In our recent webinar with Forrester Research and Symantec, there were a number of questions we often receive from individuals learning more about how to deliver successful customer experience/Net Promoter® programs. In the next few blog posts, I will provide my thoughts to these questions and encourage our readers to share their experiences as well.
Q: Do these programs work more effectively when there are multiple touch points and a relatively small number of customers? Or is feedback from a high volume of customers ideal?
The answer to this question is ideally both. However, you have to evaluate your own ability to respond before engaging customers in the feedback process. Let me elaborate.
1. An ideal program monitors the customer experience at key touch points AND measures the overall relationship health with processes that run quarterly to evaluate the customer experience across the entire journey. This means collecting “transactional” feedback at touch points such as installation, service and support, and from selected customers to provide an overall evaluation of your relationship health.
2. We would also suggest that you engage as many of your customers in providing feedback as possible. This means that you get beyond the sample approach of traditional market research to providing an opportunity for any and all customers to provide feedback. Creating multiple feedback touch points provides a comprehensive view of the customer experience at an enterprise level.
However, to deliver against multiple touch points and all customers, you need to have the right information infrastructure and business processes in place to do the following:
- Manage global touch rules and survey toxicity. This includes managing your no-send list and comparing when prior surveys have been deployed to customers so you don’t bombard them with requests for feedback. Many organizations have data fragmented across the enterprise and have to build the right infrastructure to address these needs.
- Be sure the volume of your infrastructure allows for a closed-loop process. If you ask for feedback, you are accountable to your customers to close the loop and let them know what you are doing about it. That may require both “1:1” follow-up, and a “1: many” communication that commits to actions you are taking. If you aren’t going to close the loop, don’t collect the feedback as customers may feel as though you have wasted their time. This does more damage than good.
More questions and answers will be addressed in up coming posts. I am here in London as we begin our Net Promoter Conference. Be sure to watch the blog postings coming from the conference to learn more about what other companies are doing and how they are seeing results.
