Create a Real-time Engine for Listening, Acting and Improving

With many of the companies I am working with, we’ve created a closed loop detractor contact system that is paying great dividends.  Here’s how it works:

We are optimizing an existing customer communication, such as a bill, to ask the Net Promoter© Question.  In the specific example of a printed bill, we have the question printed on the outside flap of the bill envelope. The 1-10 scale and “Would you recommend” question are printed along with one additional question, which is “Tell us one thing you’d like us to improve.” For a small incremental fee, we had that portion of the flap perforated.  That means after the customer answers the question, they tear it off and insert it into the mailing envelope.

This process, which does not invade customers with yet one more piece of communication is achieving four things.

1. It is providing an enormous amount of real-time feedback.
2. The feedback and issues identified by customers are being sorted by what “Promoters” versus “Detractors” versus “Passives” want.
3. Nearly 80% of customers are also including their account information, enabling us to overlay responses to customer records and track the customer relationship with the Net Promoter© response.  These categories of information are driving the agenda for process change and because of the mass of data being received, is driving prioritization of issues. It also creates a robust system to go back and ask clarifying questions about issues to customers and groups of customers.
4. It provides us with the opportunity to close the loop every day with detractors. Here’s how we are doing this in an ideal situation:

Every customer who gives a “6” or below, receives a phone call.  We are working wherever we can to have a portion of these calls made by company folks, especially  executives. This is providing a very potent way for them to have substantial conversations with customers.  It gives “making customer calls” a purpose. We’ve all been in companies where we urge the execs to call customers, this ratchets up the purpose.  Execs are not calling customers just to connect, they are calling to say, “We’re sorry you’re disappointed, can you tell me what happened?”  It is VERY powerful.  We’ve had some cases where there was such amazement on the other end of the line from the customer.

This accomplishes an acceleration of issues that have been in the hopper for a long time, but have not been moved to action.  There is nothing more powerful than the voice of an anguished customer talking in the ear of someone who can do something about their problem to get the action moving.  It’s not that before making these calls that these execs didn’t care, it is just hard as we all know to elevate these issues above the noise of the rest of the business.

The balance of the calls are made by other folks in the company or by an outside source.  In all cases, the customer is followed up with to resolve their issue.  And, although not yet perfected, there is an effort underfoot to communicate back to customers on what is being done to solve the issues they raised.  If not on an individual customer basis, sorting the mass of information received from this process creates a robust agenda for outbound communication topics to customers.  Which is the other piece of the closed loop process which is rarely closed.  Letting customers know what a company did with all the information they told them about their company.

If you’d like to hear more about this process and how it works, drop me an email at Jeanne@customerbliss.com.

This really works, it’s powerful and with enough advance planning, can be relatively simple to put into place.