At a recent MaritzCX event, we held an interactive power hour facilitated peer-to-peer discussion about creating a strategic action plan to generate the expectations and actionability of insights. The room was all a buzz with CX professionals, who were sharing ideas and discussing the methods that work best when it comes to driving action throughout their organizations.
We all know that gathering insight from customers doesn’t help “you” or “them” if you don’t use that information to make an impactful change. In the CX profession, we like to measure and look at metrics—but influencing people, teams and organizations to act differently is one of the most important and difficult things we need to do.
This interactive discussion pinpointed 3 strategic ways to drive action throughout your organization:
1. Drive Ownership at All Levels of Your Business
Empower the lines of business with data, so that action can be taken by the owners who can make changes for customers.
Engage the business lines in your CX work from day one. If there is a certain customer pain that a business line would like to learn about, bring them into the process from the beginning to develop a research learning plan, so that they have accountability with you. When the insight is brought to the forefront, action can be taken immediately, because the business lines have been involved from the beginning.
Provide a Playbook or repository of best practices with peer review to share with your front line employees. If you know what works well for the customer, share it and give your teams the ability to rate the information on an interactive platform. This enables peers to know when something is working well, or when it needs to be revised.
2. Don’t Forget the Importance of Data Integration
Use both Voice of Customer (VoC) and operational data metrics. Do not report them separately. Your data should be reported as one, as this will help you and your organization develop a better understanding of customers.
Leverage, test, and learn. When insights come in, they are telling us something. Use that information, get into market, measure the gaps and make sure to drive the right business outcomes (from what customers are asking for). Listen, test and learn is the key to success.
It is important to try and solve the right business problems. You now have all your data integrated into a comprehensive story of what your customers are saying, as well as what the business outcome is. At this point, you can rally around what problem you want to solve and then use the right metrics to carry that forward.
Use the data. You need to make the data immediately available and transparent to all employees throughout your organization.
3. Collaboration that Goes Beyond Your Team’s Cubicle Walls
A hub and spoke cross-functional model can be an effective way to help with accountability and actionability throughout your organization.
The hub is the CX team
The spokes are all other organizations/teams that own and drive CX/EX action within their part of the organization. They are the ones that are truly accountable for driving change.
Develop a thorough communication strategy. A communication plan that conveys the required actions and the business value of the change should leverage the customer feedback, put it into effect, and inform the organization about it, and the changes that have taken place.
I’d like to thank Amy Jo Fisher, American Family Insurance for facilitating the event discussion.
Identifying the Problems Your Customers Encounter, Is Only Half the Battle
Knowing how to resolve them, however, is what really matters. Many companies, while committed to improving the customer experience, are not where they want to be with their Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative. In particular, the frontline managers and employees who directly shape customer experience lack the information and resources they need to take effective action and fully engage with their CX programs.
MaritzCX has conducted extensive research and interviewed employees at a variety of levels and companies who are responsible for translating survey results into action. Our research revealed several common issues for frontline employees:
Feeling left out of the design;
Not fully understanding the story; and
Not knowing what to do even when they do understand
When CX programs fall short in critical areas like these, the front line employees disengage—and that’s a problem. After all, these programs don’t just exist to feed corporate dashboards; they also support and drive actions to improve the customer experience.
So, what’s to be done? It starts with acknowledging the front line as stakeholders in the process.
1. Give Front line Employees Their Own Voice
Front line employees can develop customer loyalty, attract new customers, build your company’s reputation, and drive your company’s profit. It’s important, then, to make the front line an equal partner in the design process and tailor the reporting engines to their needs. Here are some recommendations:
Involve Them in Program Design: Include front line managers as active members of the design team to learn their perspectives firsthand—after all, these are the people creating and delivering much of what the customers experience.
Give Them What They Crave—the “Real” Voice of the Customer: Verbatim customer comments provide a rich source of information and value to the front line. Sophisticated text analysis tools allow survey designers to shift the balance from 100% close-ended questionnaires to those that actively seek open-ended feedback.
Offer Them Questionnaire Real Estate and Flexibility: Mass customization techniques are making it possible for organizations to tailor their customer experience surveys for individual operating units or groups. Smart organizations will also include a “flex” section in their surveys to accommodate topical or time-sensitive issues of interest.
Give Them Easy-to-Use Feedback Mechanisms: Consider developing a system that encourages the front line to provide regular feedback on the survey process, e.g. one that is built directly into the reporting system for added convenience.
2. Use the Right Tool for the Right Job
Collecting the right information is only the beginning; you must also make the information easy to access, use, and understand. Today’s customer experience reporting portals can be difficult to use, non-intuitively organized, and full of distracting elements that obscure the message for the end user.
Employees with different responsibilities require fundamentally different information. A retail manager for a bank, for example, does not use the same information as someone in headquarters. Focusing on the front line and their specific needs helps the organization design a more effective reporting system and user interface. Most industries with a retail operation have at least three user roles with different needs:
Headquarters/Corporate Users
Regional or Area Managers
Frontline (Unit) Managers
It is important to design your reporting system with the end users in mind and equip employees with tools that cater to their individual needs.
3. Remember, It’s All About Action
It’s easy to get caught up in the details of sampling and questionnaire design and forget what equally matters: inspiring and motivating people to do something with the information. To do this, you need to deploy a consistent VoC process that aligns the right people and processes to enact meaningful change.
The ideal reporting system will include a “cafeteria plan” of pre-configured tools that support actions at the unit level:
Performance MetricsTools help managers identify and prioritize the areas they need to focus on to improve the customer experience. These tools can be aligned with organizational goals or used to analyze the relationship between customer experience and business outcomes such as loyalty. In either implementation, it encourages unit managers to understand the potential outcomes of their efforts.
Employee Coaching Tools, when built directly into customer experience management (CEM) systems, allow front line managers to collaborate with their employees and address areas of concern or opportunity. Alternatively, when linked to the organization’s learning management system (LMS), they can redirect employees who are struggling in a certain area to applicable training courses.
Service Recovery Tools, such as unit-level case management systems, allow front line managers to identify at-risk customers and reach out to resolve the problem. Additionally, managers can assign specific tasks to employees, close out concerns, and monitor case aging and incidence rates.
Diagnostic Processing Improvement Tools, when implemented at the unit level, allow front line managers to use a gated action planning process to resolve their specific problem areas. A well-designed reporting system should include a section to develop and track unit-level action plans.
Conclusion: Ringing the Cash Register
The investment return on VoC programs has never been in the measurement—it’s what companies do with the information that has the potential to ring the cash register. Getting the right information into the hands of unit managers and other front line employees is critical to improving the customer experience. The best systems:
Offer tools that support effective service recovery, employee coaching, and action planning;
Link to learning systems; and
Contain monitoring tools that drive action-ability and collaboration across all levels of the organization.
Anything less and you risk disengaging your employees and selling your VoC initiative short.
Customer centricity is a hot topic in business these days, as more and more companies challenge themselves to foster a “customer-centric culture.” But that’s a tall order – not to mention an ambiguous one – and it raises a number of questions, such as:
What is a customer-centric culture anyway?
Why is it important?
Who is responsible?
How do you inspire a customer-centric culture?
We are actively leading a customer centricity transformation at VMware, and while every organization is unique, our answers to these questions may prove useful as you embark on your own journey. And the word “journey,” when it comes to a customer-centric culture, is key.
For us, it all started with an unwavering passion to do the right thing for our customers, and over time it became clear that we needed to develop a deliberate strategy around it. We’ll talk more about our strategy later, but for now let’s break down the basics.
What is a Customer-Centric Culture, Anyway?
Customer centricity is more than a concept – it’s a mission. At VMware, we believe that customer centricity goes beyond creating great customer experiences – we put the customer at the center of everything we do. Customer centricity is a core company value, a way of thinking, and an approach to doing business.
To achieve that state of being, I can’t overstate the importance of humanizing the customer for your employees. Real culture shift happens when your employees walk in your customer’s shoes and genuinely understand how their individual roles impact the customer experience (even if they aren’t customer-facing!). With understanding comes empathy, and with empathy comes motivation to make a difference.
Why is it Important?
Ah, the million-dollar question. Starting at the top with our CEO Pat Gelsinger, we firmly believe it is our responsibility to provide the best possible experience for our customers. After all, VMware wouldn’t exist without them. In short, it’s the right thing to do.
We also know that consumers and businesses today have more options than ever before, and if we don’t deliver the kind of experience our customers expect, they won’t continue doing business with us. VMware thrives when our customers successfully harness our solutions to meet their business needs – so it makes sense business-wise for us to listen and act on our customers’ needs.
Who is Responsible?
Every employee plays a role in the customer experience. Whether front-of-house or back-office, we all contribute to our customers’ perception of our company.
At VMware, our Customer Advocacy team drives the customer centricity strategy which helps every team, from Leadership on down, understand their role in creating an exceptional customer experience.
In my view, an effective culture strategy has two main components:
Active participation from the entire Leadership team. Employees will prioritize what their leaders are focused on. We work with all functional leaders to ensure their customer obsession talk tracks are woven into every major communication, from all-hands meetings to newsletters; and that they convey a sense of importance and urgency, focusing directly on the customer experience elements that are in the wheelhouse of their audience.
Individual employee customer-centric decision making. We strive to empower every employee with the insights, resources, and independence necessary to operate in the best interests of both VMware and its customers. To facilitate customer-centric decision making, we also strive to ensure that customers are top of mind for all employees, day in and day out. This is where customer-centric culture comes in, and it is why we’ve fully dedicated a member of our team to lead culture programs that create customers for life.
How Do You Inspire a Customer-Centric Culture?
Inspiring a customer-centric culture doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey, and my team has learned plenty of lessons along the way. Some of our efforts have been more effective than others, but this is to be expected.
One of our notable successes to date has been VMware’s annual celebration of Customer Experience (CX) Day, an industry holiday. We think that CX Day is akin to a wedding anniversary! While you work hard at your customer relationships every day of the year, as you do your marriage, CX Day is a great opportunity to pause, celebrate, and show gratitude for the relationship you have with your customers. Our worldwide celebrations have engaged employees via interactive journey mapping, tours of a customer story “museum,” and other activities to acquire feedback on how to improve the customer experience. See how we celebrated CX Day in 2018!
While CX Day is impactful, we obviously want our employees to think about customer experience more than once a year! To that end, we created a global ‘CX Leaders’ program to cultivate a network of customer enthusiasts across VMware. The inaugural set of leaders were prior recipients of an internal award recognizing individuals who went above and beyond to deliver a great customer experience. The Leaders conceptualized a program known as Customer Appreciation Week, which focused on the power of an unexpected thank you. Over the course of the week, our sales teams reached out to nearly 4,000 customers to thank them for their commitment to doing business with VMware – and that was it. That’s right – no sales pitch, no upsell, no renewal prompt. The customers were surprised and delighted by the display of appreciation with no strings attached – and for us it was a simple way to maintain relationships and reinforce our commitment to our customers.
Our Closed Loop program is another area where we invest to engage employees and strengthen customer relationships. The program connects dissatisfied customers with VMware employees to dive deeper into feedback provided through various listening posts. In these conversations, the VMware employee seeks to understand the root cause of dissatisfaction and build a relationship with the customer, then follows up with the appropriate internal business unit(s) to develop improvement plans. The program mutually benefits VMware’s customers and employees, and it’s one of the best opportunities for an employee to walk in our customer’s shoes.
Closing Thoughts
I’d like to leave you with a final thought, which is that customer centricity isn’t binary – it’s a journey that begins with customer focus and extends to customer obsession. For us at VMware, it represents a fundamental business transformation that will extend far into our future. The best is yet to come!
I discovered a surprising truth after three years as Customer Retention Manager for a large volume dealer in Houston. There is a hidden enemy that must be addressed before any customer retention initiatives can be achieved. It is the no. 1 enemy of client retention, and yet most practitioners fail to recognize it, let alone address it.
It’s the reason why many dealers are left with small, gradual changes in their retention efforts that pale in contrast to the huge budgets and time spent acquiring new customers. But by keeping an existing customer, who is apt to buy again, dealers could be spending many times less to obtain the same amount new vehicle sales. As proof of this, the 2018 Cox Automotive Service Study found that buyers who returned to the selling dealer for service in the past 12 months were 74% more likely to return to that selling dealer for their next vehicle purchase. Returning service customers were 74% more likely to buy their next vehicle from that same selling store! Those who didn’t return for service in the past 12 months were only 35% more likely to return for their next purchase. That should gain the attention of most dealer GM’s, who generally come from the sales side of the business.
And speaking of sold customers returning for their next vehicle purchase, that same Cox study revealed a negative by-product of today’s obsession with “conquesting” sales from other dealers. “Not a convenience location” (no. 5 reason in the 2015 survey)moved up to the second most given reason for new vehicle purchasers not returning to the dealer where they purchased. So, there is a very good chance that many of today’s conquest vehicle sales will not return to that original dealer for service because they live out of the area where the selling dealer is located.
So, what is the number 1 enemy of retail auto customer retention?
No, the number 1 enemy isn’t a limited budget. Although a sufficient budget is necessary, it’s not the real enemy of a successful retention strategy.
Lack of buy-in from the dealer and management? It’s important, but the reason store leadership doesn’t get solidly behind a retention push is directly tied to the no. 1 enemy.
Silos are a real problem. You must address them, and it is not simple to do so, but they are not the real problem.
Competing initiatives are often cited as a reason for lack of meaningful progress in addressing customer retention. But these agendas usually directly support the number 1 enemy of retention. And that focus distracts management from seriously directing resources in the support of retention.
The lack of a robust technical infrastructure? Yes, retention can be aided with better technology, but it is not the true obstacle to retention.
Lack of training? It certainly helps to have trained employees, but if the average auto retailer really believed in retaining existing customers as a primary strategy, they would find the budget and time to train their workers. HINT: All the training, technology and “knowledge” in the world is not going to thoroughly address the number 1 enemy of retaining customers!
It’s transactionalism, an all-consuming focus by dealers on the “deal” or the “RO” is the number 1 enemy of a successful customer retention program. And that obsession consumes both the larger part of store budgets as well as the time spent by the staff.So, what is the number 1 enemy of a successful customer retention transformation?
Transactionalism describes the decades old, deeply ingrained tradition of placing the transaction front and center as the primary strategy for most auto retailers. And while the transaction has always been the primary focus of showroom sales, it’s just as prevalent these days in the service lane. Customer facing employees are paid to maximize and close “deals/ROs”, and because of that, retaining customers takes a back seat.
I’ve heard it said time and time again that there is little customer loyalty these days in retail auto. But how would we know? If the industry is so intoxicated with the transaction, and much less so with retaining the customer, it’s no wonder customer loyalty is perceived as dead. I spoke directly to this reality in a past MaritzCX Cafe post titled Retail Auto: Client Loyalty is not Dead, But Client Follow-Up is!
But there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Early last year, one of the largest automakers launched the first ever OEM customer rewards program and another major manufacturer followed soon thereafter. And there is strong evidence that other OEMs are pivoting more and more towards implementing strategies that handsomely reward dealers and their associates for focusing on retention.
That’s great, but the big question left is, how are the OEMs going to move the needle of retention forward, when most of the dealers are still consumed with “transaction?” This is all about changing behavior at the dealership, which is the toughest challenge of all.
There is no feedback more important for companies to utilize than the candid, true thoughts and feelings of employees and customers. In fact, having a detailed understanding of your brand’s emotional connection to consumers can produce positive financial results and retain valuable customers, while even attracting new ones.
Behavioral science is the study of human behaviors; the causes and the effects. There’s much we can learn from people’s actions and decisions that can help businesses to draw conclusions and make predictions that ultimately impact them financially. From product development to sales and services, every person in the journey and every step that’s taken by an organization will contribute overall to the emotional trust that consumers have for a brand.
According to an article published by The Harvard Business Review, on average “fully connected” customers are 52% more valuable to businesses than those who are just “highly satisfied” with the brand or service. Any company, from any industry can forge powerful connections to their customers by properly identifying and aligning themselves to the specific emotions that drive profitable behaviors. The first step is to identify how your customers feel and find the places to fill the gap between general satisfaction and full-on loyalty.
Be Aware of the Brain and How It Works
As humans, our brains are always working around the clock. Everyone has motivators, expectations, and experiences that influence how we feel and react. We will all bring to the table different elements and can’t change how our brains are wired. Constantly, our brains are taking in information and even making quick judgments or decisions on a moment’s notice. A huge number of daily decisions are made intuitively, and most decisions rely on feelings and emotions more than rationality. Especially when it comes to “gut feelings,” something we trust within ourselves more than any outside logic or mental analysis.
And unfortunately, although our brains are quite amazing, the constant stream of brain activity actually deteriorates the quality of our decisions over time, leading to an irrational trade-off in decision making. This is called decision fatigue.
For example, after a long day, do you want to go home and cook a meal, or just simply get takeout? Earlier in the day, before mental exhaustion kicks in, going home to cook a nice meal might sound healthy and cost effective. But by the end of the day, one might lean towards take-out instead because it’s easy and quick. Neither decision is necessarily good or bad, it’s just all about the condition of our minds prior to making decisions, that determine the amount of concentration delegated to certain choices over others.
Another factor that drives perception is the “peak-end” rule. This is whether an experience is remembered as pleasant or not, based only on the peak moment, or the end of the experience. Instead of a “general” overall recollection, it’s only what is remembered most, that drives the perception.
In order to manage and control perceptions, organizations need to pay equal attention to the emotional side of their customer experiences, as well as the operational processes. When customers don’t feel like their concerns are being heard or met, they will go where they will be addressed, and that doesn’t guarantee that you keep their business.
Learning to leverage behavioral science will give companies the ability to identify customer emotions with financial impact and provide them with a “neuro” road-map for maintaining loyalty. Because being aware of the brain, and how it works, can bridge the gaps in any customer and employee experience; if only you are willing to listen.
The Emotional Insight That Awaits You
Lots of emotional insight is waiting to be unlocked, but where to begin? In order to maximize opportunities from emotional connections, companies must examine every customer touch point and find opportunities where they can enhance the emotional motivators. It’s important to understand what you need to measure, and where.
The following questions can be helpful to begin with:
What promotes consumer behavior, and what emotions contribute to decisions?
What type of personas are being interacted with?
Who is interacting with who?
What is trying to be accomplished overall?
What are customers going through, and how do they feel along the way?
A great way to collect answers to these questions are through customer journey maps. Journey mapping helps to interpret what your customer will go through, and what they are actually feeling.
Throughout the customer journey, there are places to keep tabs on what consumers are thinking and feeling during certain moments. To find crucial touch and pain points, Quantitative surveys with open ended unstructured data, analyzed with text analytics, can detect in customer language a variety of topics that stand out. Creating and understanding a range of feelings and experiences from the collected data, especially the intense ones, closes the gap between customer expectations and the actual experience. These customer insights can determine where damage is being done and allow for prevention of future occurrences.
All the right experiences can be designed to reach the right touch points when you acknowledge the brain and determine the proper “feelings” for your employees and customers.
Set the Bar for Proactively Understanding Your Customers
A recent MaritzCX study revealed that 80% of the companies who proactively gather, analyze, manage and use insights into customers’ feelings have better financial performance, year-over-year.
Whether you have a pre-existing customer experience program for your business or are jump-starting a new one, first ask yourself, “Do you know how your customers feel about their experiences they are having with your brand?”
Emotional connections are no longer a mystery and can be utilized by businesses in-tune with their customers, as a competitive advantage to growth. At MaritzCX we work with businesses to prioritize and focus on what elements have the biggest emotional impact.
When you work in customer service you deal with hundreds of emails in a day. So, it can be easy to lose sight of just how important each one is. A single negative interaction can be enough to turn a person off your business.
People like to feel as if their problem matters to the person on the other end. Giving your emails a personal feel can be very helpful in facilitating positive and effective interactions between customer support and clients.
Use their name
Start by greeting them with a friendly hello before you dive into solving their issue. Use their name. The way you greet the customer sets the tone for the rest of the interaction, so it’s important. Don’t be weird and address them as ‘customer,’ or goodness forbid, by their case number. People like to feel as if they’re having an interaction with an actual human and not a machine. There’s no quicker way to make a customer feel like they’re dealing with a soulless robot than to address as their case number.
Get everyone on the same page
“Summarize what is happening currently with their issue to ensure everyone is on the same page. Don’t be afraid to ask the customer for confirmation if you think they might be misunderstanding,” advises Brian Sorensen, email marketer at BigAssignments. It’s much better to sort things out sooner than later. If you’re dealing with an ongoing situation or one that is complicated, then it’s never a bad idea to review what is happening. Rephrasing things back to the customer is a great way to make sure you are understanding each other.
Promise them a solution
Conduct your customer service interactions in a way that minimizes the number of customers checking in to see how things are progressing. Keep your customer updated on how things are going; this should happen at least once a day. Give them expectations. Let them know when you will be contacting them again with an update. You can’t guarantee them a solution in that timeframe, but you can guarantee them a check-in. You’ll find this makes your customers a lot less anxious, people like to know what to expect, especially when something isn’t working for them.
Be realistic about the situation
Be honest with your customers about what you’ll be able to help them with. When you overpromise you just create more headaches for both you and the customer. When you mess something up, own it, and apologize to the customer. If the product fails, apologize. Making excuses for failing or the product failing will only make the customer angrier. Focus on fixing the problem and being transparent. People appreciate honesty, and even if they are upset, they will still appreciate you owning the situation.
Canned replies work
Yes, you read that correctly. Used properly, canned replies can be very effective and save you a ton of time. The trick is to know when it is appropriate to send out a canned reply. In customer service you’ll find that a lot of interactions start repeating themselves, and for those common situations, a canned reply is fine. You can still write canned replies that feel personal and not as if they came from a robot. Automating the basic replies leaves you with more time to deal with more complicated situations that arise. Ensure your sending these at the most suitable times for your customers by using an email scheduling tool.
Write better emails with these online resources
Writing is a skill that requires regular practice and fine-tuning. Punctuation, spelling, using the correct word — it all matters. If English is your second language, or you slept through English class, here are some resources to help you nail your text and avoid coming off as sloppy.
Grammarly and Grammar Guide – Check out these grammar resources. They are perfect for simplifying grammar and making it easy for you to understand and use English correctly.
WritingExplained– Is it “#001D30” or “gray”? This blog covers these common mistakes. Don’t let errors ruin your otherwise great emails.
Conclusion
An email will never be as personal as a face to face interaction, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make it as personal and pleasant as possible for the customer. Small things make a huge difference when it comes to customer service emails. Each positive interaction counts and helps build a relationship between the brand and the customer. Use these six tips to make your customer service emails feel personal.
Grace Carter is a content manager at BoomEssays services. She creates business presentations, teaches interns and curates support communications.
It's hard to find consensus when it comes to airport rankings. Slideshows here, listicles there — it's always a matter of conjecture and PR. That's why the Lexalytics marketing team set out to define the definitive, data-driven ranking of America's 10 busiest airports. Use this as a resource when planning all your travel and layovers.
Google this: “best airports in the US 2018”
Do you see that? 660 million results. There are gigabytes upon gigabytes of articles across the internet about the pros and cons of various US airports. However, there’s rarely consensus between the many listicles, slideshows and travel blogs. So, Lexalytics, an InMoment company, mined social data from ten of the busiest airports in America. The goal? Rate these airports based on actual customer experience signal. The result: a ranked list driven by data science, not editorializations and PR.
After this project concluded, Lexalytics partnered with Gensler’s Los Angeles Aviation and Transportation Studio, the industry leader in global airport architecture. Together, the teams are completing a firm-wide research project that, in the words of Gensler, aims at “leveraging sentiment analysis to inform the planning and design of airports.”
Architects Kate O’Connor, Justin Wortman and Andy Huang from Gensler have been using Lexalytics’ Semantria Storage & Visualization (Semantria SV) to mine social media data about dozens of America’s airports, with the aim being to find the signal in the noise of customer feedback. Through Semantria’s sentiment analysis technology, the team is generating deep, data-driven insights into what travelers and staff value in their airport experience. It bears mentioning that the information and views presented in this article are Lexalytics alone. This list does not in any way represent the opinions of Gensler or its affiliates.
Methodology
This simplified example serves to illustrate the basic concepts behind rules-based sentiment analysis. In other words, -1 is very negative and +1 is very positive.
We’ve taken 30,748 Facebook comments from ten of America’s busiest airports and ran them through our Semantria Storage & Visualization platform. A bit of perspective: 30,748 Facebook comments equates to 869,973 words, enough to fill 2,768 pages. That’s more than double the size of War and Peace!
Using natural language processing, we algorithmically sorted the airports based on real customer feedback. In other words, the ranking is based on an airport’s average customer sentiment, rather than opinion or star rating. Want to know more about the factors that influenced each airport’s ranking? Click on each airport’s name to review our deep dive into customer sentiment.
If you read our earlier SFO article, it should come as no surprise that San Francisco International Airport tops the list for customer satisfaction. The airport began using social listening in 2017, making improvements aligned with customer demand. Judi Mosqueda, the Director of Project Management for SFO, oversaw the investment of $7.3 million towards improving the airport’s wayfinding experience. This project addresses a major customer concern. The data shows how the social mentions of wayfinding at SFO jumps from very negative to very positive in a year’s time. It’s clear that customers can be your best business adviser if you listen properly – using the right tools.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=””]I fly out of SFO for work and fun roughly 30 times per year. Yes there are weather delays, but this airport is truly a pleasure to use! The terminals are all being updated or have recently been updated, their [sic] are improvements in the weather delays, and there are plenty of flight options to choose from. The food has been getting better as the terminal renovations finish, which makes the weather delays more tolerable… The staff is great at serving the customers that pack in as delays stack up. The lounges are where I’ve noticed the biggest changes. American’s Terminal 2 Admirals Club is immaculate! If you have the pleasure of flying through SFO I highly recommend it![/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=””]Flights frequently get delayed due to ‘weather.’ You can play the weather card here and there, but when half your flights throughout the year are delayed due to ‘weather,’ that’s called a ‘scheduling’ problem.[/perfectpullquote]
What happens in Vegas can also skew the feelings of travelers who make their way through Las Vegas McCarran International Airport. Negatively scored reviews often criticize aspects of the city well beyond the control of airport stakeholders. Using a properly tuned social listening tool like Semantria SV, we see that often the negative customer sentiment is aimed at the City of Sin itself. We also learn that many travelers seem to enjoy the idea of having slot machines in the airport, while others found them an unpleasant reminder of past decisions. When it comes to the airport services themselves, like complimentary wifi on the tarmac, customer reviews score very positively. Overall, travelers find themselves engaged, on time, and happy while at LAS.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]Flew Virgin America for the first time. Classic funk hit ‘Flashlight’ was blasting through the speakers at ticketing! Gotta give them at least four stars for that alone! Also, won at gambling in the terminal. Even better? You get to enjoy super-fast FREE wifi![/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]I liked it but they need to get rid of the slots. After a week n [sic] Vegas I didn’t want to see another slot. I was so ready to go home. Four days is plenty n [sic] that town.[/perfectpullquote]
The deep-dive into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport details how the customer experience breaks all departmental silos. Dirty bathrooms, for example, exacerbate complaints about costly food. However, despite some small challenges, Sea-Tac’s positive reviews account for nearly 40% of its data set — not bad. Topics ranging from the attitude and helpfulness of staff to the quality of the (expensive) food all score positively. By using smart NLP solutions to its advantage, Sea-Tac could quite easily make the changes needed to find its way to the top of this list.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]A welcome stop in a long trip the food is good a little pricey but I guess that’s to be expected, train ride was nice and quick and the staff was friendly!!![/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Why are all airport’s food so darn expensive? $12 for water and crackers??? Additionally the terminals aren’t equal in terms of food options. Previously I’ve never had an issue with bathrooms but I gotta say this experience was DISGUSTING. Hair everywhere. Gag me. But otherwise it’s great, the staff is very friendly and very helpful![/perfectpullquote]
As the busiest airport in the world, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is bound to face some challenges. Through the power of NLP and social listening, it becomes clear that its biggest problem is with the wayfinding experience, despite recent and costly renovations. The data also shows that the saving grace for Atlanta is the staff, who are reviewed as courteous and helpful. Still, no amount of good cheer and manners can make up for the navigation nightmare of trying to find the proper gate.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=””]I had to navigate this huge airport with two small children, luggage, and a carseat [sic]. I can honestly say any attendant who saw me was more than helpful. Directing me to TSA, picking us up from the park and ride, and just being considerate. A large place but the staff is more than capable.[/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Nice airport, good restaurants… only complaint — the signage could use a little bit of work. I stepped off the train to [sic]soon because of the confusing signage between terminal T and the baggage claim. (I’ve actually done this twice on two different trips :-D)[/perfectpullquote]
Denver International
Sentiment Weight: +0.15
Thanks to a colorful connection with conspiracy theorists, Denver’s reviews speak of anti-gravity rooms, the Illuminati, and “Blucifer” — the giant bucking bronco sculpture at the entrance to the airport. As detailed in the linked write-up, social listening shows many of these complaints represent a potential path for customer engagement. When you tune the results, the data show that staff get twice as many positive comments as negative ones. They also reveal that while customers don’t mind the Illuminati so much, they could go for some more hooks on bathroom stalls and an improved baggage claim experience.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]It is actually an underground Illuminati headquarters. The enormous, hideous blue horse statue with glowing red eyes next to the entrance road killed it’s [sic] sculptor before he finished it. The runway layout looks like a swastika when seen from space. There is a mural in one terminal that shows a child in a coffin. There are gargoyles on the inside of the building… Also, the people that work here are extremely nice and helpful![/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Fantastic airport ruined by terrible bag delays which are common. Waited more than 30 minutes for my bags. Unacceptable.[/perfectpullquote]
In 2017, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport ranked as both the best and worst airport (on different lists, of course). That it lands here on our list makes perfect sense as customer reviews score mostly neutral. Still, our sentiment analysis reveals that when travelers do get passionate about DFW, it’s usually about cleanliness. Interestingly, a PR director working for a DFW affiliated agency reached out to contest our findings; head over to the deep-dive article to see the exchange — and see the differences between AI and PR. A trove of positive comments highlight DFW’s inter-terminal tram system, Skylink. When properly maintained, Skylink is a unanimous crowd pleaser.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]Best airport for kids! Kids play areas and the Skylink! We purposefully will always layover at DFW because it’s always a great experience.[/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]One of the grossest airports I’ve been to. Carpet in the waiting areas is absolutely filthy, as are the seats in the sky trams as well. Not sure if they even vacuum???[/perfectpullquote]
Chicago’s position on this list is unique from the others, as the sentiment weight is skewed. The subject of a viral national news story, ORD received a flurry of one-star reviews in a short period of time. Using Lexalytics’ web dashboard, Semantria Storage & Visualization, we see occurrences of 1-star Facebook ratings jump from 11% to 58% within days of the incident. The number of 5-star ratings dropped by more than half overnight. There is no question the right social listening tool might have made all the difference to Chicago’s standing during that crucial time, a subject we explore in the article.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]Flight on time. Security line reasonable. Was not beaten and dragged off the flight I paid for by agents of an unchecked police state. So all in all a better than average experience.[/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]I’m paying for wifi and I’m using my last amount of battery to write this glowing review of O’Hare, that’s how much I’m disappointed with this airport. As a disclaimer my flight was delayed due to not being able to clear snow from the runways. I won’t fault am airline/airport for weather, but I will fault you for not being able to handle minor precipitation. Not prepared for snow of any kind in December! Concourses are dated. Waiting areas have no outlets… and chairs look like they’re straight out of the 1970’s. Avoid O’Hare at all costs… Also, I figured out that all these large plastic bins scattered around on the floor of the airport are for the crappy leaky roof. Real great look, Chicago.[/perfectpullquote]
Los Angeles International
Sentiment Weight: +0.06
If first impressions last forever, then Los Angeles International Airport is in trouble. Thanks to LA’s famous traffic, the airport faces challenges before customers and staff even arrive at the facility. While some of the responsibility lies with the City of Angels itself, the airport could use — and fortunately is using — AI powered natural language processing to effect landside improvements. The airport recently began deploying text analytics to inform infrastructure changes. Now, myriad improvements are in the works, ranging from a metro link to a tram connecting arrivals to rental car companies. If they follow through, LAX might rank much higher on future lists.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]I was pleasantly surprised by how chic the new airport remodel was! Nice little shops, a MAC counter, trendy eateries, a Tumi, and a Frederic M, plus plenty of places to charge my phone and tablet, and although I don’t drink, lots of bars for those that do![/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Food options are great….if you can get there threw [sic] the traffic. Once in the vicinity it is so bottle necked its [sic] a mess. The rental car return is so far away dont [sic]even bother. You teally[sic]have to leave where you are at (if youre [sic]within a 35 miles radius, longer if you are farther) at least 4-5 hours before your plane leaves, just to get to LAX. Onc e [sic] within your terminal its [sic] nice.[/perfectpullquote]
Like Las Vegas McCarran, John F. Kennedy International Airport is as much a cultural landmark as a business. Nonetheless, customers come through by the millions and have many of the complaints you might expect of a giant transit hub. Last year, the New York state government earmarked $7 billion for renovations. They run the risk of throwing good money after bad if they fail to tap into the strategic knowledge afforded by text analytics and social listening. When it comes to positive customer sentiment for JFK, there isn’t much consensus. The airport faces many challenges ahead if it wishes to win customers from its two nearest competitors, LGA and EWR.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]My favorite of the major NYC airports (JFK, LGA, EWR). Staff is somewhat friendlier and it’s an all around better environment.[/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Beyond frustrated with the lack of breastfeeding/pumping areas anywhere! No, I don’t want to pump at an airport terminal gate or in a booth at one of the terminal restaurants, but thanks for the offer. JFK is one of the busiest airports so not a lot of low traffic areas. Why don’t airports put outlets in the family bathrooms? It is hard enough having to travel with the extra supplies as is. Ugh… Also, no free wifi?[/perfectpullquote]
People really, really don’t enjoy Charlotte-Douglass International Airport. The consensus narrative exposed by the analysis reveals a systemic attitude problem among staff. Data extracted from the reviews reflect personnel who don’t appear to care about customer experience. Complaints extend to a variety of other areas as well, from ADA compliance to poor signage and wayfinding design, and the recently defunct bathroom attendant program. Charlotte does stand tall with its communal spaces — central to which is a sunlit atrium appointed with trees and snow-white rocking chairs. If Charlotte begins listening to its customers, it will be better empowered to solve their core challenges. In turn, bonuses like rocking chairs will be seen more as a cherry on top, and less as a manifestation of tone-deaf customer support.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#1d8413″ class=”” size=”14″]As a connecting airport, it has a way to go to compete with Atlanta in terms of efficiency, services, scope… but I *have* had some respectable longer layovers here that were pleasant enough in a big white rocker with someone playing piano in the terminal gently in the evening. As an embarkation airport, it still kinda sucks but is getting better.[/perfectpullquote]
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#c8300d” class=”” size=”14″]Horrible!!!! I am Stage 4 Triple Negative Breast Cancer with METS to many bones. I am wheelchair bound as walking is very difficult. One of the people was to take me to terminal 15 and instead dumped me at terminal 8 telling me the terminal has been changed. The terminal was never changed and I was simply deserted. People began asking me if I needed help, these were passengers not employees. Never again will I fly through Charlotte.[/perfectpullquote]
Thank you for flying with us
And so concludes our definitive, data-driven guide to ten of America’s busiest airports. During the ensuing data analysis, we’ve discovered insights about airport architecture and uncovered customer experience best practices; we even learned how to use AI to handle a viral press crisis. It’s clear that when visiting an airport, customers care most about staff attitude, cleanliness, and wayfinding (in that order).
There’s a “cultural,” or if you will, “behavioral” change going on at car dealerships being driven by a source that might surprise many. New, factory bonus incentive programs, such as GM’s EBE, ESE and PASE and Nissan’s Customer Experience Elements, are creating pressure on car dealers to bring “customer experience” to the same level of importance as the “transaction.
Third party consultants and suppliers have tried for decades to motivate dealers to focus more on the “experience.” Those efforts are being dramatically supported by escalating factory bonus programs aimed solely at creating a loyalty loop, where sold customers come back to service their vehicles at the selling store. It is a proven fact that sold customers who return to that same dealer for service have much higher odds of buying their next vehicle from the dealer who sold them their previous one.
Genesis of Factory Incentives Begin With Dwindling New Car Margins
Car makers have always had incentive programs, but past payouts pale in comparison to today’s mega-programs, first launched 5 years ago. It started with factory incentive programs dedicated to compensating dealers for dwindling showroom sales margins. Even today , about 40 percent of car dealers are not profitable in their new-car departments until they get factory spiffs, according to dealership consultancy NCM Associates. But the recent OEM incentives, commonly referred to as “stair-step” programs, are still heavily skewed towards solely boosting new car revenue profits, and not necessarily the showroom customer experience.
But as time has passed, and the era of the “connected customer” comes into play, the role of showroom sales is changing as well, with a greater emphasis on setting the stage for retaining customers for life. Sales personnel are now being asked to perform tasks beyond the transaction, such as completing the connected customer set-up (like OnStar), initiating the customer rewards sign-up and spending extra time in the delivery of the vehicle. And factory incentive programs are even compensating the sales team directly for performing such tasks.
Two of the big three automakers have also introduced dealer wide “rewards programs” with the sole purpose of bringing the customer back again and again to boost service revenue and repeat sales. The growth in targeted rewards, say dealers and consultants, increases manufacturers’ power to shape dealership operations in general, and staff behavior specifically. At first, dealers balked at the prospect of corporate interference from incentive benefits, but over time, many have come to accept those bonuses as critical to the profitability of the store.
OEM incentives are changing store culture (behavior) by “fear of loss” rather than “benefit of gain”
For decades, automakers have tried to influence dealers to encourage their front line sales/service personnel to pay as much attention to creating a memorablecustomer experience, or as it is still referred to, CSI, as they do to the transaction…but to little or no avail. Auto retailers have gotten more transparent, but mainly because the Internet has empowered customers to force change. Transactional-ism is so ingrained in store personnel DNA, that training and technology, by itself, hasn’t forced the kind of behavioral changes needed to increase retention. Dealer staff pay plans have always focused on “the deal” or “service RO”. Employee pay plans are job descriptions… dictating the behavior of the sales/service personnel. But OEMs discovered that pocketbook strategies are the only way to expand staff behaviors to focus on touch points that will directly affect customer experience and ongoing relationships…thus boosting “return revenue,” including their next vehicle purchase. With factory bonus money on the line, those huge sums are beginning to strongly motivate the store leadership to formally implement management efforts focused directly on the tasks required to retain customers. And OEM incentive payments directly to the staff for non-transactional, “experiential” practices are influencing staff behavior to place retention on the same level as “the deal”. Another difference today is that, in addition to monetary payments, OEMs have dramatically increased the number of programs that specifically support the new factory standards accompanying the incentive bonuses. Dealers aren’t left to their own devices to create and manage what the new programs require in the way of behavioral change.
Ground Zero For Retaining New Customers…The Service Experience
Dealer service centers have, not so affectionately, been referred to as “the back end” of the dealership. The showroom has always been the primary focus of the dealer leadership, which is generally made up of store general managers groomed primarily in sales. While some of service directors saw this lack of attention as permission to “do their own thing”, the discontinuity between sales and service has had a negative impact on customer retention. But those days are slowly diminishing. In fact, the ever-increasing reliance on factory incentives is also changing how buyers assess a dealership purchase, buy-sell advisers say. New-vehicle sales are no longer the predominant gauge of a dealership’s financial health. In fact, about three years ago, buyers started shifting their focus to fixed operations, specifically customer-pay service work, as the barometer for store profit potential, said buy-sell adviser Mark Johnson, president of MD Johnson Inc., near Seattle. The service center has clearly established itself as the primary profit center for the future of retail auto…at least until autonomous vehicles become a reality. In fact, service has also become the “second showroom”, as I spoke about in this MaritzCX Café post a year ago. Vehicle exchange programs, stationed in service departments, have established themselves as a second point-of-sale for service customers who are in the market to move up or trade their old model in for a new one…thus facilitating dealers to turn a service visit into a new sale.
The service level customers experience is slowly becoming the great differentiator in retail auto today. The service department, in essence, provides a “loyalty loop” after the sale, where sold customers get a real taste of a dealership’s “customer care” level.
Bottom Line
Car manufacturers are mandating the right kind of cultural (behavioral) change at the dealership with huge factory incentives aimed primarily at “customer experience” and repeat business. At first, auto retailers felt threatened by their diminishing entrepreneurial power, but many have come to accept, and more importantly, even depend on the programs as the major way to keep their stores profitable. For decades OEMs and third-party consulting firms have attempted to expand the “transaction” minded dealership network to deliver a higher level of customer experience. By incenting, closely monitoring and strongly supporting customer retention programs, OEM’s are forming closer relationships with their dealer partners in order to adapt to a fast-changing auto industry.
Most comprehensive customer experience programs are made up of several different types of studies, the two most common of which are Transactional and Relationship studies. Here we will describe the differences between these two types of studies.
Transactional or trigger-based studies are the base of most customer experience programs. This type of study is conducted among current or recent customers and is used to ascertain the customer experience for a specific transaction or interaction. This type of research looks at near or short-term evaluations of the customer experience and often focuses on operational metrics.
In contrast, the relational or relationship customer experience study is typically conducted among a random sample of the company’s customer base. Relational customer experience is used to understand the cumulative impressions customers form about their entire customer experience with the company. Importantly, this type of customer experience research is often the chassis for ascertaining specific aspects of the experience important to predicting loyalty and other customer behaviors.
A. Transactional Customer Experience
In a transactional customer experience study, we focus on the details of a customer’s specific recent transaction. For example:
The respondent’s most recent visit to Wendy’s
The customer’s visit yesterday to her local Deutsche Bank branch
Last week’s call to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield customer service center
The respondent’s visit, 10 days ago, to Nielsen Nissan in Chesterton, Indiana, for routine auto maintenance.
The overall rating we ask is the respondent’s overall evaluation of the specific transaction (visit, stay, purchase, and service). The attribute ratings are also specific to the specific transaction.
B. Relational Customer Experience
A relational customer experience study is broader in coverage. Here, we ask about the totality of the relationship with a company. In a relational customer experience study, the questions relate to the overall, accumulated experience the customer has had with the company. So rather than ask about the timeliness of an oil change at Nielsen Nissan and the quality of that service, the relational survey would ask for the respondent’s overall perceptions of Nielsen Nissan’s services across all the times the customer has interacted with that dealership.
The overall ratings are often overall satisfaction with the relationship as a whole, willingness to recommend, and likelihood to return. Attributes are similarly broader in scope. We would not ask the customer about her satisfaction with the speed of service for her last oil change, instead we would ask about her satisfaction with the speed of service she usually gets when she visits Nielsen Nissan.
C. Sampling Differences Between Transactional and Relationship Studies
In addition to the content of the surveys, a critical difference between these two studies is the sampling frame. In a transactional customer experience study, we sample customers who have interacted with the company recently. This is also sometimes called “trigger-based” customer experience since any type of interaction with the company can “trigger” the inclusion in a transactional customer experience study.
In a relational customer experience study, we typically sample from the entire base of customers, including people who may not have interacted with the company recently. A relational customer experience study is projectable to the entire customer base, while a transactional customer experience study is a sub-set of customers – those who have interacted recently.
When leveraging customer experience information with internal information, transactional customer experience information is often linked to operational metrics (such as wait time, hold time, staffing levels, etc.). In turn, through the use of bridge modeling, transactional research is often linked to relational customer experience, which is then linked to downstream business measures, such as revenue, profitability and shareholder value-add.
D. Recommendations for Relationship Surveys
Survey Content: As mentioned above, relationship surveys are meant to measure the totality of customers’ experiences with a given company. They are also meant to determine how customers are feeling about the company NOW. It is important to note that customers overall feelings about a company (as measured in relationship surveys) are often NOT the average of their transactional experience evaluations. This is because different transactions, especially if they are negative, can have a much larger effect on overall feelings toward a company than other transactions.
Most relationship surveys contain questions addressing:
Overall Metrics such as Likelihood to Recommend the Company, Overall Satisfaction with the Company, and Likelihood to Return or Repurchase
High-level brand perceptions
Company service channels usage and evaluations such as store/ dealership, finance company, call center/problem resolution teams, etc.
Product usage and evaluations
Share of Wallet measures
Marketing/communication perceptions
Survey Sampling: Who, how often and how many customers do you need to survey? There are no hard and fast rules but remember the idea is to obtain a representative sample of your customers. With that in mind:
Who to Survey: All customers (whether they are recently active or not) should be available for sampling. You also might want to oversample small but important groups of customers (e.g., millennials, new owners, etc.) to ensure that you receive enough returns to analyze these groups separately. However, if you do oversample you will need to weight your data back to your customer demographics to ensure representative overall results.
How Often to Survey: While transactional CX research is usually done on a continuous basis, relationship studies are usually conducted once or twice per year. How often companies conduct relationship studies is usually determined by the number of customers available (i.e., are there enough to conduct the study twice per year?) and when and how often decisions will be made based on the findings.
How Many to Survey: This is often the most frequent question clients ask and the basic answer is that it depends on what organizational level you need the results to be representative of. The good news is that if you are only concerned about making decisions on the entire company level, only about 1000 well-sampled responses is sufficient. For most large companies that is a very small percentage of their customers. However, if you want the finding to be representative of lower levels of the organization for comparison purposes (e.g., zones, districts, stores) or want findings to be representative of certain customer groups (e.g., millennials, minorities, long-term customers, etc.) calculations need to be performed to determine the number of responses needed for these groups. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in the chart below, as the population size (e.g., company customers, zone customers, store customers) goes down, the percentage of customers needed to represent that population goes up. For instance, to obtain +/- 3 percentage point precision for a population of 3,000,000 people you only need 1067 randomly sampled returns. That is just 0.04% of the population. For a population of 30,000 people, you need 1030 returns which is 3.4% of the population. For a population of 3,000 the number of returns needed drops to 787, but that is 26.2% of a population of 3,000. For a very small population like 300, you need returns from 234 people (78.0%) of the population.
E. Summary
Both transactional and relationship surveys are key parts of any comprehensive customer experience program. Transactional surveys are great for assessing the quality of specific customer touch points and making improvements in those areas. Relationship surveys allow for the assessment of the entire customer experience across all touchpoints and therefore more closely relate to customer behaviors such as loyalty, customer spend, and customer advocacy.
TELUS is Canada’s largest healthcare and IT provider. They are also the fastest growing national telecom. However, in 2016, TELUS’ CX program was fragmented. They set to work and less than 18 months later, they turned their CX program around and saved $1 million year-over-year which resulted in a 100 percent volume increase in feedback and 45 percent SMS response rate across 3,000 VoC users. By focusing their efforts on reaching more customers with proactive recovery, they have seen a $5 million-dollar opportunity in churn reduction.Their concentration on the user experience and a comprehensive customer follow-up strategy benefited their bottom line. In a recent webinar, Stavros Davidovic, CX Manager at TELUS, shared the details of their program and the numbers behind their CX efforts.
You Need the Right Team
In order to achieve the type of growth experienced by TELUS, having the right team is critical. This needs to be a dedicated internal CX team. Team members need to be empowered to remove barriers, improve timelines, and develop themselves and others as subject matter experts.
Furthermore, as a part of the internal CX team, there needs to be a passionate executive sponsor that challenges the CX team daily. Those that support the CX team in the organization also need to have fair access to resources. Cross-functional alignment is key. Having the right team is not enough, if a customer centric mindset is not ingrained in the organization.
Establish a Customer-Centric Identity
Having a customer-centric identity at an organization means that customer experience is considered at every interaction. At TELUS, the goal is to not only collect feedback and act on feedback, but to do it at every step of the customer journey. This allows for an always up to date pulse on how the customers are feeling, which enables to TELUS to act accordingly. Part of having a customer-centric identity is having a hub for all things feedback related. This allowed for TELUS to be more transparent internally, as well as provide a place for reference material and support. One important part of keeping a customer-centric mindset is to ask the right questions.
Ask the Right Questions
Customers may not give out the detailed feedback you are looking to find. That is why it is critical to ask the right questions. Not just asking the right questions but asking them at the proper key points in order to maximize the impact of feedback. By asking the right questions at key points, you’ll be able to keep your brand consistent, invitations timely and personalized, emphasize the value of feedback to the customer, and properly act on the feedback.
“Customers aren’t interacting with you because they want to, but because they have to. You have to be mindful of that.”
From Fragmented to First-Class
In just 18 short months, TELUS saw a $1 million dollar increase in annual savings, 100 percent increase in volume of feedback, an increased SMS response rate, and a churn reduction of $5 million by reaching 15% more customers. These results were due to establishing the right team that was cross-functional with an executive sponsor, establishing a customer-centric identify that put the customer first in every situation, and asking the right questions at the right point in the customer journey. These things allowed TELUS to slingshot their fragmented CX program to being world-class. For more information and If you’d like to watch the full webinar, you can do so here.
The sale of a product marks the beginning of a business relationship – a relationship that only becomes truly profitable through the service relationship that follows. Ideally, that relationship would last throughout the product and customer lifecycle. Dealer vehicle services, therefore, are not just something that you are obliged to offer customers after you sell them something: It is an essential part of a profitable, long term business model. Predictive maintenance (PdM) – as opposed to routine ex-post or preventive maintenance – offers companies the chance to fundamentally transform their service and business model. For that to happen, they must start seeing PdM not just as a means of collecting data, but as a vital tool for creating additional value in an active partnership with their customers. PdM combines the topics of service and digitization and opens significant new value pockets. But to turn this immense theoretical opportunity into solid reality, dealer service is obliged also to meet certain conditions. Above all, they need to understand that PdM, as a form of “Services 4.0,” is far more than just a question of routine oil change reminders.
Dealer service centers…at the center of the customer loyalty loop
There’s little question that, for the near future, all eyes will be on dealership service departments as the primary source of dealership profit. It’s about time! Service centers have been the primary profit producers for decades. But consistent service customer retention is the unit responsible for bringing those sold customers back for the next showroom sale. Thus the old saying that “sales sells the initial vehicle once, service sells the “all the rest” has never been truer.
The Evolution of the dealer Business Development Center (BDC)
In its day, the launch of the dealership Business Development Center marked a monumental change in the traditional retail auto sales model. Up until then, use of the telephone was left to the discretion of sales agents, who were trained and managed primarily to focus on face to face sales and the “now” transaction. The BDC marked the first formalized effort to improve on the phone skills that sales agents lacked. To be blunt…most dealer sales people are still ineffective on the phone.
When the BDC strategy spread coverage to the service center, that same focus on re-actively answering the phone, in the past was the norm. For far too many service center BDCs, that mindset is still in place today. Retail sales and service leadership speak positively about the importance of retention, but most of their efforts are still stuck in making the appointment for the “now” transaction. While autonomous vehicles and mobility seem to be the hot topic today, those realities are still years, if not decades away from the immediate needs of the day to day retail auto world.
“We are in the midst of seeing more change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years.” Mary Barra, General Motors CEO
The connected car and predictive maintenance are the “next big thing”
Autonomous vehicles and mobility are still years off from attaining meaningful scale. Far less coverage is being dedicated to the “connected car”…with the promise of replacing mileage-based maintenance recommendations with predictive certainties. Vehicle telematics have the ability today to alert the owner of a potential breakdown ahead of the occurrence. I spoke to this opportunity in this Cafe post earlier this year. And I followed it up by this post signaling that today’s service center was not near ready to deliver those predictive alert.
So the technology part of predictive data delivery is available, but the delivery of those services at the dealer end is far from being in place. Dealer service BDCs are not equipped, both in the BDC agents’ capabilities and front line culture to deliver the interface to the end user customer.
Service BDC agents, like service center front lines, are still stuck in a reactive, “after” the breakdown culture
It’s hard to change the culture of any department in a dealership! But consider this: if service BDC agents are challenged simply to convince customers to make appointments for preventative, routine maintenance…won’t they be even more challenged to persuade customers to schedule service before a breakdown occurs? There’s a great deal of difference between scheduling inbound appointment calls and that of an outbound call attempting to convince a vehicle owner to schedule a service that will specifically prevent an impending malfunction before a breakdown occurs. Customers are inherently suspicious of dealer service preventative mileage recommendations…convincing them of predictive maintenance will be a new challenge altogether.
A new script and higher skill set for BDC agents
While service customers are familiar with mileage-based oil changes, they don’t always act in a timely manner to take action and bring the vehicle to the service center. Presently, BDC agents use repetitive calling to nudge customers to act. In other words, they focus more on reminder calls and less on persuasion skills to motivate the customer to act now. But relying on a repetitive call model won’t be effective for the future of “predictive maintenance.” Service centers will have to either train or recruit to a higher agent skill level in the future. Repetitive “reminder calls” won’t convince customers to act on a maintenance service they don’t understand. Agents must be believably persuasive to a level not practiced today.
And scripting will undergo dramatic changes as well. Repetitive “friendly reminder” calls will not be effective for owners who cannot visualize the benefit of a service that will specifically eliminate breakdowns before they occur. That call messaging will center on the agent’s ability to connecting with the “feelings” of the vehicle owner.
Service BDCs evolve from “cost/expense” to the “revenue/profit”
Most dealers are still using an antiquated P & L strategy, where sales receive all of the credit (and marketing budget) for the first sale, but for repeat sales as well. However, a high percentage of those repeat sales are the result of the positive customer experience delivered by the service center. Past customers usually don’t return for the next vehicle purchase if their service experience was unacceptable.
As customer experience manager for a large GM dealer, I was included in the weekly marketing meeting where tens of thousands of dollars were spent every month for attaining new customers. However, in all of those meetings, I never heard one mention of allocating any of those ad dollars to the service department for “retaining” repeat vehicle purchases.
Hopefully, the successes achieved with predictive maintenance will clarify even more that sales sells the first vehicle…and the positive experience delivered by the service center sells the rest.
You’ll never see a dealership Google image that isn’t like the one above—a smiling couple, seemingly happy with their experience of buying a vehicle. But are car buyers really that happy with the sales experience they receive, or happy to have it behind them?
Are they still smiling with the dealership experience after the initial sell? Did the sales staff properly introduce them to the next phase of their dealership customer journey, the service center? Was their “service experience” with free maintenance and warranty work after, well delivered? Did the follow-up experience after the sale consist of the typical, but dated, dealership follow up email of “congratulations” and maybe even a birthday card before they were receiving “pitches” for their next vehicle purchase?
Ask most any dealer principal or general manager and they’ll tell you that customer retention is front and center on their list of priorities. But with many dealers, when you measure the dollars formally allocated towards customer retention, those numbers are usually nowhere to be found.
Where are the Customer Experience Dollars?
As Customer Experience Manager for a large automotive dealer, I was fortunate enough to be invited to weekly advertising meetings between our leadership and ad agency. The purpose was to discuss what worked, what didn’t work and what was ahead.
But never, in all those weekly meetings, over almost three years of attending, did I ever witness one discussion about retaining past customers. There was time spent discussing community events, but no time spent on a formalized strategy for retention.
What was discussed? Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Pandora, Instagram, television, radio, on-site remotes, and even newspaper to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars spent each month on “getting them” and not one formal dollar designated for “keeping them”.
It is assumed in far too many dealerships that a respectable majority of past buyers will return because of the warranty or the free first maintenance offered by the manufacture. But after that, at roughly three years for leases and five to seven years for vehicle purchases, research reveals they begin to go elsewhere for service, mainly to an independent repair shop or franchise.
The Typical Dealership Sales Model
The sales funnel has been used in retail auto for decades, but where is the “retention” part of the model? Many dealers would answer that they have their have their own rewards program for retention, but is it a rewards program that provides surprise and delight on a continual basis? Or like most dealer rewards programs that only apply discounts on products and services? What’s surprising and delightful about that?! Will that be enough reason for the client to return if the previous sales or service was poor?
Candidly, most dealer “experiences” are transactional. And when the showroom sale is completed, and the vehicle is delivered to the customer, most of the focus is on the next prospect (new prospect generated by ad dollars). Dealership retention efforts are mainly focused on the experience of buying and servicing the car, but will that top-of-mind awareness remain in the vehicle owner’s mind three years later when the lease is up? Will it trigger an initial contact with that car buyer to return to that same store five to seven years later when the vehicle owner starts a new car search?
The Loyalty Loop: an inclusive model for sales and retention
Where is “the funnel” for client retention? Where is a formalized model for dealer retention of past customers? The Loyalty Loop was developed by Mckinsey and Company, a top consulting company used by many of the country’s top companies. But look how it focuses on a loyalty loop inside the traditional sales model. That inside loop consists of what the customer experiences with the dealer between car purchases.
While rewards programs are better than nothing, those rewards are not what I would call surprise and delight. They also offer discounts that involve coming to the dealership. Even though we know that vehicle owners are usually not surprised and delighted to return to the dealer for most anything.
Here’s an example of surprise and delight. Some dealers give FREE car washes as a retention tool. All the owner needs to do is come to the service lane to redeem it. But most customers don’t want to come to the dealer for anything. How about this, give them a free “mobile” car wash. Now that’s surprise and delight!
The Ownership Retention Gap
Consider these NADA statistics with respect to the retention of previously sold customers:
Dealers spent an average of $7.00 on retaining their already sold customers (2017)
Luxury dealers spent an average of $762.00 on each vehicle sold, non-luxury spent $670.00 (2017)
Average gross on referral vehicle sales was $1,200.00 vs $817.00 for fresh “ups”
Referrals have a 51% service usage vs 29% for fresh ups
Referrals have a 96% CSI score vs 73% for fresh ups
What’s is wrong with this picture? Far too many dealerships are ignoring their past customers who would be more loyal, produce more gross per vehicle, send referrals, deliver higher CSI scores and use their dealer service center more often than “newsuspects” who consume most all of the monthly ad budget for dealers.
