Olivier Mourrieras – Customer Insight & Advocacy

Building a customer loyalty program is about business transformation. Building the right strategy, access to resources and obtaining buy-in from across the organization are just a few of the many challenges that most executives and program managers face when building out (or expanding) a customer loyalty program. This afternoon Olivier Mourrieras of Orange Business Services shared with us their journey to build stronger relationships within their strategic top accounts.

Orange Business Services is a leading global telecommunications provider. Orange employs over 30,000 within their B2B segment and service over 6,000,000 business customers. Over 90% of OBS’ annual revenues come from approximately 300 strategic accounts.

While Orange has had a customer loyalty program in place for 6 years, the first couple of years with the program were not without their challenges. Some of the initial challenges highlighted by Olivier included:

• No understanding or insight into the end-to-end customer lifecycle
• A fragmented and siloed business organization
• Fragmented and siloed approach
• Limited employee mobilization
• More “spectators” than “doers”
• Lack of executive sponsorship and leadership around the customer experience

Through Orange’s partnership with Satmetrix, they have embarked on a journey which has taken over four years to implement but has reaped considerable benefit to not only Orange customers, but to Orange’s bottom line. By using principles of the Net Promoter Operating Model (NPS model), Orange had developed a transformation program which consisted of the following themes:

1. Development of  a transformational program which has taken advantage of Orange’s global business strengths while improving upon weak areas that have had a negative impact on customer loyalty
2. Development of a customer centric approach based on a variety of satisfaction feedback surveys and other listening posts including customer loyalty boards and user groups.
3. Pragmatic prioritization which drives actions prioritized on root causes and loyalty drivers
4. The tying of customer loyalty results to variable compensation.  CLI accounts for 20% of all variable compensation!

In order to align the right level of support to spearhead these themes, Orange needed to obtain proper executive sponsorship.  With the proper positioning and diligence, the program team was successfully able to enlist the support of their CEO.  Having this level of advocacy has been critically instrumental in the adoption and growth of the Orange program.  Since Orange’s core program team consists of only 5 full time individuals, a “top-down” strategy was necessary to ensure success.

As the program has taken root and built critical mass, Orange has integrated the Net Promoter Operating model within their sales and account management organization through the development of the following key initiatives:

1. (One to One) - Development of an integrative closed loop process which includes individual customer service improvement plans to be established and reviewed periodically.  This process includes an initial internal review meeting, development of individual action plans and an account team meeting with the customer to review feedback results and agree to a documented action plan.

2. (One to Many) – Use of feedback in aggregate to analyze the varying needs across Orange’s broad base of customer segments.  Given the diversity across Orange’s business, this process mitigates from “one size fits most” approaches to improving customer experiences.  After all, not every customer or customer segment can be treated identically.

3. Development of a Customer Management Model (CMM) based on key components of the Net Promoter Operating Model.  This included the establishment of:

• A clear governance and communication structure
• Clearly defined and documented escalation paths along with effective coordination to manage the Orange/Client relationship
• To ensure trustworthy data and to mitigate against gaming, requiring the Customer’s validation of the survey sample.  This process required that all survey contacts must be validated by the most senior customer interface so that optimal penetration has occurred.

So now that Orange has spent 4+ years and considerable effort in rebuilding and strengthening their program, what’s the ROI?  The ultimate test was the development of a close linkage and positive correlation between sales pipeline and CLI trends within their top 200 strategic accounts. Through this study, Orange has identified  a 6-month lag between CLI and pipeline revenue growth. In one particular customer account the CMM process identified service management issues, dissatisfaction with delivery expectations and a lack of a strategic approach. This insight was instrumental in developing an action plan with the client which consisted of quarterly strategic reviews and more proactive expectations setting. CLI scores with this client improved from 6.5 to 8.5 in one year while pipeline revenues increase 300% in this same period.  From 1H09 to 2H09 Orange also saw 42% total revenue growth with this client. Now that’s putting money where your mouth is!

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As you may have already figured out, the “Ultimate Question” that is the foundation of Net Promoter is not actually a question, but questions. Just like Batman cannot exist without Robin or Peanut Butter without Jelly  <insert cheesy analogy here>, likelihood to recommend has limited business value if there is not some way of tying context to the response that was given. The numerical values captured from clients is extremely useful for quantitative analysis, including correlation and regression analysis to identify drivers, while the open ended question is extremely useful for qualitative analysis.

Is too much data a bad thing? Not at all if you have the means to process large quantities of data. With numerical data, it is quite easy to ingest volumes of data into a database and crunch numbers with little to no regard for the volume that is being processed. However with unstructured data, like verbatim comments, we face a much more formidable challenge.

As Vince Nowinski, Director of Methodology, Satmetrix, shared during his session today, there are multiple ways of managing qualitative data in the form of customer verbatims.

1. Single Punch Categorization – This is where most comment analysis occurs. Verbatim comments are “bucketed” into a single themes or category.  Categorization may be more subjective due to interpretation or bias from the person categorizing the comment.
2. Multi-Punch Categorization – Similar to the above, however comments are bucketed into multiple themes or categories.
3. Comment Intelligence - Using software algorithms, open ended feedback are processed analysis is performed by the incidence of particular words and their relationships with other words within the comment.  In contrast to the single-punch and multi-punch categorization techniques which require categories to be created by the person (or people) performing the categorization, comment intelligence uses technology that analyses the patterns which exist due to interreliability of the keywords in a data set.  Objectivity is not an issue since software performs the analysis.

The output of comment intelligence allows an organization to uncover relationships amongst different concepts and themes, along with the frequency and likelihood of association of keywords within themes.

For organizations with very large volumes of open ended feedback, comment intelligence solutions may be a good investment simply due to the time and effort required to manually process verbatim feedback.
While verbatim feedback is very useful to dovetail into quantitative analysis, Vince shared the following insights to take into account when using qualitative feedback:

• Qualitative feedback diminishes as surveys lengthen
• Open ended comments require more thought and effort on behalf of the client
• Motivated customers share more and their sentiment influences responses
• Tailored/targeted questions are best for asking verbatim
• Customers are unreliable narrators and raters due to halo effects, fatigue, satisficing, ballistic responding and both cultural and response biases (Is it root cause or top of mind?)
• Don’t’rely just on quantitiative feedback because you’re bound to miss what you don’t measure!
  

Used wisely, however, verbatim comments can inform thinking about the customer experience, shed light on how customer segments differ and prove better insights into root cause of customer experience issues.

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