Honeywell Drives Action Through Feedback

Driving and Coordinating Enterprise-wide Action from Real-time Customer Feedback

By Global VOC Leader, Honeywell Automation and Control Systems (ACS)

Automation and Control Solutions (ACS), an $8 billion unit of Honeywell, has 40,000 employees who apply sensing and control expertise to create safer, more comfortable, secure and productive environments.

My team, Global Voice of Customer (VOC), gathers intelligence that helps ACS better understand buyer behavior, and facilitates and drives action responding to that intelligence. Specific objectives are:

• Pre-sales: To understand brand awareness, perception, and vendor selection criteria, to gain access to and win more business opportunities and revenue
• Post-sales: To identify continuous improvement opportunities in ACS project, installation, and support services, and facilitate and drive those improvements, to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, recurring revenues, and profits.

Before 2003, we used phone surveys with static reports. This approach had limitations: 1) reports arrived many weeks after surveys were conducted; 2) tying reports back to customers for follow-up was difficult and time-consuming; 3) we could neither track nor manage follow-up; 4) we were tied to specific phone vendors. We were effectively isolated from mainstream ACS operations.

To address these concerns, over 2003-2004, we instituted six online feedback programs. Three are continuous and event-driven for strategic customer touchpoints: global win/loss, project installation, and service and support. Three are periodic: customer value analysis (CVA) and brand awareness surveys of our entire market, and a customer survey of preferred communications channels. We also went online with our annual Voice of Employee/Experience (VOE) survey.

Online was critical:

• Online data collection, dashboards, alerts and case management let us distribute intelligence to the right ACS people in real-time, let them act on it immediately, and most importantly, track and manage follow-up actions.
• Our customers include building owners, facilities managers and engineering contractors. Some are at plants and construction sites during the day and are unavailable to respond to phone surveys. Conversely, others prefer phone. To accommodate everyone, our online surveys automatically escalate to call centers for non-respondents to email invitations and for those without email.
• Since the phone interviewers enter responses into the same online surveys to which we invite other respondents by email, we are no longer tied to one call center supplier, giving us new vendor independence and negotiating leverage. The balance of power has shifted from vendor to ACS.
• Our online database enables or facilitates our applying sampling rules across surveys and respondents, aggregating results across surveys, and better predicting customer retention.
• Online is less expensive, both to gather data and disseminate it, than phone.

We now provide 235 ACS professionals with dashboards, automatic action alerts, and cases driven by survey feedback.

After six months, cancellations were 40% lower in a pilot group that received surveys and follow-up as a result of alerts and cases, than in a control group that did not, preserving several million dollars in service contract revenue. 2) We used NPV of discounted cash flows to rigorously calculate ROI, which was over 100%/yr. Reason: online feedback costs are small, while assets leveraged – our entire customer-facing organization – are large.

Research Implementation

In mid-2003, we phone interviewed over a hundred ACS customers to 1) identify key loyalty metrics such as percent of preventative maintenance of HVAC systems completed on schedule, responsiveness, technical expertise, etc. for each of our business processes; and 2) determine what quantitative level of service for each metric customers considered excellent, satisfactory, acceptable, and poor. These definitions were used to calibrate and link survey results to operational metrics. Next time, we will conduct these pre-survey interviews via moderated online discussions, allowing more customers to participate and customers to interact with each other. From late 2003 to the present, we deployed an integrated system of six surveys:

For the event-based surveys and customer communications survey, samples were gathered from sales and service tracking systems. For the brand awareness and CVA surveys, the sample was gathered from both internal sources and external sample providers. To help design the CVA study, we engaged expert Dr. Bradley Gale as consultant. Over 12,000 responses have been received across all surveys and response rates average 30%.

When sending out email invitations, we receive large volumes of “bounce” email messages: out of office, mailbox full, user unknown, etc. Some of these bounce messages are critical for updating email databases, while others can be ignored. Managing them is labor-intensive and time-consuming. CustomerSat provides us with an automated bounce email manager that receives, interprets, categorizes, and files these bounced email messages. It sorts messages of different types into separate email boxes that we can access directly. This new system promises to enhance our productivity by eliminating labor-intensive tasks, and raises the quality of service we deliver to internal customers.

All six surveys drive key ACS actions and insights. For example, as a result of the CVA study, we 1) adjusted some of our targets for customer facing metrics to comply with thresholds that customers deemed to be “excellent” performance; 2) began tracking certain metrics for the first time; and 3) reviewed service area coverage to ensure that emergency response times could be met.

Through their dashboards, managers can “pull” information from the system 24/7 to use in strategic planning, presentations, and account reviews. In addition, my team and I report to the organization quarterly, reviewing survey findings with executive management, regional leadership, and individual regions. With off-line feedback and reporting, my group was isolated. With online feedback systems, we have become integral to and facilitate business operations.

Innovative Approach

Integrated email and phone. We integrate self-administered email and interviewer-assisted phone surveys in two ways. First, our system recognizes whether a customer is able or has requested to be surveyed online via email or by phone, and then automatically drives the customer record to the email invitation queue or to a phone interviewer’s queue with autodialer support. Second, if a customer does not respond to an email invitation and reminder to a survey, the record is escalated to the phone interviewer queue. This integrated approach has given us the highest overall response rates by the most economical means. A flag available for cross-tabbing tracks whether the survey was conducted via email or phone. The mix is gradually shifting (towards email), so to eliminate bias, we report email and phone mean scores separately.

Call center productivity, speed, and independence. Since our outsourced call centers access our online surveys from their interviewer’s PCs, no CATI software or programming/set-up is required at the call centers – just Internet access. The call centers become productive faster, and we don’t have to have two separate systems for email and phone. With normal CATI, results are at least a day old; with online surveys, survey results are available within minutes of interviewers keying responses in. Our surveys are now easily transportable from call center to call center, which helps us manage our suppliers. And, we now have the flexibility to use hundreds of different phone center suppliers, if we wished, rather than a select few.

Customer “touch” rules. With multiple surveys running concurrently, we need controls to protect customers from being over-surveyed. CustomerSat implemented survey-specific and global invitation rules that ensured, for example, that certain customers would receive no more than one invitation to any or all surveys more frequently than once every 180 days. Doing so helps preserve the goodwill of our customers and increases our response rates overall.

Driving Action

Our online survey system directly drives and coordinates ACS-wide action through web-browser based analytics dashboards, real-time action alerts, and feedback-driven case management.

Information-rich dashboards. Provided by CustomerSat, cross-tabs, trendlines, correlations, open-ended suggestions, significance testing, positioning charts, and other statistics are generated and updated in real-time through web-browser-based dashboards tailored to 235 ACS sales, service, and account management professionals. Filter tools allow users to slice-and-dice results any way desired. A high degree of coordination and alignment arises when so many of our professionals are armed with real-time data feeds. Online analytics allow drill-down from ratings in frequency distributions to summaries of responses comprising those ratings to detailed individual scores and open-ended responses. Results can be analyzed by region, branch office, field service leader, or product line. Decision-makers can examine factors that affect customer satisfaction and loyalty on global, regional, state and local levels.

Alerts. When a customer satisfaction score falls below thresholds that we specify, or if the customer asks to be contacted, the system does two things. First, a detailed action alert is automatically emailed to the Blackberry PDA, laptop, or desktop PC of people responsible for that customer, including field service leaders, customer care advocates, sales representatives, and regional general managers. Alerts highlight the question response(s) that triggered them, and contain links allowing recipients to directly view the entire survey response and associated respondent-describing fields (such as customer name, address, phone, and contract size) for contacting the customer, if appropriate.

Cases. Second, the system automatically opens cases and, using business rules, assigns them to case managers and teams. Online case management enables team members to share information and coordinate responsive actions. Case severity and deadline are based on satisfaction scores and in some cases on the customer’s “tier”, a surrogate for total customer value. The case manager closes the case when the customer concern is addressed. Cases are automatically escalated if not closed before their deadlines. As a result, online feedback directly drives action throughout ACS. In the past, case management has been part of CRM systems that track and manage purchases, inquiries, and other customer behaviors. We see case management as critical to feedback systems that track and manage customer attitudes as well.

To date, over 750 cases have been generated. One example: survey ratings from a government customer receiving HVAC mechanical maintenance from ACS generated an action alert and case. Our customer care advocate (CCA) called the customer to investigate, which led to a face-to-face meeting among the customer, CCA, and field service leader (FSL) responsible for the account. The meeting resulted in a solution to the initial problem and the opportunity to upgrade the customer’s entire system. Case was closed. Rapid response has consequently also generated upgrade revenues.

Conclusion

Of course, understanding the ROI of our feedback processes was critical in evaluating success and in ensuring continued funding and management support. To determine ROI, we used two methods: 1) a pilot with a control group to measure the impact on customer renewals, and 2) a calculation that summed-up revenue from new customers won; from existing customers retained; and from customers lost during a six-month period. Based on these calculations, we determined that online VOC had the highest impact on revenues from customers that would otherwise have been lost; next highest on retained customer revenue; and lowest, but still significant, on revenue from new customers. We estimated changes in each of these revenue componentsfrom online feedback, and calculated the associated incremental cash flows and finally ROI. The final feedback program ROI was very strong at over 100% per year. This level of success provides a strong validation of our feedback approach.