After surveying your customers, employees, resellers, partners and suppliers and analyzing the results, you need to drive action that will make your products more customer focused, save at-risk customers, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. But, how do companies turn what they hear into business success?   This article examines what three successful companies did.

Company A: Cross-Functional Response Team and Plan

Company A’s relationship survey found that low satisfaction and loyalty were hindering their growth.   At this company, each business unit was responsible for the satisfaction and loyalty of their customers.

A research project team was brought in and given the role of customer champion, guide and consultants. They were also tasked with translating findings into actions. Following the surveys, the research team briefed the executives and provided them with summarized findings. The briefings included quadrant charts, verbatim comment coding, Apostle Models, and five top priorities for action.

The business unit executives created a cross-functional response team composed of employees from each business unit. The response team looked at each of the recommended priorities, and created a response plan that determined detailed actions for each priority, assigned a response plan leader, specified deadlines, and identified the relevant budget. The response team then presented the plan to employees and published it internally for maximum visibility. Incentives were added by connecting response plan success to employee MBOs.   Finally, the response plan was communicated to customers.  

Company B: Executive Sponsorship and Communication

Company B wanted to identify the metrics that were the strongest predictors of purchase intent. The company then wanted to use customer satisfaction as a component of service representative compensation to provide incentives for higher service performance. Relationship and transactional surveys gather the desired information. For its Customer Loyalty Index (CLI), the company used a combination of overall satisfaction, willingness to continuing doing business, and willingness to recommend.   The Apostle Model was also used to segment customers by satisfaction and loyalty. An executive sponsor reporting to CEO championed and built support around the surveys and the project team’s recommendations. Finally, the project was linked to the company’s balanced scorecard.

Following the transactional and relational surveys, the company sent the summarized results as scores and coded comments to the business units. The business units created action plans that defined required improvements and the associated success metrics to ensure positive results for the program.

Next, Company B instituted a program that informed its customers by thanking them for their feedback and identifying the main themes that came out of the survey research. A team that included Company B’s account executives follow-up with specific customers to get a more in depth understanding of their feedback.

Company C: Focused Survey Team and Training

Company C was interested in understanding how satisfied their customers were with customer support. As part of the project, they conducted relationship and support transaction surveys. From the first survey they conducted, they discovered a lack of standards for answering and returning calls, poor product knowledge across service staff, lack of customer service skills, and poor follow-up and issue resolution.

Following the survey and the subsequent analysis, Company C determined that it could address its customer service problems across three areas: training and coaching, standards and processes, and technology and resources. First, it instituted a training and coaching program for all customer service employees. This program included extensive product and technical training to raise the base level of knowledge across the group. Next, they undertook a standards and processes program to improve the group’s overall service skills and to allow better routing of customers to the appropriate service personnel. Finally, they created a technology and resources program that led to a new self-service customer site that provided 24-hour access to basic information and solutions. It also instituted an ACD system for better call routing and a CRM system to better maintain strong customer relationships.