Traditionally customer experience research has been targeted at and purchased by executives.  No problem, right?  Not necessarily a problem,   but the effect of their unique perspective is often massive, but in the wrong direction.  Let’s take an example from the other perspective, though - that of a customer. Let’s say you call in for service with one of those big companies we all do business with.  Your mobile provider, let’s say.  Have you ever had a bad experience with one of those agents?  Of course you have.  But why?  I would further ask this question:  do you think that the individual you spoke to is going to be hurting if you take your business elsewhere?  Of course not!  That agent won’t ever even find out about it!  So why would they care about you?!  Only if the organization does an unusually rare job of hiring their staff, or you happen on an innately caring soul.  Now, have you ever had the person that sort of follows the policy, acts nice, but doesn’t really help you?  It’s yes, again, isn’t it?  How often has that happened?  Most people say this happens at least once a week.

So, here’s where I make my point.  At most companies I’ve been at, the metrics just aren’t built to be statistically solid at a front line level.  At countless Fortune 500 companies with huge volumes of customer interactions, customer experience data stops at a functional or division level.

The reason that one should care about this is the power behind the psychology of human motivation.  Let me use another example.  You probably drive over the speed limit, and if not, your neighbor does.  Most Americans would wager that more than 50% of us do every day.  Why?  How often do you get a ticket?  Traffic tickets are an example of an operant conditioning model, theorized by B.F. Skinner, a psychologist famous for this research.  As anyone who has received a ticket knows, receiving a ticket usually feels bad, but doesn’t happen very often (some readers are certainly exceptions). However, the research clearly states that conditioning works best when it is immediate, understood by the receiver, consequential, and there is a likelihood of a response to the behavior.  One thus realizes that the “not too often” part of a speeding ticket is the death knell for people following the rules.  When do people hit the brakes?  When they see a police officer, of course.  That is when the likelihood goes way up.  And the same applies to the the mobile provider’s agent. If he or she acts nice and follows the policy, but doesn’t go out of his/her way to help, the consequences will likely be minimal.  

So, some would think that you cannot do surveys to that level, but we have.  The reason more organizations use it is only because they rely on a different approach to achieve customer focus.  We believe that if the front line has robust incentives, they will make the system and policies work in the favor of the customer.  Their concern and empathy will go a long way towards keeping that customer.  And we’re even willing to prove it, at your company.

Every month, Brandocular: Provides about 80,000 customer loyalty measurements…. … for about 8,000 employees and outside contractors …. and 1,200 of our clients’ channel partners …. verifying and double checking virtually all of the data, so that… 100% of our clients can pay employees and their channel partners according to *accurate* and *representative* customer feedback.

Brandocular is the new name for the solution that has been provided by Client Outsource for a number of years. Client Outsource started out with a different and more general approach, and Brandocular better reflects the focus of our business. In the near term, this website will reflect more and more of what we are accomplishing today for our clients. This website is currently following a blog format so that we can continue to update you on the latest in our solution set. We look forward to your comments and ideas.

Ownership. Lily Tomlin’s comment blatently shouts its antithesis. Too bad that after the decades, and without the same monopolies, it still holds more than some truth. What’s worse, though, is often what is harder to define but easier to find: what we term the “superficial helper”. The superficial helper pretends to help. They can follow all of the guidelines and training, but be unhelpful. Nearly everyone has encountered them. The representative has “done their job,” according to their company’s exact rules, perhaps, but they have still lost the customer. Personal accountability to the customer is often still a missing, but critical, ingredient to success.
eBay was an early pioneer to solving this problem. How can one company put millions of vendors and millions of consumers together in a culture of trust so they can do business with each other under the eBay umbrella? Creating this marketplace is extending the trust relationship of a brand beyond the scope of the edge of the company entity; it extends the consistency and expectations of brand performance all the way out to two persons who are both outside of eBay making a transaction between themselves. eBay’s venue of trust has propelled massive growth, not to mention its thirty eight billion USD market capitalization.

So consider a company with 10,000 employees. How can they apply the eBay principal to their business? It has to do with accountability. Every merchant at eBay is accountable to their customers through a score that follows them in their eBay journey. A poor score equals less bids, hence less income. At the same time, though, they receive along with that poor score a very short verbatim comment from their customer, telling them what happened. And both can comment on each other.

The eBay lesson has three key elements: 1) get customer feedback through to the person who interacted with that customer 2) do it immediately (mostly ranging from real time to one day) 3) create a high liklihood that any given customer will have their feedback collected. 4) Have a public score that is consequential.

In the back of the mind of the representative, these elements translate to “I need to be hyper sensitive to this customer, because the customer may be asked for feedback and I want to look good internally.” Frequently buying from eBay, we here have discovered that eBay merchants exhibit some awfully weird traits; they overcommunicate order status. So rare is that in a one-off merchant relationship, isn’t it? Why do they do it? In other words, why do they adopt a trait that goes above and beyond, when chances are they may never do business with me again? Strange! They likely learned early on through the little feedback comments and scores that if they didn’t keep their customers informed that negative comments would be more likely.

Let me illustrate the value of that situational data: I went to my autodealership because of some electrical trouble. When I got the car back, there was glue on the drivers door. I didn’t get a call, but if I had received a survey I would have told them about the issue. Most customer satisfaction surveys would categorize the feedback into “car clean up.” The service manager would probably get the results and hold a meeting with that mechanic’s team to talk about the month’s or the quarter’s results, and cleaning cars would be emphasized more. Perhaps cleaner white papers on the bottom of the car, perhaps more attention to vacuuming, right? But what would happen if simply the next day or the same day the mechanic saw that a negative customer commented on the glue on the driver’s door? He would realize that when he gets out the car he uses the same hand that smeared the glue under the dash to support himself on the driver’s door. Wow. He would decide not to do that anymore, or carefully wipe that up. With today’s technology, there is no excuse for not letting this individual situational feedback get directly to the person who needs to hear it at the company. Categorization and frequency analysis is great for managers and executives. Front line can change so much on their own with situational feedback from the customer. And through the above mentioned points from eBay, the voice of that customer is amplified and heard.