Companies regularly gather customer feedback to improve their customer loyalty and financial performance. Thousands of customers are surveyed annually in an attempt to better understand what determines their loyalty. However, little or no improvements are seen in their loyalty scores, and the company’s financial metrics remain flat. Why?
The answers may be in how companies are using their customer data. While enterprise feedback survey companies offer automated tools to help summarize customer feedback results (e.g., online reporting sites), these tools only provide a glimpse into the vast amount of information that is contained in the customer data. Analysis of customer feedback data should go well beyond descriptive statistics and driver analysis. Through research, companies transform themselves into a customer-centric business by:
- Conducting surveys across all important constituencies (e.g., customers, employees and partners)
- Creating reliable, valid and useful business metrics for executive dashboards
- Quantifying the impact of customer loyalty on business performance measures (e.g., revenue growth, sales volume, defection rate)
- Identifying business areas that significantly impact customer loyalty
- Evaluating the effectiveness of company-wide programs
- Identifying the important elements of employee and partner satisfaction that will improve customer loyalty
- Determining customer satisfaction and loyalty criteria for incentive compensation programs
- Building customer-centric operational metrics to align employees
- Benchmarking best practices across the company
- Developing employee training programs that impact the customer experience
- Validating customer survey programs
Beyond the Ultimate Question
Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty (3rd Ed.)