An Active Listening Program
Active Listening is essentially the ability to listen and respond to what your customers or members are saying. Not just in surveys, research and focus groups (which is where most companies and organizations stop), but, in their behavior, in how and what they are doing when they engage with you. Active Listening needs to happen at every touch point. Why? Because when you know this, you know your customer or member and even your prospective customer or member better. And if you are really, really good at this, you know them better than they know themselves.
Think about that, you know them better than they know themselves.
This is done by pulling together data from every point of engagement. While this can be done without a top tier technology set, making a serious investment in data analytics technology will significantly accelerate your ability to build a powerful data driven active listening program. Once the data and its analysis are flowing, you can begin to apply predictive analytics and really start to maximize the relationship.
NPS: Net Promoter
Net Promoter is a powerful tool used to examine the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. It is an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth. NPS has been widely adopted with more than two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies using the metric.
NPS is a survey based methodology that asks one simple question. How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is based on a 0 to 10 scale.
NPS Classifications
Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers or members who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers or members who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters yields the Net Promoter Score, which can range from a low of -100 (if every customer is a Detractor) to a high of 100 (if every customer is a Promoter).
Why Net Promoter?
As a mechanism for actively listening to your customers or members, NPS is a very powerful instrument. The key, is not only in the score you get, it is actually what you do with it. What many organizations miss is the ability to segment your data to examine the data by different populations, demographics, product groups or even regions that will help you understand very quickly where you are doing well and where you need to improve. And when I say improve, I mean you have to take action, and take it quickly.
NPS is also very effective when it is done on a more frequent basis, quarterly, monthly or even at every point of transaction or engagement. While survey fatigue does exist, given the fact that it is a single question, it is easy for your customer or member to respond. Tying NPS into your active listening program is essential.
Here are a few links that give some additional information on the Net Promoter methodology.
Customer/ Member Experience
Customer Experience is a key component of what we do as Digital Strategists. Improving the customer or member experience should be a primary goal for your organization. And what is interesting, is that many say they have improved their customer experience while their customers or members say they have done nothing.
Customer Experience is about how your customer or member experiences you, your brand, your products and your services. This happens across every touch point of engagement. It is offline as well as online. In many associations or societies for instance, the annual meeting is still the primary point of engagement. Therefore, the customer experience as it relates to the annual meeting is critical. In a lot of organizations this experience has declined while the cost has increased. Think about this. The number one point of engagement in many cases is getting worse while the costs are going up. From a value and experience perspective, it is easy to see how this could erode loyalty.
The digital experience is the place where organizations are struggling the most, in my opinion. Not being up to speed on how your digital experience impacts your customer or member has a tremendous affect on their customer or member experience. Having a well coordinated, seamless digital experience across all channels, web, mobile, tablet and email is very important. And when I say channels, I am talking about your website, apps, content, offerings, and social media channels. Even if these are handled by different groups, departments or teams, to your customer or member, they are all YOU. If they are out of sync, not well developed or difficult to navigate or find, you are providing a poor customer or member experience, and for many this is exactly the case.
If we think about this in the context of Active Listening, when you are in tune with what your customer or member is doing at every touchpoint, you learn more about what they need, want and what they will value. When you use this to improve and enhance their customer or member experience, you are doing something very powerful. First, because very few of the organizations I encounter are good at this. Second, because it is the right thing to do. You are in business or in existence to serve the customer or member and the quality of that experience is critical.
Some Common Problems
Often we find that in many organizations, different groups or departments are responsible for different parts of the customer experience. The problem is they do not always coordinate with each other and this makes the experience disjointed. To address this and to make a seamless customer experience requires a program that oversees the coordination and integration of all of these engagement points. A program like this can be a very effective starting point for integrating the customer or member experience across all touch points.
Another very common issue is the lack of modern digital tools. Websites, content management systems, and customer and marketing technology need to work, they need to be well designed and they need to work together. The best CMS in the world without the right approach to content is a waste of money. The best marketing automation tools in the world will not help you if there is no strategy. Technology is an enabler, a very important one, that when done right can transform the customer or member experience.
Now not every organization needs or can afford a massive technology investment. The key is understanding what your organizations needs are, what your customers or members expect, and making the technology decisions that best serve the experience you want to deliver. The technology market has evolved quite a bit, and some good solutions are emerging for just about every budget. You need a trusted, experienced advisor to help you evaluate and determine the right technology solution for your organization. A solution that will allow you to improve the customer experience by building an active listening program that lets you know, understand and respond to your customers or members needs, wants and behaviors.
Multi-Channel Environments
This is an important topic because it is often not well understood. Multi-Channel means your customers and members are using more than one channel to engage with you. If we think about it, there are several channels that are in use, website, mobile/device, apps, email, social, video, offline, advertising, direct mail, and search to name the most common. There are two key aspects to a multi-channel environment that you need to know.
First, they need to be connected. I am amazed at how often the connection across channels is missed. For instance, when you email a recipient with a call to action, and that call to action takes them to a page that does not match the offer or is not relevant, you’ve missed. When a customer goes to your site and searches, does the search provide the right results or is it just text based? If they use a search to find your organization is it optimized to be easily found? Does the device experience reflect your brand and value or is it a poor experience? The number of disconnects we find across channels is staggering.
Second, you need to know how your audience is using and moving across channels. Understanding this behavior, identifying how your customers or members are engaging across these channels will tell you volumes about how your audience is consuming your brand, content and value. Actively Listening to these behaviors will allow you to improve the customer or member experience and strengthen your value and relationship.
Institutional Knowledge
One more item that needs to be addressed is what happens with the output of your Active Listening, Net Promoter, Customer Experience and Multi-Channel efforts. The data, findings and continuous feedback from these programs need to be documented and managed. This is referred to as institutional knowledge. The findings from your programs need to be documented and retained and accessible to the organization. How many times has a key employee left and with them went the things they knew and did? And how many times has the new person started from scratch or reinvented the wheel? Or if they are good, they start asking questions which usually is met with, no one knows or Bob knew but he left? Preserving your institutional knowledge serves many vital functions for your organization and is very important.
I covered a lot of ground today, and there is much more to unpack and discuss. If you are interested in any of these topics or any of the issues I address in this blog, let me set up a time to talk.
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