Last week I expressed my thoughts about the differences between “loyal” and “satisfied” customers. I give lots of credit to Net Promoter for the role it has played promoting (sorry for pun) the concept of easy to digest relationship marketing metrics. That said – I personally need more than just an advocacy index to create and tune relationship strategy for my company’s customers.

Customer Experience Indexing is how I measure, plan and act on both emotional (loyal) and quantifiable (satisfied) customer feedback. Starting with item 1 below, my next several posts will open discussion about …

1. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
2. Analysis of feedback and calculation “CEI scores”
3. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
4. Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
5. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

Customer feedback in the consumer marketing world has become an art form. Comparatively, B2B companies seem to lag far behind in having clear, sustainable ways to collect feedback, as well as having formal business process to make sure collected feedback is actionable.

The best way to get started is to make sure your company’s business leaders buy in and get involved. And the best way to make sure this happens is to write up a plan and make sure it gets budgeted. (Warning — Don’t even start a Customer Experience Measurement initiative if you don’t have this support. Without it, you will do more harm than good with your customers — as well as waste a lot of time and effort.)

While there are many variables to this type of planning by company size, type, etc., this blog series will cover quite a few customer feedback channels. The most common of all is the dreaded “annual customer satisfaction survey” (mine come with a few twists), and for a number of reasons it’s the best way to get a Customer Experience Measurement effort successfully off the ground.

To finish off this week’s post here is a checklist for getting your plan started:

1. Subscribe to an inexpensive online survey tool (a valuable thing you’ll find many uses for).
2. Figure $60 per customer as a good budget for getting the first year of your plan started (very large customer bases may need smaller scale plan)
3. Involve everyone with frequent customer facing responsibilities (Account managers, Project managers, etc.), segment your list up and assign “contact ownership” by role, (not just by account).
4. Meet with company stakeholders to craft role-based, multiple choice questions that need to be asked and answered. (We’ll talk about putting the scoring mechanism in place later). There are two basic types of questions to consider:
   • Service fundamentals (quality function, basic expectations
   • Advocacy (value, competitive advantage)
5. Test the questions on at least 2 friendly customers and ask them what questions they think you should ask.
6. Create and review the invitee list with your assigned contact owners. Usually, I like to keep the invitations focused on people you deal with (by role) at accounts that have been active within the past 12-18 months. Make sure email addresses and other contact information are accurate/current and that all contact owners “agree” (important) that inviting them into survey process is viable (formula is alive + working + accessible = invitee).
7. Clarify objectives, rewards and tactics. I’ve run a few of these initiatives so I tend to aim high.
   • Goals/objectives: If the invitee list is agreed to with the assigned contact owners (step 6), shooting for and achieving 90% response rates within 45 days is highly doable.
   • Rewards: Offer invitees a meaningful reward for taking time to complete the survey. There are many ideas here, but $20* Amazon.com e-gift certificates have always worked wonders for me. Offer the same $20* (per response) reward to the assigned contact owners as a way to motivate them to provide all important follow-up throughout the remainder of the 45 campaign.  *Note that we’ve already used 2/3s of the per customer budget.
   • The following tactics have proven highly successful in maximizing response rates:
     -Don’t ask more than 10 questions
     -Keep questions pithy
     -Avoid soliciting open ended responses as much as possible
     -Schedule email invitations/reminders to avoid heavy traffic
     -Leverage companywide email signature lines with reminders/links
     -Leverage all phone customer phone contact with reminders
     -Include a write up about the survey in your customer newsletter
     -Leverage outbound customer mailing (including billing) with reminders
     -Create fun response rate competition amongst the assigned contact owners
     -Get upper management involved with reminder phone calls, personal emails, etc.

To be continued. Please chime in with your own ideas and thoughts.