Tag: managing data

B2B Contact Management

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Knowing your messaging target in the B2B world is critical to the success of that message and critical to the customer experience. ANY type of messaging requires a carefully aimed target: marketing, order/product notifications, status updates, surveys, and so on. At the root of that process is your B2B contact management.

To start off with great contact management, you have to make sure the system in which you manage your contacts is set up to allow you to choose your groupings and add various criteria. In other words, using a billing software as a CRM might not get the job done.

Next, a great way to choose your groupings is based on personas. If you’ve never gone through a customer persona exercise, I highly recommend it. You can do so by assigning “personalities” to your different customer segments. It really helps you to get into the mindset of what that customer thinks and needs. Along with each persona, you can understand their level of influence and power with-in the business and how they are involved in purchasing and consuming your products/services.

Once individuals with-in each business have been assigned a persona, you can build your various campaigns around that knowledge of each target. Who will receive what type of messaging? Mapping out all types of current and desired messaging in one location can help you understand who should receive what and when they should receive it.

And lastly, make sure you can utilize this valuable targeting information from any other platforms that are distributing information to customers. For example, if you are sending satisfaction surveys, are you able to base the recipient on your detailed customer data from your CRM tool or are you pulling that contact information from a separate platform? Having a centralized location to pull intelligent contact information can be what makes the difference between an average campaign and an excellent one.

You Are Already Getting Feedback

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If your organization does not yet have a survey program in place, you are still receiving feedback from your customers on a daily basis. If your company isn’t interested in making the investment in a survey platform today, don’t let that hold you back. As long as you set up other systematic ways to take in and process customer feedback, you can tap into great insights. Here are some ideas on listening to the feedback you’re already getting.

 

THROUGH CALLS / ONLINE CHATS / EMAILS

Whether customers reach you through phone calls, online chats, or emails/web forms,  it is important that you classify each one of those contacts to understand the top drivers. The classifications are themselves are important here. If a customer calls or emails you and their reason is classified as a “billing question”, that doesn’t give you much to go on. Did their invoice not show up? Did it reflect the wrong amount? Try to be specific enough with your classifications that you can actually act on them, but not too specific that you dilute the results and end up with way too many one-offs.

If you don’t have historical data to look at as to why customers are contacting you or the classifications used in the past don’t give you enough insight, try going back and doing the research yourself. Document all the reasons that people call/chat/email for a week (or whatever the right amount of time is based on your volume). Set up a system to tag what you’re hearing or seeing. if you already have a system in place that does this, reevaluate it and make sure it is actionable information.

 

THROUGH YOUR FRONT LINE PEOPLE

Your front line people know the reasons that customers contact you. They might not be able to say the highest reason with absolute certainty, but they are going to have a pretty good idea of the main problems. Focus groups are a great way to probe the experience of front line employees; however, for this purpose, you might try sending a free survey through something like Survey Monkey to your employees. You can assure them that their responses are anonymous and that will give them the confidence to provide candid responses. If there’s something the company does that an employee thinks is really stupid, an anonymous survey is a great way to tap into that info.  It doesn’t even have to be that formal. Simply walk up to your staff and ask some of them, “What’s the biggest problem we have when it comes to our customer experience?” Whatever method you use to get the front line perspective, track that information.

 

THROUGH CUSTOMER ACTIONS

There are many customer actions that you can measure to give you clues about whether or not you’re meeting the mark on CX. Think about the systems with which your customers interact and what sort of data trail they are leaving. A few suggestions of areas to investigate: web bounce rate (to see if your pages are providing value); utilization rate of tools available (to see if tools are useful and/or functioning properly); repurchase/renewal rate; or attrition after certain occurrences.  The actions that customers perform while engaged with your company are where you want to look. When you’re not asking for direct feedback from customers, things like this can give you a piece of the puzzle.

 

COMPARE RESULTS ACROSS SOURCES

The last step is to compare results from the all the sources listed above. Most likely you will see a pattern emerging that warrants your attention. You can begin your customer experience improvements in that area. Start taking action and be sure to continue listening through the methods you have set up.

Too often I see organizations spending so much time trying to figure out the “right” thing to fix, the “one thing” that will transform their entire customer experience, and they end up frozen, not taking any action out of fear that it’s not the best possible use of their time and money. Stop waiting for the silver bullet, and get started. Customer experience is work! There’s not a switch to flip that will make it outstanding in an instant. Find some things to improve and chipping away at customer frustrations.

Choosing a Survey Vendor

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Choosing a vendor to administer your customer satisfaction surveys can be a daunting task as there are many considerations at hand. It is best to think through your program strategy prior to approaching vendors to ensure the best fit. Below are key topics that should be evaluated for each potential solution.

Level of automation: This depends on the type and size of your organization. Do you have a large customer base with a lot of transactional touch-points or a small customer base with more intimate interactions? A company with fewer, high-touch customer interactions could get away with a more manual surveying process whereas a high volume company needs to consider automating their survey distribution.

Survey triggers: What action or situation will trigger a survey? You need to make sure you have the ability to report on the customers that qualify for a survey based on the desired “trigger.” It is important to investigate how your database will interact with the survey vendor. This goes hand-in-hand with the level of automation. How will the vendor receive the data for customers you want to survey?

Filters: Does the vendor have the ability to exclude certain customers from receiving invitations or would you have to incorporate that into the process on your end? For example, if you don’t want a customer to receive a survey after they’ve already received one in the last 30 days, how will that be accounted for? How complex can you get with your filters?

Additional data points: You’ll ultimately want to evaluate survey responses based on other data points associated with each customer. Will you be passing these data points to the vendor along with the information to trigger a survey? Or will you be matching up the responses to your customer data outside of the survey platform after responses are received?

Invitation: Think about what you want your survey invitation to look like. Do you want a question embedded in the email, or a simple invitation with just a button to click? Do you want to be able to customize the entire thing with your own html code?

Branding: Going along with the design of your invitation is the overall look and feel of the survey. Are you able to white-label it and are there additional costs associated with doing so? Are you comfortable using an existing template offered by the vendor?

Question types: It’s so easy to get overly complicated with survey questions (more on this in a later post on survey design), but you do want to make sure the types of questions you want to ask are available in the survey platform. Be sure to get a demo of the interface for designing questions to understand if the desired features exist.

Reporting capabilities: Some solutions have minimal reporting functionality built into their platform assuming that you will integrate the survey data in another tool outside of theirs. You can generally save money here if you plan to export the data and do your reporting in another program. The vendor in that case doesn’t need a robust reporting interface. If you’re interested in a holistic solution, there are vendors that offer lots of pretty graphs, charts, and dashboards with-in their tool.

Support and consulting: Find out the level of support offered with your subscription/contract. Given that this process involves direct interaction with your customers, you want to feel confident that your vendor is going to provide assistance if something goes wrong. Some vendors also offer consulting hours to help with things like mapping out the customer journey and designing surveys.

Changes:  Think of how you will manage the distribution of surveys on an ongoing basis. This is critical. If changes are required to a survey, invitation, or trigger, will you be able to make them yourself or will you have to engage your vendor? Do you have the time to make your own changes? Do you have the patience to wait for your vendor to make changes? Considering this  aspect from the beginning will save you a lot of aggravation later on.

Survey and response allowances: Try to forecast how many surveys you want to send and receive and be sure you subscribe to the appropriate allotment.

Response integration: Where will your survey responses go when they come back in? A lot of platforms today can integrate with other systems if you want to use something outside of your vendor’s platform. Find out what integration they support. If possible, bring an IT employee along to evaluate the structure of the integration. Is it reliable? Is there a fail-safe in place if a survey response is not properly integrated?

Follow-up: If you’re not planning to follow-up with customers based on survey responses, shame on you. If you are planning to follow-up, great! Figure out how you want to append additional follow-up data to a survey response after it is collected and how follow-up status will be reported on.

Price: An obvious consideration and often negotiable based on the desired level of customization and support.

In general, I recommend keeping things as simple as possible. You will eventually want to make changes to surveys based on how your business processes evolve, and straying too far from an out-of-the-box solution can come back to haunt you when that time comes. Remember, your customers want the see something simple and easy to interact with, and you want something simple and easy to manage and adapt.