Imagine taking a long flight and towards the end the air hostess hands you a customer service ‘form’ (…‘tome’ seems a more fitting description) within which, every single part of the anatomy of the company’s performance is examined. After a recent flight on United, a colleague at Feedback Ferret was asked to complete a 300-question survey about her flight!

In order to rate their service, from the icing on the cupcakes to the state of the toilets, you probably would have to surrender the best part of an hour. Imagine how this would leave you feeling? Utterly cheesed off. This, in itself, isn’t the best way to go about pleasing your customers.

Remember that how you gather feedback is part of the overall customer experience. This is why Feedback Ferret has opted to take the comment-based approach to collecting data for analysis. Instead of operating a lengthy ratings-based system, we adopt a far simpler and more appealing approach for our clients, which actually generate more responses as well as more insight from their customers, compared to traditional tick box surveys.

Without the need for wading through scores of numbered questions, our feedback requests get straight to the point:

• How did you rate our service?
• Why did you give us that score – use your own words to give us your opinions about our products and services.

That’s all it takes.

Customer satisfaction with the feedback process itself is substantially improved, resulting in higher feedback completion rates. And our clients find that the response provides far richer feedback than any tick box surveys.

So – kick out the 300 question surveys, and start asking customers what they really think. After all, would you fill out one of your own surveys?

By Billy Brooks

There will never be a shortage of UK rail travel customers willing to give their thoughts on how services could be improved.  So, we were encouraged to see a tweet the other day from National Rail pointing its followers to a customer feedback form, run by the Passenger Information Strategy Group (PISG), asking followers to share their experiences.

After closer inspection, we felt there were a number of aspects of National Rail’s strategy that were worth sharing and highlighting:

1.  Use of Twitter.  Hit or miss?

National Rail’s use of Twitter is in itself interesting.  Typically we recommend that brands ask customers for feedback as close to the interaction point as possible – for example, immediately after making a purchase in-store or a call to the contact centre or via a follow-up email after a holiday.

You might imagine therefore that National Rail would have been better served handing forms out at stations or putting adverts (or QR codes) on trains themselves (as I note TfL has done recently in London).

But the complexity of the UK’s railway infrastructure puts National Rail in a tricky situation, making it quite a challenge to roll out a nationwide feedback programme in train carriages.  And this illustrates an important point…

Sometimes, companies just don’t have easy access to customers; while an airline will have contact details for every single passenger, a train operator won’t.

And so, in this respect, using social media could be seen as a masterstroke. The vast majority of National Rail’s Twitter followers have probably used a train service recently, making the social network a direct and timely feedback channel   for this audience.

2. Too many questions

While the use of Twitter is great, the questionnaire itself is likely to put many passengers off as it is far too long.

The form stretches over several pages and asks a lot of quite detailed questions, which can be self-defeating; there is a lot of reading to do and plenty of clicking required.  Paradoxically keeping forms short can actually increase the amount of feedback given, which leads us nicely onto the next point…

3. Yes or no questions

We’ve discussed before the importance of asking open-ended questions and how best to achieve this.  By asking so many closed questions, National Rail is missing out on some really useful insights. The survey does have a space at the end for ‘further comments’ but it’s very small, which means passionate passengers will get cut off in mid flow by the limitations of the form.  Not a great way to engage passengers or assuage travel frustrations.

In the past, the difficulty of analysing open-ended feedback presented an obstacle for many brands, but technology has moved on since then; Feedback Ferret’s contextual analysis engine for example puts no limit on either the length of text that can be analysed, or the number of topics it can extract from every sentence.

4.  Sending the right signals

The survey is being run using the Survey Monkey tool which, because it is free, doesn’t give the impression that National Rail has invested much in this programme.  While the structure of any feedback form is as important as the ‘look and feel’, showing customers that you are serious about investing in voice of the customer programmes is important.

5.  On the right track?

So all in all, it is a good effort from National Rail. Twitter is a handy, cost-effective tool to gather feedback for companies that have large, engaged communities. It’s also a good option for businesses where getting customer data can be tricky.

The form itself however needs work.   By making it shorter, but encouraging respondents to leave open-ended answers, National Rail could then use contextual analysis technology to mine this raw information for actionable insights to help it make improvements to the service and the experience of its customers.

By taking on board the points in this blog, National Rail should be able to get its customer feedback programme back on track!

By Piers Alington

In a recent blog post, we offered five good reasons for adopting open-ended customer feedback.  In this latest post, we focus on how to frame your questions and give some pointers to explain how to elicit answers and opinions that yield actionable insight and earn customer loyalty.

Traditionally, when collecting customer feedback, companies ask a series of questions that aim to elicit answers on commonly-cited problems or issues that have already been identified. For example, ‘Was the waiting period satisfactory?’ or ‘Was the call centre representative you spoke to helpful?’

However, as we at Feedback Ferret have often pointed out, prescriptive questions will only ever provide you with feedback on the questions you ask. That’s not to say this won’t be valuable, but it won’t give you the full picture either. And it won’t tell you the things you don’t know or haven’t thought to ask.

In the past, asking questions that asked for longer verbatim answers were problematic, because of the resource required to collect, analyse and report on the data. With contextual analysis technology, this is no longer an issue.  Think about that for a second – it really doesn’t matter how much customer feedback you collect any more – a good contextual analysis engine will be able to analyse the data and discover meaningful trends and topics.

So how can you encourage open-ended feedback that delivers valuable customer insight.

1. Don’t ask leading questions

The answers you receive will depend very much on the questions you ask. So avoid asking questions that seem to be searching for specific answers.  For example rather than ‘Was the waiting period satisfactory’, asking ‘How did you find the waiting period?’ is likely to yield some surprising and useful insights based on your customers’ individual experience.

We avoid asking the question ‘What should we improve?’ – it results in ambiguous verbatim answers (“speedy checkouts” really means that the checkouts were slow. Whilst Feedback Ferret can cope with this type of inverse-positive answer when taking the ‘improve’ question into account, it isn’t a particularly helpful approach). More importantly, such a question seems to acknowledge to customers that you know things aren’t great and that there are things that could be improved.

If you make the question suitable open-ended, for example, after a simple rating question or NPS score, ask “Why did you score us in that way?”, you will get all the comments and context that you need from customers. They will tell you the things that are important to them.

2. Don’t ask yes/no questions

If the answer to a question is a yes or a no, this is unlikely to be much use to you or provide detailed insights. The next question you’ll want to ask is ‘why’ or ‘what is the reason for your answer’.  Only by asking ‘why’ do you really find out what the experience is actually like for your customer – which is after all the real purpose of feedback and the reason for investing in Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes at all.

3. Encourage longer answers

Don’t use a word limit or restrict the feedback field (whether using a web or paper form). This will encourage longer responses and give you more information.  There is nothing more annoying for the customer when they are warming up to their subject and a pop up says there is no more room for feedback.

We know that some text analysis tools have limits to the length of the text that they can process – some as few as 1,500 characters. Feedback Ferret has no limits to the length of text that can be contextually analysed.

4. Be proactive, don’t leave it too long

People tend to give longer, more detailed questions when they are more passionate about the issue in question. So try and ask for feedback as soon as possible after the interaction someone has had with your brand. For example it is not unusual for an email sent to a customer within 24 hours of their call to your contact centre to elicit a 20% response rate.

 5. Close the loop

We have written on this topic before too but it cannot be stressed too often. If a customer has taken the time to write long detailed feedback, then the very least you can do is reply to thank them and let them know you are listening. True, this will involve setting up new business processes and allocating resource, but it will be worth it.  After all, isn’t putting customers at the heart of our business, one of the fundamental reason for inviting feedback in the first place?

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by Piers Alington

Following my recent blog post highlighting the failings of using tick box surveys for customer feedback (as reported in The Independent), I thought it would be useful to point out that there is an alternative that allows customers to explain the reasons for their responses – open-ended feedback.

Below, we’ve put together our top five reasons why it’s always best to give respondents the space to express themselves.

1. Tick box surveys don’t always ask the right questions

Tick box forms tend to come with a built-in impossibility to collect the kind of nuanced customer feedback that delivers actionable insight.  To put it bluntly there are questions that you do not know you need to ask, or could never put down as questions in a survey!

Questions like

• “Was the salesman rude to you and patronising to your wife?”
• “Was the ‘child-friendly’ lunchtime menu spoiled by the fact that the cutlery was several sizes too large?”
• “Was the dealer’s advertising dishonest?”

But customers will tell you these things, if you give them an opportunity.

2.   You need to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction)

Typically, 80% of your customers will be satisfied or very satisfied, but 20% are not. Now, what are you going to do about it?

Yes, of course it is reassuring to know that your customers are largely happy. But your job is to find out why. And this task is all too often ignored, or to be fair, traditional methods of collecting and analysing customer satisfaction surveys made it difficult or impossible to drill down into the reasons behind individual customer scores.

You’ll also discover that 10-15% of your “satisfied” customers have surprisingly negative things to say about their experience with you. Without gathering and analysis of customer feedback comments you will never know what those negative comments are about, and you will miss these opportunities to improve your customer experience.

3. You will uncover customer trends that can save you money!

By including open-ended questions on their customer feedback forms, Holidaybreak (Eurocamp and Keycamp) discovered that despite a general assumption by the management team that the garden furniture next to the tents and mobile homes needed to be upgraded, customers were actually more than happy with it.

On the other hand, the feedback revealed a high demand for duvets instead of sheets and blankets, and also for more and bigger BBQ equipment. These insights saved millions of pounds in possible misdirected investments, enabling funding to be channelled to the areas that customers would most value.

4. You can identify service issues and put them right immediately

Take Origin Energy, Australia’s largest energy supplier, with around three million customers. Every week, Feedback Ferret analyses the recorded audio verbatim answers from more than 1,800 IVR telephone surveys, automatically extracting the themes, topics and sentiment using its sophisticated contextual analysis engine.

One woman had left a verbatim comment saying there was a problem with the local third party support company who was unable to connect her electricity supply. She was very distraught and feared her two-year-old son wouldn’t get hot meals that week.

The IVR responses were sent to Feedback Ferret late one night and by lunchtime the following day, the supply was reconnected and the reason for the poor service from the third party was investigated so that it didn’t affect more customers.

5. Increased Response Rates

In a recent direct comparison in response rates between an online 12-question tick-box survey, and one-page feedback form from Feedback Ferret, the one-page form generated nearly double the response rate of the traditional survey. And analysis of the open ended comments provided considerably greater insight for the client than the alternative tick-box survey.

6. The technology to analyse open-ended data is now here

In the past, the seeming impossibility of collating, analysing and reporting on large amounts of verbal feedback, presented a very real obstacle for many organisations. However, the latest textual analysis technology is more then equal to the challenge.

And you don’t need to ferret around to find it…

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Two pieces of apparently unconnected research last week really caught my eye. The first, from Forrester, found that while more than three-quarters of US companies monitor online conversations and respond to customer feedback through social media, only 20% feed this information back into marketing plans or the wider business.

The second study from Verint (PDF), found that 79% of global customer service and contact centre managers felt they could gain more insights from the customer service data they currently hold, with 82% agreeing that insights gleaned from customer interactions could help influence the products and services their companies provide.

Ask and you shall receive

For me, these two pieces of research, taken together, demonstrate some key issues that many organisations need to tackle before they can truly claim to be customer-centric or indeed realise the full value of their Voice of the Customer initiatives:

1. In spite of some welcome moves to capture and monitor the voice of the customer, there remains a lack of organisational will – or in many cases, ability – to carry out contextual analysis of customer feedback in order to identify meaningful trends. Yes, it’s important to respond to individual complaints. But by understanding the trends that drive customer dissatisfaction, analysis of customer comments will yield insight that can inform marketing plans or even help to drive the wider business.
2. Secondly, organisations are continuing to invest in costly and resource-hungry social media monitoring tools and processes, without fully realising the value of the feedback their customers provide to them everyday via the contact centre.  Our own experience shows that by applying text analytics to contact centre interactions, organisations can uncover real-time issues and trends and take action to resolve them before customers resort to venting their frustration on social media.
3. Finally, companies are missing the opportunity to create a dialogue with their customers, by inviting open-ended feedback to find out what they really think about the products and services they use every day.  We are working with organisations who are saving significant amounts of money and delivering against key metrics such as customer retention and repeat purchases, simply by asking customers what they really think – and then acting on this information at a wider macro – as well as a micro – level to drive strategic business decisions.

Of course the key theme linking all these points is that, in order to properly extract the value from all the feedback a company receives, it is necessary to identify trends and topics using effective text analysis of customer feedback comments.  Only by doing this can companies really report on the insights gained in order to receive the true value and use this to achieve business success.

]]> http://www.feedbackferret.com/2011/07/listen-to-all-your-customers-for-business-success/feed/ 0 http://www.feedbackferret.com/2011/07/feedback-ferret-silverstone-a-winning-combination/ http://www.feedbackferret.com/2011/07/feedback-ferret-silverstone-a-winning-combination/#comments Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:00:29 +0000 Feedback Ferret http://www.feedbackferret.com/?p=910

Organising a big sporting event can be a complex juggling act. Visitors will usually have spent large sums of money to acquire tickets and their desire to have the ‘experience of a lifetime’ will be high.   Collecting customer feedback is vital to make sure these expectations are met and ideally exceeded.

And sporting events don’t come much bigger than the Silverstone British Grand Prix.

So, we are extremely proud of our recent work with Silverstone Circuits, which came to fruition at the British Grand Prix last weekend when visitors were asked to provide live feedback, via QR codes and SMS.

Sally Reynolds, Leisure Development Director from Silverstone was interviewed by Computerworld UK about their innovative approach to collecting, gathering and analysing customer feedback – check out the extract below or click the link to read the full thing.

We’re proud that the companies we work with are telling the world about how Feedback Ferret can make a difference to their customer feedback strategies.

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Silverstone Circuits will be deploying a new customer feedback system this weekend at the Grand Prix, in a bid to improve customer experience at the event.

In addition to using social media networks such as Twitter, Silverstone is deploying a technology from Feedback Ferret that allows the organisers to monitor, categorise and perform analysis of the feedback.

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“Silverstone Grand Prix to improve services with real-time feedback” – Computerworld UK

by Piers Alington

When an esteemed travel guru devotes an entire article in a national newspaper to a customer questionnaire from a travel company, surely that has to be great PR for the company in question? Thomas Cook may wish to differ, after being the subject of a wittily scathing piece by Simon Calder in the Independent recently.

In yet another piece of bad PR for the traditional tick box survey, the journalist explains how a lengthy customer questionnaire about his recent trip to Les Deux Alpes had taken a turn for the bizarre by page three.  After being asked about the make of this car, the survey delved into his current utilities suppliers before asking for the renewal date for car, buildings and home contents insurance.

The journalist drew a fairly damning conclusion from all this:

“You don’t care two hoots what I thought of the flight, or the bed, or the breakfasts. All you want is my contact details and spending habits so you can sell the information to other firms. Anyone who is fool enough to fill this out is an ideal target for any identity thief who gets his hands on the data”.

The real shame here is that Thomas Cook was probably nothing like as cynically pre-meditated as Simon Calder imagines.  But what the travel company is guilty of, like many brands, is applying an off-the-peg customer feedback solution to an occasion where one-size fits-all is just not appropriate.

Today’s consumers are a richly-diverse bunch, who may want very different things from their holiday experience.  If Thomas Cook genuinely wants to find out what ‘makes its customers tick’, why not ask them what they really thought?

In our experience, inviting customers to provide a simple Net Promoter Score (NPS) together with open-ended comments to provide context to their NPS rating, can be much more rewarding than imposing a list of generic, bland and frankly irrelevant questions?

In addition to capturing some valuable insights (and possibly positive PR) from a vastly experienced and knowledgeable traveller such as Simon Calder, Thomas Cook would discover a wealth of data from a wide range of customers who have just as much emotional investment in the travel brand.  This approach will yield the type of nuanced actionable insight that market research companies can only dream about.

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London, 7^th July 2011 – In an innovative step, visitors to this weekend’s Formula One British Grand Prix at Silverstone Circuits will be invited to use their mobile phones to provide real-time feedback on the event via QR codes and SMS, using Feedback Ferret’s customer feedback analysis system that includes powerful contextual analysis of customer comments.  The new real-time feedback channels will be promoted throughout the circuit and in the event guide and feedback will be monitored by Silverstone Circuits during and after the event.

Customer feedback is vital to ensure that Silverstone Circuits, whose tagline is ‘Experience is Everything’, constantly improves the customer experience at its live events, from F1 and MotoGP races, to experience days and corporate functions.  The use of real-time feedback channels in addition to web feedback forms and post-event emails is part of Silverstone’s strategy to make it as easy as possible for fans to provide feedback via their preferred communications channel.

By deploying Feedback Ferret’s customer feedback analysis platform to help collect, analyse and report on feedback from fans, Silverstone will benefit from automated analysis of the topics, sentiments and attitudes from their comments. The Feedback Ferret roll-out has enabled the entertainment venue to replace its lengthy tick box customer surveys with a new format that requests a Net Promoter Score (NPS) and invites fans to provide open-ended comments to provide context to their NPS rating.

The Feedback Ferret rollout represents a fundamental shift in strategy for Silverstone, who wanted to make it easier to analyse the vast amount of customer feedback it collected via its tick box surveys, in order to develop deeper intelligence and actionable insights. The Feedback Ferret text analysis engine will enable Silverstone to analyse thousands of verbatim comments from passionate motor racing enthusiasts.

Sally Reynolds, Leisure Development Director at Silverstone Circuits said: “We aim to give every visitor the best possible experience when they come to Silverstone. We have made significant improvements this year to grandstand locations and general admission viewing areas as well as opening the new state of the art pit and paddock building, The Silverstone Wing. We’re keen to continue improving our service so that fans really get a day out to remember. Customer surveys have proved effective in getting answers to specific questions, but we wanted to extract maximum value from the verbatim comments that were coming in.

“Feedback Ferret is an incredibly powerful technology that will allow us to vastly increase the amount of feedback we collect and use it to further improve the customer experience. It allows us to quantify the unquantifiable. Following the Grand Prix weekend, we’ll be looking to roll this out to our full range of race weekends and corporate hospitality events.”

Piers Alington, Managing Director at Feedback Ferret said, “Silverstone, like many businesses, is very attuned to the benefits of customer feedback analysis. With Feedback Ferret, Silverstone will now be able to accurately analyse customer comments so that it can maximise the value of the information its customers want to share. Feedback Ferret will empower fans of Silverstone to give detailed feedback using cutting edge technologies like QR codes and SMS, and will enable Silverstone to use this information to improve the service it offers.”

Perhaps they forget that in the vast majority of cases, this small subset of consumers has probably tried to contact the company through traditional means first.  In fact, in terms of customers who have a gripe with your organisation, this social-media aware crowd is probably the tip of the iceberg.

Its fair to say that, by the time people complain via social media, they are generally really, really annoyed with you and desperate to talk to anyone who will listen, wreaking considerable damage to your brand in the process.

So isn’t the real question whether listening to customers on social media is a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?

United breaks guitars

Take the celebrated example of Dave Carroll, who, when United Airlines refused to pay compensation for damage to his $3,500 guitar, took revenge via a YouTube music video. His composition ‘United Breaks Guitars’ became a huge hit, causing more than a few people to share it with their friends. In total, it now has almost 11 million views and counting…

Considering the disgruntled artist had been trying to get a response from United for over a year at this point, could it have nipped this all in the bud much earlier if United had listened more closely through traditional channels? My own experience with United suggests that they still have a pretty poor attitude to listening to customers’ luggage concerns and don’t appear to have learned much from Mr.Carroll’s diatribe.

Make sure you’re looking after all your customers

So how do you make sure you’re listening across traditional channels and taking feedback on board to improve customer experience?  The five suggestions below will ensure that brands generate maximum value by listening to their customers and uncover actionable insights in the process:

1. Make it really, REALLY easy for customers to contact you and give feedback

Place feedback forms with prominence across your website, in your retail outlets and introduce brief surveys at the end of calls to your contact centre so customers don’t have to go looking for them. And they should be easy to fill in – keep them short. It’s also really important to ask open-ended questions, so customers can tell you what’s really on their minds rather than restricting them to just a few points that you think the company wants to know about.

In our experience, you can get most value from a simple rating score and then ask customers to explain why they gave that score, using their own words to highlight what is most important to them.

2.Use multiple channels to invite feedback

It should go without saying, but customers want to contact you via their channel of choice and know that you will be ready and waiting to listen.  Invite feedback via SMS.  Create a smart phone feedback form so that they can give you feedback while on the move.  Include a link in the confirmation email following a transaction.  The opportunities are endless and can easily be tailored to your business, mostly at low / no cost.

3. Make sure they know you’re listening

Now this one is not as easy as it sounds.  That’s why you need processes in place – and resources – to listen and respond to the hundreds, or thousands, of communications you are likely to receive.

And of course, it’s impossible to act upon each individual request, however large your customer service department. So you need the ability to understand the feedback, prioritise where you do need to intervene, and then to make it simple for you to take the right actions.

Making the penultimate point doubly important…

4. Close the loop

Some customer feedback will be positive, some requests will be plain impossible to action and some will be genuine complaints that you can do something about.

Make sure that you take action to resolve the latter, but also that you close the loop every time.

For example, “Thank you very much for your suggestion that we stay open on Christmas Day.  But due to legal requirements and our commitment to our families that is impossible for us to do. We appreciate your comment nevertheless”.

It’s actually very easy to ‘wow’ your customers by responding to their comments. Our clients repeatedly tell us that customers say “Wow – I never thought you’d read that stuff” when they close the loop. And as one Feedback Ferret client has found by contacting customers expressing negative sentiment about their holiday experience, their re-booking rate has multiplied four-fold amongst these people. Big payback!

5. Be prepared for cultural change within your organisation

If you are serious about listening to your customers, it is quite likely that this commitment will have far-reaching effects upon the culture and business processes within your organisation.  Having a strategy is important.

Yes, you will need to determine what themes and topics are most relevant to your customers, but beyond that, you will start to focus on what your customers actually need, rather than what you think they want. And that in itself is a radical step, producing genuine innovation, way beyond the scope of social media monitoring.

What do you think? Feedback gratefully appreciated…

Recently a client contacted us to see whether there was an error with the Feedback Ferret system.  The reason?  They had received negative comments from several customers who had had left very positive overall satisfaction scores.

This is actually a very common occurrence; you get a customer that is generally really happy, but still has suggestions about how things could be improved.

It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. Your happiest customers are the ones that are highly motivated to help you improve the product or service they already value.  Negative feedback from happy customers should be seen as constructive criticism. These are your customer evangelists, your brand advocates, with a vested interest in your product or service. They deserve to be listened to very carefully indeed.

Some brands only gather the verbatim feedback from customers that leave dissatisfied customer satisfaction scores and, in doing so, miss out on a fantastic opportunity.

Looking at scores alone is a quick route to one-dimensional thinking and complacency because scores just don’t tell you where all your customers are finding issues with your company.

Going the extra mile

Verbatim comments require thought and effort and are therefore always more useful to a company that just a score.  An angry and dissatisfied customer may check 3/5 instead of 1/5 if they’re just trying to rush through your form. But there’s no way they can type a negative (or indeed a positive) verbatim comment without putting thought into it.

So no matter how much your customers love your business, make sure you always give them the opportunity to give you their feedback on how they feel about their experience and to make the service they receive even better.

The answers might surprise you.