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General

The Power of a Smile

You often hear of the positive power of a smile.  A recent business trip brought this to light to me, as well as the negative power that is portrayed when it is missing.  My colleague and I were on our way to see a client and we decided to stop and get a coffee. The first coffee shop we came upon is a nationally well-known one, and especially here in New England—and even especially more in Quincy, MA.  It was a long drive and we still had a way to go.  We were really looking forward to a nice coffee and having optimistic discussions about our upcoming meeting.

As we approached the counter, we were ignored for about minute while several employees chatted a bit amongst themselves.  Of course, one minute can feel like ten when you are standing there awkwardly waiting for someone to acknowledge your presence.  However, we patiently waited until the representative made eye contact with us.  With no smile or greeting whatsoever, and with a clearly visible “I hate my job” look and tone, she said to us “What would you like?” We ordered, and once we got back to the car with our coffees, both looked at each other and at the very same time said “Wow!”.  We could not believe the lack of customer service and left there feeling like we were a bother and not wanted.  Why would we ever go back there?  The answer is we wouldn’t, and we won’t.  While the coffee was decent, the service certainly wasn’t.

As we reached our destination, we again stopped for another coffee, this time at another equally and nationally well-known coffee shop.  That experience was the complete opposite.  We were greeted with a smile, asked how our day was going, and how they could help us.  We felt acknowledged, invited, appreciated, and left feeling quite pleased and positive.

This experience reminded me of a great article I read a few years back called, “4 Reasons Why Excellent Customer Service Should Start with a Smile,” by Kaan Turnali in Digitalist Magazine. In the article, Kann explains that what’s often missing is a smile, a key element of customer service and business interactions.

Here are four reasons why excellent customer service should start with a smile:

A Smile is More Than an Expression

Smiling isn’t just something your face does. It communicates your state of mind. A smile—or the nonvisual sense of a smile for telephone customer service representatives—can be the most significant part of a business transaction. In retail, it can influence people’s perception of a brand and their customer satisfaction.

It can enhance the exchange of a product, the sharing of knowledge, or the offer of a solution As Internet and mobile commerce take market share from traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, smiling as a state of mind is more important than ever.

A Smile is More About a Mindset

Smiling is as much a reflection of an organization as it is a validation of that organization’s promise. It helps form the customer’s first impression, an indication of a pledge to offer a satisfactory product or service. It plays a role in everything we do, in every transaction we touch, in our relationship with every customer we help. It starts before we first interact with our customers, and it certainly does not end when the transaction is complete.

A Smile is an Attitude

Smiling tells our story beyond first impressions. It is a personal touch that extends our customer service promise and reflects our passion. Smiling says that we want to be here serving our clients and customers. It says that we are ready and willing to go the extra mile. And we smile even when we are not face-to-face with clients or customers. Our tone of voice on the phone and style of our correspondence communicate a virtual smile—or the lack thereof.

We cannot control everything that unfolds during customer interactions, but we always control the attitude we convey, such as amiability, energy and excitement, as well as commitment to satisfying the customer’s wants or needs. Even though a smile can’t solve every problem, in many cases, our attitude can triumph over many complications that can occur during the transaction and our smile can become a competitive edge.

Most Important: A Smile is an Invitation

Smiling sets a tone. It establishes a rapport and initiates trust, the cornerstone of every business relationship. This last point is more relevant than ever as we struggle to retain that integral factor in our fast-paced, smartphone-addicted, multitask-driven culture. Technological advances, globalization and new business models have us spending more time working remotely on our devices, which also makes us more remote.

Bottom line: Whether the transaction is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), a smile is one of the easiest components to get right. Omitting smiles from the equation leaves out the crucial ingredient in any business interaction.

So, as we learned from the experiences I shared above, it takes more than a good cup of coffee to keep customers coming back.  Good service is just as important as a good product, and it all should begin with a smile.

 

Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) Joe Camirand along with HorizonCX, LLC aims to improve operational and financial results for small and medium-sized businesses through Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategies.  Learn more at www.horizoncx.com

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Placement of Survey Questions

This is an article written by MaritzCX in which the nature of survey questions are examined and connections to business results are illustrated. 

The placement of certain key survey questions – particularly the overall satisfaction question in a customer satisfaction questionnaire – has been extensively debated among academics, suppliers, and clients.

The point of view of MaritzCX is outlined below, results from discussion in our Research Leadership Council sessions, our Marketing Sciences Department, a review of relevant academic literature, and a limited amount of side-by-side testing.

Importantly, no overwhelming body of evidence indicates whether the key metrics in a survey, particularly questions like the overall satisfaction question, should come first (before the attributes) or last (after the attributes). Some studies have shown that the overall-last design produces higher relationships (R-squared) between overall satisfaction and the attributes, presumably because the preceding attributes influence the overall satisfaction measure through context effects. In fact, some suppliers recommend this “overall last” design for just this reason.

MaritzCX has the opposite point of view: We recommend the overall-first design to achieve the least-biased, best estimate of the real level of satisfaction that exists among a company’s customers.

Here is the rationale:

  • The goal of marketing research is to interview a sample of people in order to understand the entire universe of those people; for example, interviewing a sample of customers to represent all of the company’s (un-surveyed) customers. The goal is not to change customers’ perceptions as a result of having participated in the survey.

 

  • In any survey design, context effects from prior questions are unavoidable. The best survey designs eliminate or at least minimize context effects on the most important variables in the study. In general, the most important questions appear earlier in the questionnaire, thus minimizing respondent fatigue and bias from prior questions.

 

  • In customer satisfaction research, overall satisfaction is usually the most important measure in the study, the one on which compensation and other performance awards are based. Therefore, it should be sheltered as much as possible from context effects in the design i.e., placed early in the questionnaire.

 

  • If the overall-last design produces a higher R-squared or “driver” relationship between the attributes and the overall rating, this typically means that the overall rating is being impacted or changed by the preceding attributes. (Otherwise, there would be no difference between the two designs). Therefore, modifying the attribute battery could single-handedly produce a change in the overall satisfaction rating. Obviously, this is extremely problematic for a tracking study, in which attributes commonly change between the benchmark and rollout waves, or from year to year as company operational priorities change. Asking the overall satisfaction question first will allow clients to change the attribute battery at any time without this worry.

 

  • In an overall-last design, if the satisfaction rating is changed by preceding attributes, it may not have the same linkage to downstream customer behaviors (e.g., loyalty, advocacy) and/or business results that exists in the true customer universe. Thus, any modeling analyses undertaken could be mis-specified.

For these reasons, asking the overall question before the attributes appears to be the best under either scenario: If there is no context effect, then overall-first makes sense because it is less subject to respondent fatigue. If there is a context effect, then the overall-first design creates the least-biased, most stable and useful measure of overall satisfaction.

The preceding discussion applies to new studies, with no need to match prior historical data. For an existing study with an overall-last structure already in place, any potential advantages in switching to an overall-first design could be outweighed by the need to track historical trends as accurately as possible.

For more information about this article, click here.

MaritzCX believes organizations should be able to see, sense and act on the experiences and desires of every customer, at every touch point, as it happens. We help organizations increase customer retention, conversion and lifetime value by ingraining customer experience intelligence and action systems into the DNA of business operations. For more information, visit www.maritzcx.com.

 

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Airport Analytics: SFO and Building a Better Delay

San Francisco International Airport is the gateway to the world's tech capital. In this installment of our airport review analytics series, we see how SFO effectively listens to its customers to guide billion dollar terminal renovations and make daily improvements.

In this series, we’ve been using text analytics to analyze the social media data around America’s busiest airports. In this installment, we broaden the scope to include Tweets as well as Facebook reviews. To begin, San Francisco International Airport is not having the greatest year. Over a six-month period, SFO had three near-miss aviation accidents, any one of which could have been “the worst disasters in aviation history” according to a Business Insider report. An editorial from the local Mercury News calling for “action” from the federal government reveals that over a 14-month timespan there were two additional near-misses. SFO has been called the “worst” airport to travel through during the holidays by the New York Daily News, and a 2012 study supposedly found that SFO was the “worst” airport in the country when it comes to delayed or cancelled flights.

Nonetheless, upon closer inspection of the airport’s social media, it’s easy to see that stopping short at occasional bad press and travel column listicles gives only a fraction of SFO’s story; to wit, San Francisco excels where many other airports in this series fall down. As an example, take wayfinding, the architectural study of how people orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. Airports are complex buildings to design. In premise, they must connect large, mixed use spaces through navigational cues intuitive enough to be grasped by cabin crew and children alike. Frequently however, the design falls short of effectively communicating with the subconscious. SFO is no exception, said one disgruntled traveler on Twitter in 2017: “Why aren’t there helpful signs here @flysfo?”

Social listening for airports

San Francisco International Airport actively listened to this feedback, recently pivoting a negative narrative into a positive one. “Yes, we do get comments from passengers [who find themselves lost]” said Judi Mosqueda, SFO Director of Project Management. In response, the airport allocated $7.3 million to remedy the problem throughout the 2.5 million-square-foot space. That was in January, and text analytics already demonstrates a positive customer feedback. One frequent flyer to the United States stopped by the SFO Facebook page to shower praise on the new wayfinding experience: “I find SFO to be one of the easiest airports in the USA to navigate,” they say. “Kudos to SFO for consistently providing a super travel experience!”

Sentiment surrounding SFO wayfinding trends positive over time

Building a better delay at SFO

San Francisco International, like all airports, can spark the ire of its customers when acts of nature foil schedules — perhaps more frequently than most, compliments to its fog, Karl. However, the airport aims to mitigate the stress of delays by investing in lounges, a yoga room, complimentary high speed broadband, museum installations, therapy animals, and more — all of which is represented in the topic sentiment present in the social data.

Booking-Scheduling suffers on account of frequent delays and cancellations due to weather. However, other areas, including amenities, internet, and food & drink quality trend neutral-positive, a win for the airport.

What is more, recent renovations to Terminals 2 and 3 set a strong standard for other American airports to follow. The social media data set is replete with praise for the new terminals, which boast sophisticated art exhibits, stylish seating areas, strong food vendor offerings, and evocative architectural features, with one reviewer describing the airport as “architecturally stunning.”

“Terminal 2 is probably the nicest domestic terminal in the entire country. Spacious, modern, clean and plenty of places to sit + free wifi!” says one reviewer. Another echoes this sentiment on Twitter, pointing out simply that “Terminal 2 is a class act!” Recently, a customer doubled down on this sentiment, urging SFO to begin similar renovations on Terminal 1: “Terminal 2 in SFO… best terminal by far in the USA. Can’t wait for the renovations in Terminal 1!”

While considering the design for Terminal 1’s renovation, which is estimated to be a $2.4 billion project, SFO’s stakeholders and the design firms they work with ought to dig even deeper into the text. Many of SFO’s review specifically target the airport’s facilities. A frequent target is the connector passageway between Terminals 2 and 3, or rather the lack of it. In 2009, SFO developed a connector passageway between the domestic Terminal 3 to the International Terminal. However, there is no way to navigate between the Terminals 1, 2, and 3 without exiting security. Says one aggravated guest, “I had to move from terminal 3 to terminal 1 and I had to get out one terminal and to get into the other one and I had to go through the already tedious, painful and unfriendly/brainless/rude TSA security checkpoint. Why don’t they have a way to move through terminals without passing security.” Being able to move freely between terminals, especially during a stressful delay or layover, makes a monumental difference in a customer’s experience at an airport.

Beating the competition by winning travelers

Text analytics helps airport stakeholders and travelers alike cut through the noise of editorialization by identifying the signal present within actual user data. With this technology, airports like San Francisco can better respond reactively — like in the case of wayfinding — while developing other proactive structural strategies to grow the customer base. What is more, SFO operates in a busy travel corridor where it competes with two other nearby airports, Oakland International and San Jose International, all the while protecting its market share from the behemoth in the south: LAX. This level of competition is not uncommon in the United States. As such, major airport brands need to get an edge where they can.

More from this series: airport review analytics

Series introduction: Analyzing Airport Reviews using Natural Language Processing

  1. Atlanta International has a big problem with “wayfinding”
  2. Charlotte Douglas can profit big by listening to their customers
  3. Chicago O’Hare needs to learn about viral reputation management
  4. Dallas/Fort Worth has a dirty secret
  5. Denver International may be a secret haven for the Illuminati
  6. New York’s JFK has to plan for the future
  7. Las Vegas McCarran doesn’t shy away from your vices
  8. San Francisco can teach us about listening to customers
  9. Seattle-Tacoma has a vocal customer named Jerry
  10. Los Angeles needs to master the “final mile”

Series summary: The Definitive Data-Driven Airport Ranking List

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How the Perception of Productivity Affects our Engagement at Work

Weekends in my household are often consumed by time well spent with my wife and two young children, who enjoy everything from hide & seek and board games with crazy rules, to baseball and bike riding.  While I love these activities and the family memories they create, I too enjoy weekend time spent alone on personal projects around the house.  I call these “garag-ects”—projects generally accomplished in the garage.

Over the years, the bikes and sports equipment, toys and old ping-pong table, tools and materials have taken over my work space, each time requiring me to prepare a space to get started. It’s an unmotivating and incredibly inefficient environment, but I know that until I dedicate the time to organize the space required to tackle many garagectsin a single weekend, I will continue to lack the motivation and resources to engage in even a single item on the growing list of ‘to-do’ items.  In years past, I found myself able to fill a weekend with a list of accomplishments and was highly productive in the garage.  When I could start and complete a garagectin one sitting, I found myself entirely engaged in the process and motivated by the accomplishments each completion would bring.

Perception of Productivity Drives Employee Engagement

In this way, I have something in common with the vast majority of employees who work in any role across all types of industries and organizations.  Perhaps not just the family aspect or the growing list of projects in the garage, but the continuous intrinsic need to be productive in order to feel truly engaged.  In fact, research suggests that employee happiness and engagement at work is driven by the perception of productivity – an employee’s sense of being able to effectively execute his or her duties and role for the organization in an effective and efficient manner.  Coupled with the ability for an employee to see his or her contribution, the feeling of productivity is powerful in establishing and maintaining high engagement levels.

The social and physical environment for an employee in the workplace may be just as important as an organized garage when it comes to enabling a higher sense of productivity.  As organizations invest in employees by regularly asking for feedback and insight in order to make effective changes and promote a culture for employee-generated insights, it can be valuable to include measures that connect productivity and the outcomes of the work done day in and day out.

Bridging Concepts of Productivity with Employee Surveys and CX Measures

Many organizations are beginning to find ways to include such measurement within regular employee engagement surveys, where for example, employees are presented with specific items connecting the concepts of productivity while also bridging data between employee surveys and customer experience measures.  These items may cover processes & procedures and incentives, to goal-setting and technology, and might include items such as;

  • Our organization always acts in the best interests of our customers.
  • Our organization eliminates processes and procedures that interfere with best serving my customers.
  • Staff in our organization are given incentives to provide the best possible service to our customers.
  • My co-workers consistently think about how to better serve our customers.
  • Our organization hasformal programs and processes for improving customer experience.
  • Our organization sets specific goals for achieving and improving customer experience.
  • Our organization effectively uses technologyto deliver a consistently positive customer experience.
  • Our organization commits the resources required to exceed the expectationsof customers.

employee engagement diagram

Such measures offered to employees serve as a great way to connect traditional siloes between HR and CX Professionals who independently measure the employee and customer experience respectively and provide a mechanism for employees to weigh in foundational concepts affecting their work and the outcomes for customers.

Asking the Right Employee, with the Right Measures, at the Right Time

Another growing strategy organizations are deploying includes the use of employee experience (EX) surveys to monitor the more standard aspects of the employee life cycle.  This process includes asking the right employees, the right measures, at the right time – while they are top of mind and while the employee is most invested in a particular experience.  By measuring the initial impressions of an organization during the recruitment and hiring stages, through onboarding and acclamation, to communication and recognition, and typically ending with exit experience, an organization can identify employee-driven ideas for improving the experience in each of these areas affecting nearly all current and future employees.  These surveys can be administered in a more intelligent, automated fashion by leveraging employee record files to distribute certain survey types based on tenure, employment events (such as promotion or training) and communication processes by the organization, including quarterly townhall meetings. By including even just a single item on an employee’s perception of productivity, the organization can better identify quick wins across processes in the employment life cycle to improve this concept and engagement.

Make Sharing Experiences Easy

One other emerging trend includes the use of open-ended prompts, either as part of the regular employee survey process or as part of an open listening strategy where employees can share a story/idea at any time through a dedicated portal or open exchange.  Just as we do as customers when we experience something very positive or negative, employees also want to share their stories.  One positive and inspiring method is to provide a mechanism for employees to identify any instances where colleagues, processes, or the work environment allowed them to be overly productive and/or provide an exceptional experience to a customer.  Every employee has days where, from their vantage point they accomplish an incredible feat or series of feats in one day.  Providing opportunities for employees to share these stories will generate ideas for how to foster such productivity while recognizing employees for their accomplishments.  Such stories can even be shared publicly in electronic employee boards and in recognition mechanism across the organization to further drive engagement.

Speaking personally, I can physically feel the difference in my engagement when I’m in an environment that promotes focus and productivity.  Whether provided to me by the leadership at my place of work, or self-created in my garage, my working conditions including the processes, tools, space and people should foster productivity and be intentional in design to allow for my best work.  When this occurs, I’m most likely to remain engaged in my efforts and connected to the purpose of my work.  In my case, this means a weekend engaged in making my garage a more productive environment.

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Airport Series: McCarran and Las Vegas

When an airport company reviews social data they need to be able to find the signal in the noise. Airports and the cities they serve are often confusingly interchanged on social media. In this article, we use filters and a custom configuration to see exactly what people are saying about McCarran International Airport.

Pop-quiz: what do you think of when you imagine Las Vegas?

Prostitution, gambling, hotels, and recreational marijuana might come to mind. But rather than fighting these associations, Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport embraces them.

For example, the airport has “pot amnesty boxes”, where people can dump their legally-purchased weed in the event they’re traveling to a state or country with stricter regulations. And they’ve installed slot machines in the terminal, so travelers can get a jump on their gambling.

Or, as one Facebook reviewer put it, “try for one last hurrah.”

Figure 1: A pot amnesty disposal at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport

A city and its airport

However, this inextricable link between a city and its airport can pose a problem for a business analyst. For example, we recently sourced thousands of reviews from Las Vegas McCarran International Airport’s Facebook page. While analyzing this data set we discovered an interesting phenomenon: reviews on their Facebook page frequently criticized not just McCarran International, but also the city of Las Vegas itself.

Of course, listening to natural language reviews of Las Vegas is interesting. But it’s not useful for a business analyst tasked with understanding how customers experience the airport.

Finding the signal in the noise

To cut through the noise, we configured an analysis to extract what’s being said about McCarran International Airport based on reviews that mention both McCarran and Las Vegas.

To do this, we used Lexalytics’, an InMoment company, web-based dashboard, Semantria Storage & Visualization (SSV). SSV allows any business person to create configurations and run an analysis, even if they have no previous experience with data analytics.

Figure 2: Tuning a configuration in Semantria Storage & Visualization is a simple as point-and-click

To start, we used the SSV configuration builder. We can easily train the analysis to recognize sentiment in the text data set pertaining to other brands, such as the airlines flying into the airport, or even the city of Las Vegas itself.

Figure 3: By pulling out unrelated topics we can understand how people discuss elements related to “Las Vegas” the city, like “city infrastructure,” which might be confusingly lumped into the conversation about “Las Vegas” the airport

First, let’s take a moment to appreciate how the sentiment surrounding “vice” is only positive. In Las Vegas, it seems, vice is virtue!

Now, let’s pull this apart. In this data set, many customers complain about construction on the highway and roads leading to the airport. If our hypothetical business analyst working at the airport doesn’t configure their analysis properly, complaints about this roadwork may impact the sentiment score for McCarran. This will skew the results of the analysis, as civic works, like road construction, are outside the purview of the airport.

However, accounting for this can be tricky. Take this Facebook comment from March 2017, in which a customer complains about road construction:

“Our experience with the airport was overall great no problems at all I just don’t understand why car rentals can’t cooperate and have transportation inside the fence. Then there’s traffic congestion and detours everywhere. A 5 minute trip takes 15-20”

A properly-configured data analytics tool can split this review into its components.

For example, our own Semantria will sort this comment as positive for the airport, while identifying the other entities involved. In this case, “Overall great” adds +0.2 to McCarran’s sentiment score, while “car rentals” and “city infrastructure” get dinged -0.16 and -0.19 respectively.

Working with airport partners

Within any given airport, customers are exposed to numerous third-party vendors and agents. By tuning our analysis, we can focus on conversations about airlines, rental car agencies, and the TSA — all of which are operated by authorities independent from the airport.

Ultimately, these insights will help airport stakeholders share valuable intel with the brands that act as airport ambassadors every day. Furthermore, an analysis like this allows the airport to drill down into relevant conversations where they might affect change.

McCarran customer insights

Overall, analyzing Facebook reviews of McCarran International Airport shows us a mixed bag of opinions. There are some complaints about the cost of food and beverages (although we could say that high prices are inevitable, as the airport shares the retail concession with their restaurant partners, driving prices upward).

A whopping 48% of baggage handling reviews are negative, citing lost, damaged, or delayed luggage. If baggage isn’t delayed, the customers are. Many comments focus on out-of-service doors, people movers, and more.

Says one commenter on Facebook:

“Looked great with the Welcome to Vegas signs BUT couldn’t get to baggage collection as the doors were broken, no airline or airport staff or signage to say how to take a different route. You guys may know it, but visitors don’t!”

Speaking of signage, wayfinding is a consistent problem. As we’ve learned in the past, wayfinding is crucial to the success of an airport.

There are places where McCarran outshines the rest. In 2005, the airport became one of the first to provide complimentary Wifi. Thanks to an emphasis on network friendly infrastructure and regular uptime airline passengers are able to enjoy complimentary unlimited connection even while their on the tarmac. Stuck on a grounded flight? Now you may connect to an LAS branded wifi hotspot and while away the delay. This brand experience goes a long way in promoting customer retention. The emphasis on wifi as a customer experience touchpoint is something an airport company can suss out using text analytics. And, as we’ve pointed out with other examples, this intel can then be baked into the very fabric of the facility.

This fact is reinforced by Samuel G. Ingalls, assistant director of aviation, information systems at LAS, “By the time we started construction on our new Terminal 3, which opened in June 2012, we had a pretty good idea about where to place the Wi-Fi antennas for maximum effectiveness.” The work on expanding network connection onto the tarmac was put to a test in 2015 when 170,000 tech oriented conference attendees descended on Las Vegas. Mr. Ingalls and his team might’ve used text analytics to mine feedback about the experience of these power users, identifying any problem areas. “I saw many people around the airport with at least three devices.” reported Ingalls. “And we didn’t get any negative feedback from these attendees, who used the Wi-Fi system both inside and outside the terminal. I considered that a very positive sign.”

What should McCarran do with these insights?

McCarran might use this social data to design a 2019 budget aimed at solving problems real customers encounter every day. Natural language data is the single best resource for businesses to make profitable decisions. Now, with tools like Semantria Storage & Visualization, all stakeholders in a business may leverage this resource, even if they have no data analytics experience.

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7 Steps and Tools to Avoid Brand Erosion During Organizational Transformation

Editor’s note: This is a chapter from the ebook, Unlock the Value of CX. You can download the entire book here.

Most organizations strive to ingrain in their employees a set of organizational values–behaviors and attitudes–that are the guiding principles for all employee actions. These values are often expressed as brand promises–statements about what an organization is, what it stands for, and what it will deliver to its customers.

Brand promises can be implied as well as expressed, if customers are used to a particular level of service based on their previous interactions with the company. Brand promises work best when they are realistic and actionable, targeted to the organization’s customer base and clearly linked to every customer interaction across the organization.

Meeting Brand Expectations at Every Level

The ability to meet brand promises at every customer interaction, however, eludes too many organizations. Brand promises are often set from the top of the organization and performance metrics for executives are often tied to them. However, when it comes to brand behaviors being practiced at the point of customer interaction, the results are not always consistent or satisfactory. This causes some customers to leave the interaction disappointed and frustrated.

The problem is often magnified in companies undergoing changes. As organizations grow, they often reach a state where they develop competing priorities such as, a need to cut spending to reach profitability targets or a mandate to introduce a new product or benefit.

Executives often fail to question whether changes across the organization will impact their ability to deliver on the existing brand promise. The impact is not limited to marketing or product functions. Changes to any function should be considered in terms of its downstream customer impact. Every function, from marketing, product, risk, operations and finance to human resources and compliance, has a role in fulfilling the brand promise. Each function must own its impact on the customer experience.

Take for example, a bank’s underwriting department. As a result of a recent audit, is now required to perform manager-level reviews of a greater percentage of applications prior to approval. If the leaders collectively fail to ask for more underwriting managers, the approval timeline for applications will increase, and the trickle-down impact will likely be severe. If the product and marketing teams at individual branches are not informed about this change, customer complaints will begin to build and customer satisfaction will suffer.

Seven Strategies to Prevent Brand Erosion During Organizational Transformation

The solution requires ownership by the entire organization. Below are seven strategies to avoid setting brand promises that are untenable and avoiding brand promise erosion when organizational changes happen.

1. SET THE TONE FROM THE TOP. Brand promises are often built by a chief marketing officer or branding executive in conjunction with a branding agency. However, every executive function should be involved in this effort to confirm the positioning is feasible. Once alignment exists around the brand promise, the CEO must set the tone. It is imperative for employees to be empowered to deliver on the brand promise at every customer interaction.

2. APPOINT A CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER. A chief customer officer is part marketer, part ombudsman, part efficiency expert and part operations expert – and fully committed to the customer journey. The best CCO is often someone experienced across various functions who can support the customer journey design from multiple perspectives. This customer champion must be willing and able to converse with peers from across the organization to ensure alignment with the brand promises, develop and lead efforts to assess impacts on the customer journey, and influence every other function to achieve the end goal of delivering the brand promises.

3. DESIGNATE A CUSTOMER COMMITTEE. It is common for organizations to have corporate committees, often aligned with executive functions, to support efforts ranging from compliance to risk to finance. A customer committee, consisting of cross-functional senior executives, will similarly support the customer experience effort and provide it with the emphasis it deserves.

4. ENGAGE IN CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING. Create a cross-functional team consisting of product, marketing, risk, technology, operations, finance, human resources and other key functions to engage in exercises that map the actual customer experience. This may include what customers are trying to do, what they are feeling, what is going on behind the scenes in operations and technology, what moments of surprise, delight or unnecessary friction exist, and which interactions meet or fail to meet the brand promises. Then, develop a target customer journey that meets the brand promises with the appropriate level of friction, and chart a road map to achieve it. Think about the impacts on people (customers and employees), process, product and technology. The customer journey map should be owned by the chief customer officer and each key stakeholder in the journey. It should be updated each time a change to people, process, product or technology is considered.

5. MEASURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND CLOSE THE FEEDBACK LOOP. Many, if not most, organizations have invested in customer satisfaction monitoring of one type or another and implemented scoring methodologies with which to keep track. However, monitoring alone won’t move the needle on customer satisfaction. The keys to the success of customer satisfaction monitoring are 1) implementation of a feedback loop, and 2) understanding drivers behind changes in macro-level satisfaction scores. Qualitative information about a poor experience (a low score) from a customer is an indicator that something has gone wrong. When multiple survey responses are similar, that’s an indicator that a process is broken. It is important that organizations not only monitor feedback but also assign owners of the feedback loop for each key step in the journey. When a customer provides negative feedback, the journey owner must reach out to the customer, acknowledge the issue and commit to a response. They must then investigate, engage in internal communication, develop a plan to rectify problems (if needed) and follow up with the customer.

6. DEVELOP CUSTOMER SATISFACTION METRICS ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION. Companies should develop meaningful and consistent customer satisfaction metrics for employees that tie directly to compensation. A technology metric, such as system uptime for example, does not correlate to customer experience. Although system uptime is clearly a requirement for customer satisfaction, it is too narrow. Rather, develop organization-wide metrics that apply to all employees and allow them to relate the requirement to their own tasks.

7. LEVERAGE INDEPENDENT TESTING. Independent testing is crucial to ensure what you have prescribed is actually occurring. Independent testers should be given tasks tied to discrete journeys and asked to report back on exactly what happened and how they felt as a result of the experience. Additionally, testers should provide a fact-based method for comparing the interaction against the journey map and brand pillars, as well as qualitative feedback that uncovers gaps between the experience and the brand promises. Achieving excellence in customer experience is a result of every employee living the organization’s brand promise. Getting there requires significant enterprise-wide commitment, including the implementation of the steps listed above. In return it can reap significant rewards in the form of satisfied customers, happier employees, greater revenues and improved profitability.

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“Choice Overload”: Is Your Customer Onboarding Overwhelming? (Find Out Fast)

Starting the post-sale relationship off right is key to customer retention.

While this can’t be emphasized enough, with regards to onboarding, be careful not to mistake giving customers more choices and information for a better process.

Too Many Options May Overwhelm Customers

Chances are that your sales team pulled out all the stops to attract the attention of your current customers. Customers are drawn to large numbers of features and options when making the initial purchase decision.

You would think that after they’ve closed the deal, it’s your job to explain all the details and nuances about everything they were promised in the sales pitch. It’s time to exceed all of their expectations. But when it comes to onboarding it is very easy to overwhelm them with all of those same options that originally attracted them to your product.

What is Choice Overload?

One of the basic phenomena in behavioral economics is choice overload, which occurs when you present someone with too many choices. It is associated with unhappiness, decision fatigue, going with the default option, and choice deferral.

By showing your customers all of the customizable settings, features, and options right at the beginning of your relationship, before they are familiar with you or your product, you run the risk of overwhelming them into inaction and dissatisfaction.

There are four key factors that contribute to choice overload:

  • choice set complexity
  • decision task difficulty
  • preference uncertainty
  • and decision goal

With a more complex choice set, a more difficult decision task, more preference uncertainty, or a more prominent and effort-minimizing business goal, there is a greater chance of choice overload. Poor onboarding is one of the leading causes of churn, so overwhelming your customers during onboarding can be one of the most impactful mistakes regarding your overall customer experience.

How User Interface May Contribute to Overload

Even if you channel your eager energy into the best onboarding process on the face of this planet, that may not be enough to prevent a different kind of overload, cognitive overload. According to experts at Fluid UI, if the user interface your customers are dealing with is too stimulating or even not stimulating enough, customers may “overlook the finer details of a product or service, lose focus or ignore an important learning moment. [Humans] still draw conclusions about the suitability of the product [they] are learning about.”

Read more about avoiding cognitive overload using customer-centric design for successful onboarding and retention.

Cyberpsychology and UX 3: Preventing Cognitive Overload

Your step-by-step instructions, videos, and one-on-one walkthrough conversations for onboarding will be negatively impacted if the web pages customers interact with are cluttered. If the instructional video/ help documentation is buried in an obscure corner of your homepage, you’ll find that your Success team spends too much time acting as Support.

Customer Effort Score: One Question to Combat Overload

The easiest way to learn if you have a problem is to gather feedback from customers who have completed onboarding. Both types of overload are easily identified when you ask customers “How easy was it for you to complete onboarding?”, the Customer Effort Score question. Asking for a score and comments will bring to light the most prominent issues at this journey point.

By gathering feedback immediately after onboarding, customers who struggled with the user interface will be able to provide you specific examples from their experience that need adjustment. For example, you may hear from a customer who is colorblind that the color theme for a specific chart was tough to distinguish for them, or that finding a specific button took more time than they had anticipated.

Read more about how Customer Effort Score can improve your onboarding process.

Use Choice to Enhance Customer Experience

Driving adoption and customer loyalty is a tough job, but flooding new customers with information is not the way to go.

Gathering feedback throughout your relationship about effort, satisfaction, and loyalty will help you improve the entire customer experience and prevent you from overwhelming your customers at any point in their journey with you.

To provide an excellent customer experience, all you need to do is provide convenient information that helps your customers achieve the next milestone, or inspires them to develop a new milestone. By listening and taking action, you build trust and loyalty with your customers that will help you win customers for life.

Measure and improve customer experience. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

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The Easiest Way to Improve Customer Onboarding: Measure Customer Effort

Putting off changes to your onboarding process is too tempting. Where do you find the time to overhaul the entire process and where do you even begin? It feels like a monumental task that will take ages to do properly.

While it may seem daunting, there is a simple, quick step you can take to prioritize incremental improvements immediately: start gathering Customer Effort Score feedback after onboarding completion.

What does “Onboarded” mean?

Onboarding is a term often used in SaaS businesses and there are many ways people will define what “onboarded” means. It can vary depending on the type and level of complexity of your product or service.

As an event in the Customer Success journey, “onboarded” can mean the first point where customers start to achieve their goals. In terms of product training, it is the point where hand-holding is no longer necessary and customers are confident enough to navigate on their own.

Once you have a better idea of what “onboarded” means to your company, you can reverse engineer the process to get there.

The Easiest Way to Improve Onboarding

There are plenty of specific actions you can take when it comes to improving the onboarding process, but how do you know which actions to prioritize? You could write up a playbook for all of your CSMs, but how do you know what methods are the most successful, or what the most frequently asked questions during onboarding are?

Gathering Customer Effort Score feedback after your customers soon after they finish the onboarding process helps you prioritize initiatives when it comes to improving the onboarding customer experience.  Address the most frequent, most fundamental complaints first to incrementally change your onboarding process instead of trying to do a complete overhaul in one go.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

The Customer Effort Score survey asks customers on a scale from 1 to 7 how easy it is to deal with a companies products and services. The CES survey is a transactional survey, gauging the experiences customers have after a specific touch point in the customer journey.

Why Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Why focus on effort here? Why is it a better choice than, say, NPS? Because effortless onboarding correlates with retention. According to the Harvard Business Review, “companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.”

When you ask your customers directly – “How hard was it for you to get started with us?” you will quickly identify whatever obstacles your customers faced during onboarding. Address them immediately for quick wins with big impact.

Implementing a CES micro-survey means receiving open-ended feedback from customers that speak to the issues that are at the top of their minds. You’ll hear what customers struggle with specifically so that you can prioritize the changes and additions that will have the greatest impact on customer experience.

In the long term, CES can get you answers to the questions that shape your overall process such as:

  • What do customers need to be able to do or know to accomplish their goal?
  • What information do they need in order to do this?
  • Which content formats are best to convey different information?
  • What do your customers perceive to be the first value delivered point/ first value achieved point?
  • How long does it take customers to get to the first value delivered point/ first value achieved point and what can be changed to reduce that amount of time?
  • Is there information being lost in the handoff from Sales to Success? If so, what is being lost?

Focusing on minimizing friction and achieving your customers’ desired outcome encourages them to form a longer, deeper relationship with your company. This means more opportunities for upsell and cross-sell. It also means higher advocacy, which is instrumental to growth.

Iterate & Adjust as Your Company Evolves

By gathering CES feedback after onboarding completion, your company can improve retention and build a loyal customer base. You’ll demonstrate customer-centricity from the very beginning of your relationships.

Creating a customer-centric onboarding process kicks off a customer experience that will make you stand out among your competition. Even as your company and product evolve to accommodate new needs, customer feedback will guide you to the most effective onboarding process, helping you win customers for life.

Start getting in-app CES feedback for free with Wootric.

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Did You Know 45% of Banking Customers Interact Through Digital Channels Only?

Have you ever wondered how important digital interactions are to the customer experience in financial services? According to PWC, more than 45 percent of banking customers say they only interact with their bank through digital channels. This means that for almost half of a bank’s customers, digital experience (DX) all but equals customer experience (CX). The large majority of banking customers are multi-channel and the most frequently used channel is online.

Retail banking may be on the bleeding edge of the financial sector in the transition to digital, but insurance, wealth management and SMB banking are moving along a similar path. The frequent presence of an advisor or agent has somewhat mitigated the rush to digital for these businesses, but every facet of the industry faces the same push and pull forces.

  • Companies are being pulled by consumers who increasingly manage and live their lives digitally and are accustomed to always-on services through online, on-the-go and social channels.
  • Equally important, financial services providers are being pushed by the growing challenge from FinTech firms making inroads in the market with their digital-only offers supported by cutting-edge technology.

These market forces mean that over the next few years more customers will be digital-only and an increasing share of interactions will be digital. The maturation of Generation Y and Millennials all but assures that digital-only and digital-dominant users of financial services will become increasingly prevalent. As such, DX will become more important to, even the primary determinant of, CX.

The Speed of Change Which Companies Must Keep Pace

When the Internet became a popular means for conducting transactions and disseminating information, financial firms were quick to encourage customers to move activity online. These early efforts were pushed by the banks for efficiency and cost-savings. The focus was on function and static content.

The rush of innovation and technology adoption has crossed an inflection point in the past five years or so. Function is now tables stakes and has been overwhelmed by design and form, static content has been supplanted by the interactive, and digital delivery for operational efficiency has been trampled by the need to offer digital experiences that meet the rising expectations of customers.

The pace of change has caught the industry flat-footed. Designing a home page that is consistent with the company’s brand image and customer experience is one thing. Delivering on this promise is far more complex in an increasingly mobile and social world, not to mention the emerging domains of Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), let alone wearables and IoT (Internet of Things). Keeping up with the “best next Customer Experience,” as Gartner puts it, is like being the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass,who says that you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place; “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” This is the speed of change with which firms must keep pace.

Focus on Strengthening Relationships

The starting point is an over-arching strategic perspective: digital tools are not meant merely as stand-alone applications that are easy-to-use and minimize customer effort. Rather, the approach to digital needs to be integrated across channels and built on the premise that the objective is to offer delightful, engaging digital experiences that contribute to the larger goal of promoting superior customer experiences. In other words, the digital experience is a means to strengthening the relationships that are the backbone of the financial services industry.

Easy to say, tough to do. So here are a few specific suggestions.

  • Map it.Customer Journey Maps will detail and illustrate the scope of digital and non-digital channels and touchpoints, the complexity of the challenge, as well as help set priorities.
  • Aim for sticky.This means engaging and interactive.
  • Design for mobile first.Four-fifths of Internet usage is via mobile. Flip the old model: explicitly design for mobile, then move to online.
  • Make it relevant.Personalize and anticipate needs. This means built-in intelligence.
  • Omni-channel vs multi-channel.Go where customers go. This means also being social and offering SMS; video access to reps, agents or advisors; click-to-chat; and the emerging technologies, which will continuously evolve.
  • Onboard for DX.This doesn’t mean using traditional onboarding approaches for digital applications; it means adopting digital tools to facilitate digital onboarding.
  • Measure and remediate.Digital is real-time, making it critical that firms have real-time feedback programs in place, supported by closed-loop procedures to mitigate the risks of disappointing or simply unengaging digital experiences.

It is hard to imagine how even the largest banks can accomplish this on their own, so partnerships will be critical. Internally, the lines separating tech workers and the product/marketing teams need to be erased.

Get Rid of the Extra Overhead

Tomorrow started yesterday in the race to keep up, let alone differentiate on CX and DX. The FinTech firms – most with their singular focus and technology pedigree and without the overhead burden of branch networks or offices – are designed for a continuous sprinting leapfrog of innovation. Traditional players also carry the additional overhead weight of heightened security demands and regulatory standards. That is the playing field on which financial services firms must compete and they need to start running twice as fast now.

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VIDEO: 3 Ways Machine Learning Will Transform Your VoC Strategy

Jessica Pfeifer, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, spoke at Totango’s Customer Success Summit on March 6, 2018 about how the Customer Experience landscape is evolving and how companies need to adapt to the rapid changes with the help of machine learning.

Her talk covers the ways customers are changing, how companies can fail to recognize these changes, and how machine learning empowers companies to adapt quickly to the new customer mindset.

Machine learning makes it easy to break down customer feedback data silos within organizations, giving Customer Experience champions a holistic view of the Voice of the Customer and a competitive advantage on companies that do not take advantage of new VoC technologies.

Learn more about getting insight from qualitative data with InMoment CXInsight™.

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Customer Success Operations Manager: Does Your Team Need One?

Customer Success teams are expanding – not just in size, but in scope. New roles are emerging as CS is maturing as a specialty, specifically roles like Customer Success Operations (CS Ops).

At early-stage startups, Customer Success Managers will find themselves covering this function, but as the company grows, it can be extremely valuable to separate this function into a dedicated role within CS to help scale up.

What does a Success Operations Manager do?

Think of “Success Operations” as a product that promises to optimize processes for its customers, i.e. the Customer Success Managers.

CS Ops managers establish a baseline of productivity using metrics like net MMR churn and how difficult it is to learn about new product features. They talk to CSMs to learn what pain points they face in their day-to-day responsibilities and observe how processes currently work.

They segment the current customer base to distribute the workload effectively among CSMs. CS Ops managers look for consistent issues across the whole Success team, break the issues down into manageable components, and create solutions with measurable results.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter F. Drucker

Using the information they’ve gathered, CS Ops managers may build tools like custom dashboards, or establish automatic workflows among software platforms to make the CSM’s job easier and help them be more productive.

A CS Ops manager will “onboard” CSMs, teaching them how to use the new tools at their disposal, and check in frequently with their “customers”. In this sense, they are CSMs to the CSMs.

In short, Customer Success Operations managers are responsible for providing tactical support to the rest of the Success team, helping them improve their KPIs and their efficiency.

What does a CS Operations Manager need to know?

Customer Success Operations Managers should be familiar with:

  • Customer Relationship Management Software (e.g. Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango)
  • In-app messaging Software (e.g. Intercom)
  • Support platforms (e.g. Zendesk, FreshService)
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Customer Success

Each company will have a unique suite of different platforms that it uses, and CS Ops managers need to be quick to become fluent in most, if not all of them. This is crucial for the role since data silos are a major hindrance to organizational efficiency and detract from your customers’ experience.

Additionally, Success Operations Managers will need many of the same ‘soft skills’ that CSMs use. For example, CS Ops managers need to be able to actively listen to the struggles of the CSMs to come up with valuable solutions.

What does this role look like in real life?

For Feedvisor Customer Success Operations Manager Shachar Avrahami, he came into the company as the first “Professional Services team member.” As the team grew from a one-man operation to a multi-person team (and the company scaled up), Shachar’s manager asked him to create his own role – Customer Success Operations Manager, “and I became the first person to assume this new position and help define it.”

He says, “I am the owner of our team’s processes on a macro level, making sure all teams are aligned with the strategy for each part of the customer’s journey.”

How do you know if you need a Success Operations Manager?

Giving a concrete number at which you need to hire a CS Ops manager is difficult. It depends on the capacity of your current CSM team. As a rule of thumb, you will want to look into hiring a Success Operations manager after you’ve hired your fourth or fifth CSM.

For some organizations, the new role may be an internal promotion of a CSM. For other companies, it may be wise to bring in an individual with experience in a ‘project manager’-like position to help streamline Customer Success processes, aligning everyone under the common vision that is handed down from the C-suite and creating a more consistent experience for customers.

Like Robert S. Kaplan, co-creator of The Balanced Scorecard, says, “consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.”

How do you advocate for a CS Operations Manager role?

Understand that a CS Operations Manager’s responsibilities are nearly the same as those of a Sales Operations Manager. The justifications for the CS Ops role are similar.

The operations role increases the productivity of your customer-facing Success team members, who carry the weight of recurring revenue on their shoulders. Not only does this mean management can hire fewer individuals for the customer-facing roles, but each CSM’s key performance indicators will improve at rates that were impossible before this specialized role.

Having a CS Ops role also improves visibility into the Success team’s business outcomes, places for improvement, and what projects need to be prioritized for Customer Success.

For an excellent breakdown and comparison of the Sales and CS Ops positions, click here.

Operations For Smooth Scaling

There will always be growing pains as a start-up matures and finds success. Operations experts specialize in finding technical solutions for when people are stretched beyond their limits. Creating a Customer Success Operations position is an effective way to proactively combat capacity issues for the Success team and deliver a consistently positive experience for your customers.

Access Voice of the Customer insight in your system of record with InMoment’s native integrations, including Salesforce, Gainsight, & Totango.

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Airport Series: JFK And Planning For The Future

JFK International Airport is about to undergo a massive renovation. To understand what JFK should change and why, we analyzed 1000's of traveler reviews using our web-based text analytics platform. Here's what we found.

Consider New York City: the tangy gradient of smells emerging from chocolate shops and beer halls between 18th Street and 14th Street; the dissonance of high heels and sirens pounding against the Upper West Side; plumes of steam on a cold night, seething from deep within the City’s crust. New York is the navel of civilization — a hub where all people meet. To this end, its primary ports of entry, its airports, are unique in their role as ambassadors of the City.

A business and an icon

In this series we’ve examined airports like any other business. But for John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), the delineations between retail space, transit hub, and cultural monument are blurred. Analyzing public comments on JFK’s official Facebook page, we found an uncanny trend of users equating the airport to the city as a whole. Unfortunately, the comparison rarely proved positive. This is true even for the locals: “I have lived in NYC for 12 years,” says one man, “this airport is an example of everything wrong in this great city.” So, how might such an airport remedy this reputation crisis?

Here’s to new beginnings

In January 2017, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a $7-10 billion renovation plan for JFK International Airport. While a start-date has yet to be announced, the Governor’s office is accepting proposals. How might this portal to New York City respond to customer feedback? We uncovered some rich insights by mining and structuring thousands of free text reviews from travelers passing through JFK. The body overseeing the renovations, the Airport Master Plan Advisory Panel (AMPAP), might set some criteria based on these qualitative feedback.

Get connected

We ran this Facebook text data set though our web client, Semantria Storage & Visualization (SSV). By viewing Topics, which are query- or model-generated document classifications (in other words, known categories you’re actively looking for), we can see an immediate issue.

Figure 1: JFK topic sentiment polarity.

Notice Internet, the solid red column near the center of the visualization. What might be going on here? As we drill down we quickly notice something all too familiar to any regular at JFK: Wifi. Take it from one foreign traveler:

“How it is possible that one of The biggest airport [sic] of The world dont [sic] Provide free wifi???”

And, from a sardonic American:

“Get free wifi, this place is like a greyhound station ?”

There is, in fact, not a single neutral or positive mention of wifi in the JFK data set. It’s 100% negative. When planning future terminal renovation, AMPAP ought to consider network optimized architecture as well as sponsored, complimentary wifi.

Kindness is a universal language

A trend we’ve noticed across our airport experiment is the frequency of staff attitude. Staff attitude frequently plays first fiddle in the qualitative reviews.

This pie chart illustrates how much of the JFK data set is dedicated to customer-staff interactions.

Figure 2: Topic breakdown by volume.

All four variants — Attitude, Staff-General, Staff-General-Helpfulness, Staff-General-Attitude — constitute a volume nearly equal to the next 16 topics combined. Furthermore, we begin to notice a troubling situation when we compare this pie chart to the sentiment polarity columns from the first visualization. Frequently, customer-staff interactions result in negative feedback.

Figure 3: Detail of topic sentiment polarity for staff attitude.

For each of these categories, sentiment skews neutral-negative. Frequently, visitors mention how JFK appears understaffed, like this American traveler:

“Not enough staff, the staff you do have are rude, shouting at the public like they’re animals. I will never fly through JFK again. End of story.”

JFK is close to two competing airports, including Newark Airport. This means JFK’s non-aeronautical facilities, such as restaurants and retail stores, are especially susceptible to churn. A disgruntled guest, like the one highlighted above, can have a sphere of social influence encompassing hundreds of potential customers.

Hearing and addressing these concerns are the only way to ensure JFK retains a dedicated user base.

The road ahead for JFK

The AMPAP renovation project will cover a broad scope. But central to the mission ought to be the loud and colorful social media manifesto issued by JFK’s many customers. Staff attitude and wifi aren’t the only discussion topics. Hundreds of JFK reviews point to broken elevators, jammed jetways, confusing signage, and more.

Keeping a finger on these real time data streams will define the projects of the future while maintaining the facilities of today.

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