in the most impactful way to increase engagement. Creating feelings of engagement in the minds and hearts of customers empowers them to be more frequent and effective promoters.